Otterly.AI publishes every self-serve price, from $29 to $489 a month, while Conductor sells credit-metered, usage-based contracts with no public prices, so the pricing question is mostly about how predictable the bill is. Otterly.AI suits teams that want a fixed monthly tracking cost, and Conductor suits large teams that want tracking, drafting and site monitoring under one enterprise contract. DeepSmith is a strong alternative on that same point: every self-serve plan is listed from $99 a month with a fixed monthly article allowance, and finished articles publish straight to your CMS.
If you are choosing between Otterly.AI and Conductor, the first thing to settle is how you want to pay. Otterly.AI is a tracker you can price out from its website in a few minutes. Conductor is an enterprise SEO and AEO platform where the tracking is one part of a larger contract, and the price comes from a sales conversation. DeepSmith sits next to both as a platform that tracks AI answers and also writes and publishes the content that closes the gaps.
Otterly.AI vs Conductor: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking and article production on one self-serve plan, with published prices from $99 a month, a fixed number of articles each month, no long-term contract, and publishing to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful.
- Choose Otterly.AI if you mainly need tracking and want to know your cost before you talk to anyone, starting at $29 a month for 15 prompts or $189 a month for 100 prompts.
- Choose Conductor if you are a large or multi-site team that wants AI visibility, SEO reporting, drafting and 24/7 technical monitoring under one usage-based contract, and you are fine getting a quote.
| DeepSmith | Otterly.AI | Conductor | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | $29/mo (Lite) | Not published |
| Annual price | $80/mo (Pro) | $25/mo (Lite) | Not published |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 15 | Not published (2,500 AI Search credits a year) |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT) | 4 (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot) | Not published per plan |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 7 (3 are paid add-ons) | 8 |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days, no card | 3 weeks, no card |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Competitor benchmarking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Content generation | Yes | Not listed | Yes, drafts |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Not listed | No |
| Brand-context grounding | Yes | Not listed | Yes |
| API and MCP | Yes, read-only | Yes, Standard and up | Yes, MCP on all plans |
| Security certifications | SOC 2, GDPR, ISO | Not listed | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001 |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.7 to 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.5/5 on G2 |
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 daily on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, and it reports mentions, citations, average position, sentiment and share of voice against competitors. Around that it offers prompt research, page audits, ranked recommendations and Agent Analytics for AI crawler traffic. The plans are Lite at $29 a month, Standard at $189, Premium at $489, and a custom Enterprise plan, all with unlimited seats.
The standout is the price transparency. Everything a small team needs to budget is on the pricing page, including the cost of adding Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude as paid engines. The limits are also easy to see. Lite has 15 prompts and no API or MCP access, and the next plan up is $189. Otterly.AI also does not describe writing articles or publishing to a CMS, and it cites only its AWS host's certifications rather than its own.
Reviewers on G2 rate it 4.7/5 from 54 reviews on one listing and 4.8/5 from 42 on another, as checked in September 2026. They praise the clear interface and easy setup, and they ask for more flexible filters and more actionable recommendations.
Conductor
Conductor is an enterprise SEO and AEO platform founded in 2006 in New York. It sells four connected products: Intelligence for AI search and keyword reporting, Creator for drafting and scoring content, Monitoring for 24/7 technical checks, and AgentStack for MCP, API and agent access. Its AI Search Performance reports mentions, citations, sentiment, share of voice and fan-out queries across eight engines, including Grok and ChatGPT in both Auto and Search modes.
The standout is how much sits in one system. AI visibility sits next to keyword rankings, page data, and AI referral sessions, conversions and revenue through Google Analytics 4 or Adobe Analytics. The limits are mostly about access and cost. Prices are not public, AI tracking runs on credits, and the pricing page leaves out seats, prompt limits, engine access per plan and overage terms. Conductor says final publishing stays in your own CMS.
G2 shows 4.5/5 from 788 reviews, and Capterra 4.7/5 from 118, checked in September 2026. Reviewers praise support and training, and they mention price pressure for smaller teams and a learning curve from the breadth of the product.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes at published prices
The gap both tools leave for a marketing lead who has to budget is the step from knowing to producing. Otterly.AI tells you where you are missing and recommends fixes, but it does not describe writing or publishing. Conductor drafts articles, with 60 drafts a year on Essentials and 180 on Growth, but the price is a quote, the drafts are reviewed by people before publishing, and the publishing happens in your own CMS.
DeepSmith puts the tracking and the production on the same plan, with the prices listed. Pro is $99 a month ($80 billed annually) with 20 articles and 50 tracked prompts. Grow is $199 ($160 annually) with 40 articles and 100 prompts, which is close to Otterly.AI's Standard price for the same prompt count, with the article allowance on top. Scale is $399 ($299 annually) with 90 articles and 200 prompts. Enterprise is custom and covers all ten engines. Pro tracks ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, and Scale adds Gemini. There are no long-term contracts and no cancellation fees, and the trial is 7 days.
The loop works in one place. AEO tracking shows which prompts you miss and which pages AI cites. Opportunity Agents turn that data into content ideas, each carrying the data point that justifies it.
The Writer then produces a finished, internally and externally linked article grounded in Deep IQ, your stored brand context, and Autowrite can run it on a set date without anyone in the app. From Produced Content you publish straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or send it to your own webhooks.
DeepSmith plans don't include crawler log analytics or the technical site monitoring Conductor sells. For the goal behind those, keeping your content visible to AI, the tracking reports the pages AI actually cites, and the Writer produces the pages that close the gap.
