Otterly vs Profound: pricing, coverage and AI visibility

Otterly is the one people compare on price; Profound is the one they compare on depth. Otterly's Lite plan is $29 a month, billed monthly, for 15 search prompts across four engines, according to its pricing page on 2 Oct 2026. The real question is which mistake costs you more: paying for more monitoring than you need, or buying a shallow view of what assistants say. If Peec AI is also on your list, see Peec AI vs Otterly.

Price is only half of it. The other half is what the engines say about each product, which neither product page can show you about itself.

The useful distinction is simple. A mention means an answer names a product. A citation means the answer links to a source. An interval is the range around a measured share, which is a polite way of saying the sample has edges. Price tells you what a vendor asks. Engine evidence tells you what buyers may encounter.

That makes this comparison less tidy than a feature grid.

Otterly is the comparison people can see

The public Otterly page gives buyers something concrete to work with. Otterly's Lite plan, at $29 a month billed monthly, covers 15 search prompts across four engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and MS Copilot, according to Otterly's pricing page. Each Otterly plan is set out in Otterly AI pricing, explained. The page has two tabs: billed monthly, Lite is $29, Standard $189 and Premium $489 a month; billed annually ("15% off"), they are $25, $160 and $422 a month. Those figures were checked on 2 Oct 2026.

The page also says Standard covers 100 search prompts and Premium covers 400. It lists an extra 100 search prompts at $99 a month, and separate paid additions for Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude. The important point is that Otterly exposes the unit you are buying: prompts, with engine tracking attached.

That makes Otterly easier to place in a small team's spreadsheet. You can start with the public prompt allowance, count the questions you actually care about, then check whether the extra engine or prompt charges change the bill. Its public page says there is a free trial for new users, although the captured text does not state the trial length. During that trial, record the answers and citations that matter to your team, rather than judging the dashboard from a single session.

CiteGraph's own published plans show the same reason price comparisons need workload beside them. Starter is $29 a month for 2 projects, 10 questions each, 3 runs per question on 4 engines, 6 tracked rivals and 30 written pages a month. Growth is $69 for 3 projects, 10 questions each on 4 engines, 10 tracked rivals and 60 written pages. ChatGPT Only is $19 for 1 project and 20 questions, asked on ChatGPT only. Weekly scans ask each question 3 times on every plan; a scan you start on Growth asks it 5 times. Those details are on the CiteGraph pricing page, and they show why a monthly number alone is a poor comparison.

The leaderboard gives Otterly the stronger measured presence in this sample. It leads on both being named and having its own site cited, with the details below. That explains why Otterly becomes the reference point when buyers ask what a lower-priced tracker can cover.

Profound is the depth comparison

Profound's public pricing page describes a broader monitoring job. It says the product “runs structured prompts across AI platforms daily, analyzing where and how your brand appears in responses, tracking citations, sentiment, ranking, and competitive presence”. That is a deeper description than a prompt allowance. It covers the answer, the source, the position and the surrounding competitive picture.

On 2 Oct 2026 the page offered brands two options: a free trial, with 50 prompts run daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews and limited AI Marketer credits, and a custom Enterprise plan with a tailored prompt tracking plan and up to 9 answer engines. For agencies it lists Agency Growth at $99 a month plus add-ons, with each full client workspace (100 prompts a day on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and 400 Agent credits a month) at $399 a month.

Profound publishes no self-serve price for brands, so there is no honest like-for-like price comparison with Otterly's Lite plan. We can say what the buying shape suggests: Profound asks you to think about prompts, engines, Agents credits, companies and analysis depth, rather than only the number of questions you can run.

Once the prompt count stops being the main constraint, the choice becomes a depth question, which is Profound's argument. If your team needs to understand citations, sentiment, ranking and competitive presence in one view, Profound's public description speaks directly to that need. If you mainly need a repeatable set of buyer questions across engines, Otterly's public pricing is easier to read.

