Otterly.AI is a self-serve monitor that starts at $29 a month and reaches into AI crawler traffic, referral visits and shopping results, while SE Ranking AI Visibility sits inside an SEO suite and is the one that tracks ads shown in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode today. DeepSmith is a strong alternative for teams that care about the organic answer, because it tracks mention rate, citation rate and share of voice and then writes and publishes the content that moves them.
When you compare Otterly.AI vs SE Ranking AI Visibility, the first question is usually about ads. SE Ranking says its ads trackers detect paid placements in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode answers, and Otterly.AI has paused its ChatGPT Ads reporting since September 16, 2026. After that, the two tools split on what else they measure and on how you buy them. DeepSmith comes at the same problem from the organic side, tracking the answers and then producing the pages that earn the citations.
Otterly.AI vs SE Ranking AI Visibility: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want one platform that tracks mention rate, citation rate and share of voice across AI engines and then writes, grounds and publishes the articles that close the gaps, from $99 a month with a 7-day free trial.
- Choose Otterly.AI if you want the lowest published entry price ($29 a month) and need AI referral traffic, crawler analytics or shopping visibility, and you can live without working ads tracking for now.
- Choose SE Ranking AI Visibility if you already work in an SEO suite, want ads in ChatGPT and AI Mode tracked next to rank tracking, and need Google AI Mode and Gemini coverage at the entry plan.
Side-by-side comparison
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Otterly.AI | SE Ranking AI Visibility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | $29/mo (Lite) | $129/mo (Core suite plan) |
| Annual price (per month) | $80/mo | $25/mo | $103.20/mo |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 15 | 100 daily |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT) | 4 | 5 |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 7 (3 are paid add-ons) | 5 |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days, no card | 14 days, no card |
| Tracks ads shown in AI answers | - | Partial, ChatGPT Ads reporting paused | Yes |
| AI referral traffic | - | Yes, Standard and above | No |
| AI crawler analytics | - | Yes, Standard and above | Not listed |
| Shopping visibility | - | Yes | Not listed |
| Query fan-out | - | Partial | No |
| Content generation | Yes, with CMS publishing | Not listed | Partial |
| Security certifications | SOC 2, GDPR, ISO | Not listed | Not listed |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.7/5 and 4.8/5 on G2 (two listings) | 4.7/5 on G2 (whole suite) |
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 the Austria-based OtterlyAI GmbH, which launched it in October 2024. It is built for marketing, SEO and content teams at small to mid-sized companies, and for agencies that run several client brands and want daily prompt tracking at a published, low price. Plans run from Lite at $29 a month to Premium at $489, with unlimited seats on every plan.
The standout is how far it reaches past tracking. Brand reports cover mentions, position, sentiment, share of voice and cited URLs, and around them sit a GEO Audit, ranked recommendations and Agent Analytics, which separates AI bot fetches from AI-referred human visits on Standard and above. It also tracks ChatGPT shopping cards and lists Google AI Overviews ad tracking.
The real limits are the four included engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot), the paused ChatGPT Ads reporting, and methodology that Otterly does not publish, such as answer retention and repeat sampling. It cites only its AWS host's SOC 2. Reviewers on G2 give it 4.7/5 from 54 reviews and 4.8/5 from 42 on a second listing (checked September 2026), praising setup and support and asking for more flexible filters and deeper history.
SE Ranking AI Visibility
SE Ranking is an SEO platform founded in 2013, and its AI Search Toolkit lives inside it. You can buy the tracking three ways: inside the Core ($129 a month, 100 daily prompts) and Growth ($279, 250 daily prompts) suite plans, as an AI Search add-on from $89 to $345 a month for 200 to 1,000 monthly checks, or as the separate SE Visible product from $99. It is built for SEO teams and agencies that want AI tracking next to rank tracking and site audits.