Pricing and cost predictability
In Otterly.AI vs Conductor pricing, Otterly.AI is the clear winner on predictability, because every self-serve tier has a price and a prompt count. A team on Standard knows it pays $189 a month, or $160 a month billed annually, for 100 prompts. Extra prompts come in batches of 100 for $99 a month on Standard and Premium, and Standard can add up to 300 before it moves to Premium. The one place the bill grows is the engine add-ons. Google AI Mode and Gemini are $59 a month each on Standard and Claude is $109, so covering all seven engines on Standard adds $227 a month on top of the $189.
Conductor publishes allowances but no dollar amounts. Essentials and Growth both list 2,500 AI Search credits a year, and Enterprise starts at 2,500 or more. The research for this page documents the credit cost per response, checked in September 2026: ChatGPT Search and Gemini cost 2 credits, ChatGPT Auto and Grok 1, Claude Sonnet 0.5, Copilot and Perplexity 0.2, and Google AI Overviews and AI Mode 0.1. As a rough example, using my own arithmetic and assuming one response a day, one prompt on ChatGPT Search uses about 730 credits a year, so 2,500 credits covers a little over three of those. The same prompt on Google AI Overviews uses about 37. The engine mix you choose changes the bill a lot, and Conductor shows a credit forecast inside the setup flow before you start tracking.
Contract terms follow the same pattern. Conductor's published US terms, dated May 2024, set fees in an order form that is invoiced in advance, noncancellable and nonrefundable by default, with automatic renewal unless you give 90 days' notice. Otterly.AI lets you cancel in account settings and change plans from the billing tab.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith lists every self-serve plan with its monthly price and a fixed monthly article allowance, so the cost of tracking and of producing the content is one known number. There are no long-term contracts, and the 7-day trial lets you see real data and real drafts before you pay.
Engine coverage
In a Conductor vs Otterly.AI check on engines, Conductor covers more, and Otterly.AI is clearer about what each plan includes. Conductor tracks eight engines, including Claude, Copilot and Grok, and it tracks ChatGPT in both Auto and Search modes. What it does not publish is which engines come with which plan, because the engines are picked per topic and each one spends credits.
Otterly.AI tracks seven engines. Four are included on every plan (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot), and Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude are paid add-ons. It does not offer Grok, Meta AI or DeepSeek. For most marketing teams the four included engines cover the questions buyers ask most, and the add-on prices are on the page.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith covers ten engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. Coverage rises by plan, from ChatGPT on Pro to all ten on Enterprise.
Tracking depth and data access
On tracking depth the two are close, and the better one depends on what you report to. Both record mentions, citations, sentiment, share of voice, competitor benchmarks and which of your own pages get cited. Otterly.AI also records the average position of your brand inside an answer, which Conductor's pages do not describe. Conductor goes further on business reporting, with AI referral sessions, conversions and revenue per engine and per page through Google Analytics 4, plus 24/7 monitoring that flags AEO issues on the site.
For data access, Otterly.AI offers a REST API, an MCP server and a Looker Studio connector on Standard and above, with 2,000 requests a month each for the API and MCP on Standard. Conductor includes its MCP server on all three plans, and the Data API is marked "Available" on Essentials and Growth and included on Enterprise. Conductor's own materials say it collects answers through official APIs where possible, which it calls more stable than scraping. Otterly.AI's help center says it submits prompts to the consumer-facing AI websites, with Claude as the exception.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice and sentiment per prompt, with full answer history, the pages of yours AI cites, and the exact competitor pages that win citations. The REST API and the MCP server are read-only, so your analysts and AI assistants can pull everything it collects.
Security and support
Conductor is the stronger choice between the two for security reviews. It lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001, SAML SSO on Growth and Enterprise, and role-based access on Enterprise. Otterly.AI states GDPR compliance and cites SOC 1, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 for its AWS data centers, but it does not claim a certification for the company itself, and SAML SSO is Enterprise only. If procurement asks for a SOC 2 report from the vendor, that difference matters.
On support, Otterly.AI gives group onboarding on Lite and Standard and a personal session on Premium, and Enterprise adds a dedicated Customer Success Manager. Conductor describes an onboarding sequence and a team of experts, though the support details are not published on the pages reviewed.
From insight to action
Between the two, Conductor is ahead on turning data into content, because Otterly.AI stops at audits and recommendations. Otterly.AI ranks on-page and off-page actions by impact, with unlimited recommendations from Standard, and its page audits grade structure and AI readiness. Conductor links its recommendations into the Writing Assistant, which produces outlines and full drafts grounded in Content Profiles for voice and tone and up to five Knowledge Sources per draft. Conductor says every draft should be reviewed by people before publishing, and it lists no direct publishing to a CMS.
Neither tool publishes. Otterly.AI does not describe writing at all, and with Conductor the final step of publishing stays in your own CMS.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith closes the loop in one platform. Opportunity Agents propose ideas with their evidence, the Writer produces a publish-ready article with a cover image and metadata, and Autowrite can take it hands-off to published. Produced Content publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, which is the step a Conductor draft still leaves with your team.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith: for content and marketing teams that want to track AI answers and publish the content that fixes the gaps without stitching two tools together, with plans from $99 a month, a fixed article allowance, and no long-term contract.
- Otterly.AI: for a small team or agency that wants tracking only, a price it can read off the page, and unlimited seats. Lite fits a handful of prompts, and Standard fits a team tracking around 100.
- Conductor: for a large, multi-site SEO organization that wants AI visibility connected to keyword, analytics and technical monitoring data, and can accept a quote, an annual allowance and a longer commitment.
If you want to see tracking and production working from the same data, you can start a free DeepSmith trial and run your own prompts first.
