Otterly.AI is a self-serve AI search tracker with published prices from $29 a month, while BrightEdge is a sales-led enterprise SEO platform with an AI search layer and no public pricing or trial. Otterly.AI suits teams that want to start tracking this week, and BrightEdge suits large teams that already run their SEO inside one contracted suite. DeepSmith is a strong alternative to both because it tracks AI answers and also writes the publish-ready articles that close the gaps, on a self-serve plan.
If you are weighing Otterly.AI vs BrightEdge, the real question is whether you need a full SEO suite just to see how AI engines talk about your brand. The two products come at AI search from opposite directions. Otterly.AI started as a monitoring tool and adds audits around it, and BrightEdge started as an enterprise SEO platform and added AI modules. DeepSmith sits in a third spot, since it tracks AI answers and also produces the articles that fix what the tracking finds.
Otterly.AI vs BrightEdge: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking and publish-ready article production on one self-serve plan, from $99 a month, with a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract.
- Choose Otterly.AI if you want a standalone tracker with published tiers from $29 a month, a no-card trial, and unlimited seats, and you plan to handle the writing somewhere else.
- Choose BrightEdge if you are a large team that wants classic SEO research, reporting and AI search visibility in one contracted platform, with customer success support, and you are fine going through a sales process to see a price.
Comparison table
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Otterly.AI | BrightEdge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo | $29/mo | Not listed |
| Annual price (per month) | $80/mo | $25/mo | Not listed |
| Free trial | Yes, 7 days | Yes, 7 days, no card | No |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 15 | Not listed |
| Engines at entry tier | ChatGPT | 4 (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot) | Not listed |
| Most engines on any plan | 10, on Enterprise | 7, three as paid add-ons | 5 named |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| AI crawler analytics | - | Yes, Standard and above | Yes, enterprise customers |
| Writes full articles | Yes | Not listed | Partial |
| Brand-context grounding | Yes | Not listed | Not listed |
| Publishes to a CMS | Yes | Not listed | Partial |
| Public API | Yes | Yes, Standard and above | Yes |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Not listed | Yes |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 4.7/5 | 4.4/5 |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI is a self-serve AI search monitoring tool from an Austrian company that launched it in October 2024. It runs your tracked prompts every day across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, and it sells Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude as paid add-ons. For each answer it reports mentions, citations, position, sentiment and share of voice against the competitors you name. Around that it adds prompt research, page audits, ranked recommendations and Agent Analytics for AI crawler traffic.
It is built for small and mid-sized marketing and SEO teams and for agencies, since every plan has unlimited seats and Standard and above have unlimited workspaces. Public plans run from Lite at $29 a month to Premium at $489 a month, with a sales-led Enterprise plan above that.
The standout is how much you can see before you talk to anyone. The prices, limits and a no-card trial are all on the site, and the API, an MCP server and a Looker Studio connector start on Standard.
The limits are mostly about packaging. Lite has 15 prompts and one workspace, the step up to Standard is $189 a month, and covering all seven engines on Standard adds $227 a month in add-ons. Otterly.AI does not document article writing or CMS publishing, and its security page cites only the certifications of its AWS host. On G2, one listing shows 4.7/5 from 54 reviews and a second shows 4.8/5 from 42, with reviewers praising easy setup and responsive support and asking for more flexible filters and deeper history (checked September 2026).
BrightEdge
BrightEdge, founded in 2007 and based in San Mateo, sells an enterprise SEO platform covering keyword research, rank tracking, site audits, recommendations and reporting. Its AI search layer is AI Catalyst, which tracks mentions, citations and sentiment across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Gemini, with persona testing for a practitioner versus a decision maker. AI Hyper Cube adds AI conversations weighted by real search demand, and AI Agent Insights reports visits from AI crawlers.
It is built for large in-house SEO, content and web teams, and for the agencies that serve them. The standout is the combination, since classic search data and AI search visibility sit on the same platform, with a read-only MCP server and a REST API on top.
The limits are about access and clarity. The pricing page is a contact form and a phone number, with no tiers, limits or trial. BrightEdge does not publish how often it samples AI answers, how it collects them, or which countries and languages it covers. Its content output also stops short of full articles, since Content Advisor and Copilot produce briefs, titles and descriptions. On G2 it shows 4.4/5 from 882 reviews, with reviewers praising the depth of keyword and competitive data and raising price, a learning curve and slow navigation (checked September 2026).
