HubSpot AEO is a low-cost beta that tracks three engines, while Otterly.AI includes four and sells Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude as paid add-ons. HubSpot AEO suits a team that wants the cheapest start on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and Otterly.AI suits a team that has outgrown three engines. DeepSmith is a strong alternative on coverage that grows with the plan, up to all ten engines on Enterprise, and every plan includes publish-ready articles from the Writer.
Most teams comparing Otterly.AI vs HubSpot AEO are asking one thing: what happens once three engines stop being enough, and what does more coverage cost. The two tools differ on that point more than on anything else. HubSpot AEO is a $50 beta, and Otterly.AI starts at $29 but prices its extra engines separately. DeepSmith is a third route, where engine coverage rises by plan and the same platform writes and publishes the articles that close the gaps.
Otterly.AI vs HubSpot AEO: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want tracking and production in one platform, with plans from $99 to $399 a month, 20 to 90 publish-ready articles a month, and all ten engines on Enterprise.
- Choose Otterly.AI if you need more than three engines inside a tracker: four are included from $29 a month, and AI Mode, Gemini and Claude can be added for a fee.
- Choose HubSpot AEO if you want the lowest-cost start on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, at $50 a month with a 28-day trial, or you already pay for Marketing Hub.
| DeepSmith | Otterly.AI | HubSpot AEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo | $29/mo | $50/mo |
| Annual price (per month) | $80/mo | $25/mo | $45/mo |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 15 | 25 |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT) | 4 | 3 |
| Most engines on any plan | All 10 (Enterprise) | 7 with add-ons (4 included) | 3 |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days, no card | 28 days, no card |
| Tracks across countries | - | Yes | Partial |
| Content generation | Yes | Not listed | Partial, Marketing Hub only |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Not listed | Partial, HubSpot blog only |
| Brand-context grounding | Yes | Not listed | Yes |
| Public API | Yes | Yes, Standard and above | Partial, beta |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Not listed | Yes, platform level |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 4.7/5 and 4.8/5 (two listings) | 4.4/5 |
Pricing and features as of October 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI is a self-serve monitoring tool from Austria-based OtterlyAI GmbH, launched in October 2024. It runs your tracked prompts daily on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, and reports mentions, citations, 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. Plans run from Lite at $29 a month to Premium at $489, with unlimited seats on all of them.
The standout is breadth for the price. You get daily tracking, a country selector (more than 70 countries per its help page), and API, MCP and Looker Studio access from the Standard plan at $189 a month. The real limit is the engine list. Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude cost extra on every plan, and Grok, Meta AI and DeepSeek are not offered. Lite is also narrow, with 15 prompts, one workspace and no extra-prompt add-on, so the next step up is a big one.
Reviewers on G2 and TrustRadius mostly praise the interface, quick setup and responsive support. G2 shows two listings, 4.7/5 from 54 reviews and 4.8/5 from 42, checked in September 2026. Review volumes are modest, so I'd treat them as a good sign and not a settled verdict.
HubSpot AEO
HubSpot AEO launched in April 2026 after HubSpot's December 2025 acquisition of XFunnel, and the product is still labelled beta. It runs 25 daily prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and reports a brand visibility score, sentiment, share of voice and citations by domain and URL. A site audit and prioritized recommendations sit on top. The standalone plan is $50 a month, or $45 billed annually, with a 28-day trial that needs no card. It also comes bundled in Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise.
The standout is the low price and the easy start. You do not need a HubSpot CMS or any other subscription, and G2 reviewers describe it as easy to set up. The real limits are the three engines, the 25-prompt base, and one brand per setup. HubSpot says extra capacity costs $20 a month per 10 prompts, and extra brands need another $50 instance or an add-on. Reviewers name the 25-prompt cap and the missing Claude coverage, and some find the recommendations generic.
G2 lists HubSpot AEO at 4.4/5 from 145 reviews, checked in September 2026. Most of the praise is about ease of use and a clear competitor view.
DeepSmith: the alternative that grows engine coverage and writes the articles
Both tools stop at the same place. They tell you where you are missing from AI answers, and they leave the writing to someone else. HubSpot AEO writes drafts only inside Marketing Hub, and no Otterly.AI page describes article writing or CMS publishing. For a team that has outgrown three engines, that matters, because the longer engine list produces a longer list of gaps and nothing in the tracker closes them.
DeepSmith tracks and produces in one platform. Its AI Visibility module checks the questions you define on a schedule and reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, sentiment and trend, with a per-platform breakdown, a competitor leaderboard, the pages AI actually cites for you and the sources it cites most. Engine coverage rises by tier. Pro tracks ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. Enterprise is custom priced and adds one-to-one onboarding and a dedicated account manager.
What separates it on this axis is that every plan includes articles. Pro is $99 a month ($80 billed annually) with 50 tracked prompts and 20 articles a month. Grow is $199 ($160) with 100 prompts and 40 articles. Scale is $399 ($299) with 200 prompts and 90 articles. Opportunity Agents read your visibility data and your Content Map and return ideas with the data point that justifies each one. The Writer then turns an idea into a finished, brand-grounded article with internal and external links, a cover image and publish-ready metadata, using what Deep IQ stores about your company, voice and personas. Autowrite can run that on a schedule with no one in the app. Articles publish to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks, and no marketing hub is needed.
Engine coverage
Otterly.AI is the clear winner between the two on engine coverage, because it includes four engines and offers seven, while HubSpot AEO tracks three on every plan. The overlap is ChatGPT and Perplexity. Otterly.AI adds Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot in the base price, and HubSpot AEO includes Gemini, which Otterly.AI sells as an add-on. This is the main point in any Otterly.AI vs HubSpot AEO engine coverage comparison, so the details are worth a look.