Neither description tells you how often an engine will mention the other product in a live answer. That requires an external sample. Vendor pages are evidence about the offer, not neutral evidence about how assistants retrieve and cite it.

What the engines say about each

CiteGraph's leaderboard for the week measured 80 answers to 10 buyer questions across 4 engines. Otterly appeared in 60% of answers, with an interval of 49 to 70, while Profound appeared in 48%, with an interval of 37 to 58. Their own sites were cited at 26% for Otterly and 20% for Profound. In this sample, Otterly leads on both being named and having its own site cited.

That result is useful, though it is not a product verdict. The questions were buyer questions for AI search visibility and answer engine optimisation tools, not every question your market asks. The engines may also vary by prompt wording, time and retrieval conditions. We measure samples, we print margins and we do not know what we have not measured.

The result does answer the part neither vendor can answer about itself. Both products have visibility in assistant answers, but they are not equally present in this set. Otterly is named in 12 percentage points more of the sampled answers than Profound, and its own site is cited in 6 percentage points more. Those gaps belong in your decision, alongside price and depth, without being inflated into a forecast.

The AI search visibility and AEO tools leaderboard shows the wider field too. Peec AI was named in 53% of answers, Semrush in 33%, Ahrefs in 18%, AthenaHQ in 14%, HubSpot AEO Grader in 13%, Scrunch in 10%, Rankscale in 9% and AirOps in 9%. A comparison page that only repeats vendor claims misses this context. It also misses the ordinary fact that being visible in an answer and owning the cited page are separate outcomes.

Match the tool to the work

Use Otterly as the price and coverage comparison when your first task is to establish a manageable monitoring set. Its public page gives prompt allowances and names the 4 engines included in the Lite description. That makes it suitable for a buyer who wants to count questions before committing to a more involved analysis workflow.

Use Profound as the depth comparison when the report needs to explain more than whether a brand appeared. Its public description covers citations, sentiment, ranking and competitive presence, and its plans describe Agent credits and up to 9 answer engines. That points to a more analytical purchase, although Profound publishes no self-serve price for brands.

Neither choice removes the need to inspect the answer itself. A dashboard can tell you that a product was named. You still need to know which wording triggered the mention, which page was cited and whether the cited page supports the claim. This is where a founder and a larger marketing team may reasonably choose different tools, even when they use the same target question.

The strongest case for comparing these products is the gap between what each vendor can promise on its own page and what an external set of answers actually shows. The vendor pages tell you how each product frames the work. The leaderboard tells you how often the products appeared in one measured category sample. It does not explain every cause of that difference.

A practical buying checklist is short:

• Write down the buyer questions you need to monitor before comparing plan names.
• Record the engines that matter to your customers instead of assuming every engine has the same value.
• Separate named products from cited pages in your notes.
• Check whether the plan measures competitors, sentiment, ranking or only appearances.
• Confirm how prompts, runs, credits and extra engines affect the bill.
• Run the same questions more than once when the decision depends on a small difference.
• Read the cited pages before turning an assistant answer into a content brief.

For a quick site-side check, the free AI readiness check runs fifteen checks without an account and shows the fix for each. It does not replace product monitoring. It helps remove the more basic reasons your pages may be hard for an assistant to use before you spend time explaining a visibility gap.

CiteGraph can also combine answer sampling with written page checks. Its documentation says the service runs as an MCP server that Claude, Cursor or VS Code can use to read a scan and apply readiness fixes in a repository. That is a workflow detail. The weekly research on who owns AI answers is the better place to look when you want the wider pattern rather than a plan comparison.

What the measured gap changes

SEO still matters, and neither Otterly nor Profound can manufacture a useful page from a weak source. The comparison is also about whether each product gives you the evidence and explanation your work requires.

The 12-point gap in the measured sample changes the question. You are not choosing between two labels that claim the same result. You are choosing which workload to measure, which explanation you need from the report and which independent evidence you will use to check the claim. The spreadsheet can have its prices. The engines get the final word, at least until the next sample.