The tracker covers five engines (Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity), captures answers through the interface daily, and reports mentions, links, positions, cited sources and competitors. Its standout items are the ChatGPT and AI Mode ads trackers, a documented method, and API and MCP access on every plan.
It does not track Claude or Copilot, sentiment sits in SE Visible rather than the main tracker, and query fan-out analysis and AI traffic analytics are marked as coming soon. No security certifications are published. Its G2 rating is 4.7/5 from 1,606 reviews, but that covers the whole suite and not the AI product (checked September 2026).
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes
Both tools stop at the same place for a reader who watches organic citations: they show you where you are missing, and the next step happens somewhere else. The records show Otterly.AI with no documented article writing or CMS publishing, and SE Ranking's writing tools sit in the wider suite, apart from the AI tracking product. Each tool does give you recommendations, and Otterly ranks them by impact, so the gap is in what happens after the recommendation.
DeepSmith puts tracking and production on one platform. Its AI visibility tracking reports mention rate, citation rate and share of voice with a per-engine breakdown and a competitor leaderboard, shows which of your pages AI actually cites, and keeps the full answer history for each prompt. Opportunity Agents then read that data. One of them takes a competitor's citations, and each idea it returns carries the data point that justifies it. Those ideas move into Content Studio, where the Writer produces a finished article grounded in your Deep IQ brand context, with internal and external links, a cover image and publish-ready metadata. Autowrite can run it on a schedule, and Produced Content publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful.
That covers the measuring half, and the figure above is demo data. DeepSmith's plans don't include ads tracking or crawler log analytics. The tracking it does reports the pages AI cites, and the Writer produces the pages that close the gap.
The production half is shown above, also demo data. Plans are Pro at $99 a month ($80 billed annually, 20 articles and 50 tracked prompts), Grow at $199 ($160 annually, 40 articles and 100 prompts) and Scale at $399 ($299 annually, 90 articles and 200 prompts), plus a custom Enterprise plan. All of them come with a 7-day free trial and no long-term contracts. DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified and rated 4.8/5 on G2.
Engine coverage
In SE Ranking AI Visibility vs Otterly.AI on engines, SE Ranking wins at the entry plan and Otterly.AI wins on the widest coverage you can build. SE Ranking includes Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity from its first plan, with country and language set for each engine. It does not track Claude or Copilot.
Otterly.AI includes four engines on every plan. Google AI Mode and Gemini cost $9, $59 or $149 a month each on Lite, Standard and Premium, and Claude costs $29, $109 or $439. Covering all seven engines on Standard adds $227 a month to the $189 plan. Grok, Meta AI and DeepSeek are not offered by either tool. For a team that needs Copilot and Claude in the same report, Otterly is the only one of the two that gets there, at that added cost.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks ten engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. Coverage rises by plan, with ChatGPT on Pro, Perplexity added on Grow, Gemini added on Scale, and all ten on Enterprise.
Ads, referral traffic and shopping visibility
On ads in AI answers, SE Ranking AI Visibility is the tool that works today. Its ChatGPT ads tracker and AI Mode ads tracker, found under Competitive Research, detect the advertiser and destination link and show how a placement's presence changes month over month. SE Ranking states they need no separate subscription or add-on, though the pages do not say which plans include them.
Otterly.AI lists ChatGPT Ads and Shopping Card tracking on every plan, covering advertiser, ad copy, product details and ad frequency per prompt. Its changelog says ChatGPT Ads reporting has been paused since September 16, 2026, after OpenAI changed how ads display, with no resumption date, and the pricing page still lists the feature. It also lists Google AI Overviews ad tracking, without saying which plans have it. For Otterly.AI vs SE Ranking AI ads tracking, the practical answer today is SE Ranking.