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes
Both Otterly.AI and BrightEdge are strong on the measuring side. Otterly.AI shows you where you appear and which pages get cited, and BrightEdge adds demand-weighted research and the wider SEO suite. Neither one documents a way to turn what it finds into a finished article. Otterly.AI's recommendations and BrightEdge's briefs end with a person opening another tool, and BrightEdge's CMS publishing pushes title, meta title and H1 changes, not articles.
DeepSmith closes that gap inside one platform. The AEO module tracks mention rate, citation rate and share of voice across engines, shows which of your pages AI cites, and shows which competitor pages win the citations you want. The Content Map compares your site with competitor sites topic by topic, so coverage gaps are measured. Opportunity Agents turn that data into content ideas, and each idea carries the data point that justifies it.
From there the Writer produces a finished, brand-grounded article, researched, internally and externally linked, with a cover image and publish-ready metadata. Autowrite can run it hands-off on a scheduled date, and Produced Content publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful. Deep IQ stores your brand, product, persona and voice once, so every article starts from the same context. Plans are Pro at $99 a month, Grow at $199 and Scale at $399, with a 7-day free trial and no long-term contracts. DeepSmith's plans don't include crawler log analytics, and what it does instead is report the pages AI cites and write the pages that close the gap.
Engine coverage
Otterly.AI has the broader engine coverage of the two. It lists seven engines, with ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot included on every plan and Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude as add-ons at $9, $59 and $149 a month for Google AI Mode and Gemini, and $29, $109 and $439 for Claude, across Lite, Standard and Premium. Grok, Meta AI and DeepSeek are not offered.
BrightEdge names five answer engines in AI Catalyst: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Gemini. It mentions "other AI platforms" without naming them, and Claude appears in its material as a crawler it reports on, not as an answer engine it samples. Which engines come with which contract is not published.
In BrightEdge vs Otterly.AI on breadth, Otterly.AI wins, with the caveat that three of its seven cost extra. On clarity BrightEdge is harder to judge because nothing public says what a given contract covers.
What DeepSmith does: it covers ten engines, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. Pro tracks ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten.
Tracking depth and measurement
In a BrightEdge vs Otterly.AI check on tracking, Otterly.AI documents more of how its tracking works. It tracks daily, stores each answer, lets you export raw answers as CSV or JSON, and reports average position inside an answer, sentiment with the triggering sentence, and sources at the URL level. It also covers more than 70 countries per its help page, with ChatGPT shopping results and ads tracking on top, although ChatGPT Ads reporting has been paused since September 16, 2026.
BrightEdge is more specific in other ways. It separates Mentions Presence from Citations Presence, rates sentiment with reasoning, and tests how an answer changes for different personas. AI Hyper Cube weights AI conversations by search demand, which a standalone tracker has no way to build from its own data. The unknowns matter, though. BrightEdge does not publish its sampling frequency, collection method, locations, languages or answer retention, and it doesn't describe tracking the brand's position inside an answer.
For measurement you can inspect today, Otterly.AI is ahead. For demand-weighted research built on its keyword data, BrightEdge has something Otterly.AI doesn't. Both report mentions and citations separately, and it helps to understand the difference between mentions and citations before you compare dashboards.
What DeepSmith does: it reports per-prompt mention and citation rates with full answer history, sentiment, share of voice, a competitor leaderboard, and the cited pages and sources behind each prompt. Discover Prompts builds a starter set from your product, persona and buyer-stage context.
Pricing and value
Otterly.AI wins on pricing, because it is the only one of the two that publishes any. Lite is $29 a month ($25 billed annually), Standard $189 ($160), and Premium $489 ($422), with unlimited seats on every plan and a 7-day trial that needs no card. The costs to watch are the engine add-ons, extra prompts at $99 for 100 on Standard and Premium, and the jump from Lite's 15 prompts to Standard's 100.
