Otterly.AI review: the cheapest serious AI visibility tracker, and where 15 prompts runs out

Prompt tracker

Otterly.AI

The cheapest credible way to start tracking whether AI assistants name you.

4.1/ 5

Entry price

$29/mo

Prompts at entry

15$1.93 each

Engines

4 · up to 7

Sees AI crawlers

Higher plans

Pick it if A single business or consultant tracking its own name and a few competitors.

Skip it if You need Gemini, AI Mode and Claude from day one, or more than about 50 prompts.

Prices from otterly.ai, checked Nov 1, 2026. Visit Otterly

We compared Otterly's published pricing, help centre and documentation with six other tools, scored against the rubric on our methodology page. We didn't run Otterly side by side with the others for this review. Prices are in US dollars, checked on November 1, 2026.

What Otterly.AI does

Otterly is a prompt tracker. You give it the questions your customers ask an assistant ("best emergency plumber in Hamilton", "is X better than Y"), and each day it sends them to ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, then records whether your brand is mentioned, whether your site is cited as a source, and which competitors and domains show up instead.

On top of that it adds brand reports, a GEO audit that checks whether AI engines can crawl and read your pages, and on higher plans an API, a Looker Studio connector and Agent Analytics events. Otterly calls itself an "AI search monitoring and optimization platform", and the monitoring half is the core of it.

Pricing, and what a small business actually pays

Annual billing shows $25, $160 and $422 a month. Engine add-ons, monthly, on Lite / Standard / Premium: Google AI Mode $9 / $59 / $149, Gemini $9 / $59 / $149, Claude $29 / $109 / $439. Extra prompts: 100 for $99 a month on Standard and Premium (Standard takes up to 300 extra); none on Lite. Source: otterly.ai/pricing, checked Nov 1, 2026. Prices in USD.

The headline $29 is real, but price your own prompt list before you decide. A useful starting set for a local business is its main services crossed with the places it serves, plus a few brand and comparison questions. Five services in two towns plus five brand prompts is 15, exactly Lite's limit. Add a third town and you're over.

What happens next is the part to know in advance. Prompt add-ons (100 prompts for $99 a month) only exist on Standard and Premium, so outgrowing Lite means moving to Standard at $189, a 6.5× jump. The engine add-ons scale the same way: Google AI Mode is $9 a month on Lite but $59 on Standard and $149 on Premium, and Claude goes from $29 to $109 to $439. On Premium with all three add-ons, the bill is $489 + $149 + $149 + $439 = $1,226 a month.

For one business tracking 15 prompts on four engines, though, nothing else we compared comes close on price. That works out to about $1.93 per prompt per month, which is about the same per prompt as Peec AI, but Peec's floor is $95.

How it scores

1. Cost for one small business25% weight5$29 for 15 daily prompts is the lowest entry price of any tracker we compared, about $1.93 a prompt.
2. Engine coverage at entry tier20% weight4ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot at entry. AI Mode, Gemini and Claude cost extra.
3. Data method and freshness15% weight4Help centre says it queries public web interfaces daily, country by country, and uses the API only for Claude.
4. Insight and next steps15% weight3Citations, brand reports and a GEO audit of your pages, but only 3 recommendations a week on Lite.
5. View of your own site10% weight2Agent Analytics exists, but only from the $189 Standard plan.
6. Self-serve and trial15% weight5Published prices, a free trial, monthly billing you can cancel, unlimited seats.

Weighted for a small business buying its first tool. Scored from published pricing and documentation, checked Nov 1, 2026; not from hands-on testing. How we score

The score is high because our rubric is weighted for a small business buying its first tool, where entry cost and self-serve matter most. An agency comparing tools on depth would weight "insight" and engine coverage more heavily, and Otterly would land closer to Peec and Scrunch.

How it collects its data

Engines at entry

ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot

Most engines available

7 with paid add-ons (AI Mode, Gemini, Claude)

How it collects data

Posts prompts through each assistant's public web interface, from the country you choose. Claude is tracked through the API. Source

Refresh

Daily

AI crawler / agent data

Agent Analytics events from Standard (200k a month); not on Lite

Seats

Unlimited on every plan

Trial

Free trial for new users (length not stated)

This matters more than most buyers realise. Otterly says it posts prompts through the assistants' public web interfaces, such as chatgpt.com, rather than calling their APIs, and that it runs each prompt from the country you set. The one exception is Claude, which it tracks through the API.

Why that's the right call: a study Surfer published in October 2026 ran 1,000 prompts through both the consumer apps and the APIs of five AI products, and found the brands named overlapped by only 15.5% to 23.8%. On ChatGPT, the API named 13.8 brands per answer against 7.9 in the app. A tracker built on API calls is measuring something your customers never see. Otterly, Peec and Ahrefs all say they use the interfaces; Semrush and AthenaHQ don't say.

Daily runs are the norm among the trackers we compared, and they're enough. Single answers are noisy, so look at a week or a month before you react to a change.

Strengths and weaknesses

Who should pick something else

• You need more than about 50 prompts or several brands. Peec AI's $95 Starter gives 50 prompts and three engines of your choice, with projects to keep clients apart. See Otterly vs Peec AI.
• You want Claude, Gemini and Meta AI included. Scrunch covers seven engines on its entry plan, at $300 a month.
• You already pay for Semrush or Ahrefs. Try their AI visibility add-on before adding another login.
• Your worry is that AI can't read your site at all. That's an access problem, not a tracking one. Run the free AI access checker first; no tracker will fix a robots.txt that blocks OAI-SearchBot.

Alternatives

• Peec AI$95/moAgencies and in-house teams tracking a few brands or markets, who want daily data and a tidy UI.
• Scrunch$300/moMulti-location and mid-size brands that want prompt tracking and agent analytics in one tool.
• AthenaHQ$295/moBrands that need many engines, including Grok, DeepSeek and Mistral, and can budget by usage.
• ProfoundCustomLarge brands and enterprise marketing teams with budget and someone to act on the data.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar$199/moSEO teams and agencies on Ahrefs doing competitive and market research.
• Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit$99/moTeams already on Semrush who want AI visibility in the same reports.
• cite-met (ours)$60/moSmall businesses rebuilding or moving their site who want hosting and AI crawler data in one place.

We publish Three Impact and own cite-met, one of the alternatives above. It's a hosting platform with AI crawler analytics, not a prompt tracker, and it isn't a substitute for Otterly if what you want is mention tracking.