The picture reverses on traffic and shopping. Otterly's Agent Analytics separates AI-referred human visits from bot fetches and classifies crawlers by name, using logs from Cloudflare, a WordPress plugin, a webhook or a file upload, on Standard and above. It also tracks ChatGPT shopping results, including the products, prices and retailers surfaced. SE Ranking's GA4-based AI Traffic Analytics is marked coming soon, and the pages reviewed describe no crawler log analytics or shopping tracking. Otterly wins this axis.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith measures the organic side of the answer. It reports the pages AI cites, each page's share of your citations and the prompts driving them, and it shows which competitor pages win citations for your prompts.
Tracking depth and data method
SE Ranking AI Visibility wins on documented method, and Otterly.AI wins on sentiment and a fan-out tool. SE Ranking states that it captures real answers through the interface, checks prompts daily, matches brand names without regard to case, and keeps full answer text for 30 days and presence metrics for a year. The main tracker reports mentions, links and positions, and sentiment is in SE Visible.
Otterly.AI reports sentiment in every account, scoring each mention positive, neutral or negative with the sentence that triggered it. Its Query Fan-Out tool shows the queries engines may generate from a prompt, though it is not stated to capture sub-queries from your tracked answers, so the record scores it as partial. SE Ranking lists fan-out analysis as coming soon. What Otterly does not publish is how answers are collected, how long they are kept and how often each prompt is sampled. A team that has to defend its numbers to a finance lead will find more to cite from SE Ranking.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith keeps full answer history for every tracked prompt, with mention rate, citation rate and position per engine, and Sentiment and Visibility Trend alongside the three headline rates.
Pricing and value
Otterly.AI is the cheapest way to start, and SE Ranking AI Visibility costs less at the 100-prompt level. Otterly's Lite is $29 a month ($25 annually) but allows only 15 prompts, one workspace and three recommendations a week, and the next plan, Standard, is $189 for 100 prompts. Reviewers raise the size of that jump.
SE Ranking's Core plan is $129 a month ($103.20 annually) for 100 prompts tracked daily across five engines, and it also includes the SEO suite. The AI Search add-on runs $89 to $345 a month and is counted in monthly checks, where one check is one prompt on one engine. The pricing page calls those units prompts, and how plan prompts and add-on checks combine is not stated, so budget from the help center's definition and confirm it in writing.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes four plans, with article production included in the price. Pro is $99 a month with 20 articles, Grow is $199 with 40 and Scale is $399 with 90, so the cost of tracking and the cost of producing the content that responds to it sit on one invoice.
From insight to action
Neither tool connects its tracking to production, so this axis is a tie, for different reasons. Otterly.AI generates ranked recommendations across ten types, split into on-page and off-page, along with Content Audit grades for pages, but no vendor page describes article writing, stored brand context or CMS publishing. SE Ranking's AI tracker suggests actions such as tracking keywords that trigger AI Overviews and flags sources that mention competitors but not you. Its suite also has an AI Writer (25 articles on Core, 50 on Growth) and a WordPress export, which sit outside the AI tracking product.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith closes the loop in one platform. Tracking finds the prompt where you are missing, an Opportunity Agent returns ideas with the evidence attached, the Writer produces a grounded article in your brand voice, and Produced Content publishes it to your CMS. Repurpose then turns the finished article into social posts and channel versions.
Which should you choose
Whether you pick Otterly.AI or SE Ranking AI Visibility depends mostly on the job you need done first. If that job is ads, the answer is different from the one you get when it is traffic or price. Here is how the three options line up by reader.
- DeepSmith: you are a marketing lead who wants to win the organic answer, with tracking, evidence-backed ideas and publish-ready articles on one platform, and a published price you can start on with a 7-day trial.
- Otterly.AI: you want a low entry price, you need AI referral traffic, crawler analytics or ChatGPT shopping visibility, and you are comfortable that its ChatGPT Ads reporting is paused for now.
- SE Ranking AI Visibility: you work in an SEO suite, you want ads in ChatGPT and AI Mode tracked today, and you want five engines, including both Google AI surfaces, without add-ons.
If you want to see tracking and production working together on your own prompts, start a DeepSmith free trial.