BrightEdge publishes no price, plan or trial. You request a demo and receive a custom proposal, and the pricing page does not say which AI modules a proposal includes. A third-party research note says BrightEdge states that AI Catalyst is included in SEO Platform subscriptions, but the current pricing page does not confirm it, so ask for it in writing. A G2 marketplace snapshot from September 30, 2026 showed an estimated two-month implementation and 13-month ROI period. Those are marketplace estimates, not BrightEdge's promises. Reviewers describe high or opaque pricing and contract concerns.
If you need to know the cost before a sales call, Otterly.AI is the only one of the two that lets you. If you already budget for an SEO suite and want AI tracking folded in, BrightEdge's custom contract may make sense.
What DeepSmith does: it publishes its plans, $99, $199 and $399 a month or $80, $160 and $299 billed annually, with 20, 40 or 90 articles a month included alongside 50, 100 or 200 tracked prompts. Tracking and writing share one plan, so the same budget covers measuring the gap and filling it.
From insight to action
BrightEdge is ahead on this axis between the two. It turns citation gaps into briefs, checks drafts against them in Content Advisor, offers Copilot suggestions for titles and descriptions, and a Publishing Agent pushes approved title, meta title and H1 updates into a CMS after a person confirms each change. Its record shows AI-assisted briefs and drafts but no claim of full publish-ready articles, and no stored brand or voice context for generated content.
Otterly.AI turns tracking data into ten types of ranked recommendations, on-page and off-page, and its Content Audit scores a page on 15 structural checks. It mentions content briefs but does not describe what one contains, and no page describes writing articles, grounding output in brand context or publishing to a CMS. WordPress shows up only as a log source for Agent Analytics.
So a team on either product ends up with a to-do list and a gap between the list and a published page. BrightEdge covers more of that gap with briefs and metadata automation, and Otterly.AI stops at the recommendation.
What DeepSmith does: it closes the whole loop. Tracking feeds the Content Map and Opportunity Agents, ideas move into Planned Content with a date, the Writer produces a finished article with links, a cover image and metadata, and Autowrite can generate it on schedule and land it in Produced Content for review. Apps Library then turns the article into LinkedIn, X, newsletter and other channel versions in the same stored voice. The result is publish-ready output instead of a draft to rescue.
Data access and security
Both products give you data access, on different terms. Otterly.AI includes a REST API and an MCP server from Standard, with 2,000 requests a month each on Standard and 5,000 on Premium, plus a Looker Studio connector. BrightEdge has the Connect REST API and a read-only MCP server that is available to all customers, with the OAuth client ID issued through your customer success manager, and it connects to GA4, Adobe Analytics and Search Console. If you want to see how these connections fit together, the guide to MCP servers for the content and AEO stack is a useful starting point.
On security, BrightEdge is better documented. Its trust page lists SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, 27701:2019 and 42001:2023 and SAML single sign-on, though the audit scope was not inspected. Otterly.AI cites only the certifications of its AWS host, offers SAML SSO on Enterprise only, and hosts in Frankfurt while storing public monitoring data in the US. For a buyer who needs a vendor security review to pass quickly, BrightEdge has the edge, and for a buyer who wants an API key today, Otterly.AI does.
What DeepSmith does: it is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified. Its REST API and 23-tool MCP server are read-only and give you visibility, Content Map and content library data in your own tools, and signed webhooks notify your systems when content changes status.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith: you want to track AI answers and also produce the articles that improve them, you want published prices and a 7-day free trial, and you would rather run one platform than a tracker plus a writing tool. It fits content and marketing teams and agencies that treat content as a growth channel.
- Otterly.AI: you want a standalone tracker you can start on this week, with a low published entry price, unlimited seats and workspaces for several clients, and you already have a way to write and publish.
- BrightEdge: you are a large enterprise SEO team that wants keyword data, audits, reporting and AI search visibility in one contracted platform, and you value customer success support and security documentation over a quick start.
For Otterly.AI vs BrightEdge without an SEO suite, the question is whether buying one only to get AI tracking is worth a large commitment. The choice between Otterly.AI or BrightEdge usually comes down to budget and how much of the work you want one vendor to do, and it looks different when your goal is published content and not a dashboard.
Start a free DeepSmith trial at app.deepsmith.ai and see tracking and writing run on your own site.