The Otterly.AI add-ons are priced per engine and scale with the plan. Google AI Mode and Gemini are each $9 a month on Lite, $59 on Standard and $149 on Premium. Claude is $29, $109 and $439. Covering all seven engines on Standard adds $227 a month, so the plan costs $416 instead of $189. On Lite, all seven would cost $76 a month. Otterly.AI does not say whether Enterprise includes the add-ons.
HubSpot AEO has no way to add engines. Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Copilot, Claude, Grok, Meta AI and DeepSeek are not listed, and G2 reviewers ask for Claude and broader coverage. If your buyers use Claude or Google's AI features, three engines leaves those answers unmeasured.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith covers more engines as you move up, with Gemini on Scale and all ten on Enterprise, and the engine count is part of the plan and not a separate add-on bill. Because tracking and writing share one platform, a gap found on a new engine goes straight into the idea backlog for the Writer.
Pricing and value
In a HubSpot AEO vs Otterly.AI price check, the two are close at the low end, with a split verdict. Otterly.AI Lite is cheaper at $29 a month, and HubSpot AEO gives you more prompts for the money: 25 against 15, though Otterly.AI covers one more engine. Adding Gemini to Otterly.AI Lite makes it $38 a month for five engines and 15 prompts, against $50 for three engines and 25 prompts.
Prompt volume pushes the cost up on both sides. Otterly.AI Lite has no extra-prompt add-on, so the next option is Standard at $189 for 100 prompts. HubSpot sells 10-prompt packs at $20 a month, and by my arithmetic reaching about 100 prompts takes eight packs, which puts the standalone plan near $210 a month.
HubSpot AEO also has a second price tier that is easy to miss. Blog generation and CRM-based prompt suggestions need Marketing Hub Professional, which starts at $890 a month ($800 billed annually) plus a $3,000 one-time onboarding fee. Each generated post uses 1,000 HubSpot Credits. The standalone $50 plan does not include any of that.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith lists its price per plan and includes the article allowance in it, so the cost of the tracking and the cost of the content come from one line. At Scale, $399 a month covers 200 prompts, Gemini tracking and 90 articles, with a 7-day free trial and no long-term contracts.
Tracking depth and data access
Otterly.AI is the stronger tracker of the two. It records where the brand ranks inside an answer, scores sentiment with the triggering sentence, tracks shopping results, stores answers for export as CSV or JSON, and offers Agent Analytics for AI crawler visits on Standard and above. Its Content Audit and GEO Audit check page readiness and crawler access. One caution is that Otterly.AI paused ChatGPT Ads reporting on September 16, 2026, though the pricing page still lists it.
HubSpot AEO covers the core set well: visibility, sentiment on a -100 to +100 scale, share of voice, and citations by domain, URL, content type and channel, including your own most-cited pages. Its site audit checks structured data, canonical tags and crawlability. It documents no rank-within-answer metric, crawler analytics, shopping or ads tracking. Its API is a read-only beta, and whether a standalone account can use it is not clear. HubSpot does not say how answers are collected for the paid product or which model versions run, and Otterly.AI does not publish its answer-history retention or how often each prompt is sampled, so neither can be fully checked on method from public pages.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, sentiment and visibility trend, and its Pages view shows which of your pages AI cites and the prompts driving each one. Everything is readable through a REST API and a 23-tool MCP server, and both are read-only.
Multiple brands and security
Both tools can serve more than one brand, in different ways. Otterly.AI gives unlimited workspaces from Standard, unlimited seats, branded PDF reports and a Looker Studio connector, plus an agency partner program. HubSpot AEO supports one owned domain per setup, so extra brands use prompt groups, an add-on or another $50 instance, and it documents no white-label reporting.
On security, HubSpot AEO sits under HubSpot's platform SOC 2 Type II, though AEO is not named in the report scope. Otterly.AI's security page cites only its AWS host's certifications, and SAML SSO is Enterprise only. For a security review, HubSpot AEO has the stronger paper trail and Otterly.AI the more agency-ready setup.
From insight to action
This is the axis where HubSpot AEO pulls ahead of Otterly.AI, with a catch. Inside Marketing Hub, a recommendation can become a researched blog draft in your brand voice that opens in the HubSpot blog editor. Posts for an outside blog need copy and paste. Otterly.AI ranks its recommendations by impact and grades pages with Content Audit, but no page describes writing articles or publishing to a CMS.
The catch is the price of the path. HubSpot's own approach works best when the whole team already lives in Marketing Hub, and the $50 standalone plan stops at recommendations.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith closes the loop in one platform. Opportunity Agents turn visibility gaps into evidence-backed ideas, the Writer produces the article, and Produced Content publishes it to your CMS in one action. Apps Library then turns the finished article into LinkedIn, newsletter and X versions, so distribution does not fall off the end of the process.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith: a team that wants engine coverage to grow with the plan and wants the articles that close the gaps produced and published from the same platform, without a separate marketing suite.
- Otterly.AI: a team choosing between these two that needs more than three engines, several client workspaces or crawler analytics, and is fine paying per engine for AI Mode, Gemini and Claude.
- HubSpot AEO: a team choosing between these two that wants a $50 start on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, or that already runs Marketing Hub and wants drafts inside it.
Start a free trial of DeepSmith to see your own visibility data and first drafts before you pay: start your 7-day free trial.
