Otterly.AI measures AI referral visits and AI crawler activity on your own site directly, while the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit covers both only in part, inside a wider SEO platform. Otterly.AI suits teams that want that traffic view at a lower price, and the Semrush toolkit suits teams already working in Semrush. DeepSmith is the alternative that tracks which of your pages AI cites and then writes and publishes the content that earns more of those citations, which neither of the other two does.
Most AI visibility tools tell you whether your brand shows up in an answer, and they say much less about whether anyone clicked through afterward. Otterly.AI vs Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit is mainly a question about that second part. Otterly.AI reads AI-referred visits and AI bot fetches from your own site's data, and the Semrush toolkit gets only part of the way there. Price, engines and workflow matter too, and the sections below cover each one. DeepSmith sits beside both as the option that goes from the citation to the finished article.
Otterly.AI vs Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want one platform that tracks which of your pages AI cites across engines and then produces and publishes the articles that win more, from $99 a month with a 7-day free trial.
- Choose Otterly.AI if you need to see AI-referred visits and AI crawler activity on your own site, starting at $29 a month, with the traffic reporting on Standard at $189 a month and above.
- Choose the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit if your team already lives in Semrush and wants AI visibility next to Google rankings, from $99 a month standalone or inside a Semrush One bundle.
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Otterly.AI | Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | $29/mo (Lite) | $99/mo (standalone) |
| Annual price (per month) | $80/mo | $25/mo | Not listed |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 15 | 25 |
| Engines at entry tier | ChatGPT | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity (varies by report) |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 7 (3 are paid add-ons) | 5 (varies by report) |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days, no card | No (standalone toolkit) |
| AI referral traffic | - | Yes, Standard and above | Partial |
| AI crawler analytics | - | Yes, Standard and above | Partial |
| Content generation | Yes | Not listed | No |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Not listed | Not listed |
| Brand context grounding | Yes | Not listed | Not listed |
| Public API | Yes, read-only | Yes, Standard and above | Partial |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 4.7/5 | 4.4/5 (whole Semrush suite) |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Otterly.AI in brief
Otterly.AI is a self-serve AI search 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, with Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude sold as paid add-ons. For each answer it reports mentions, citations, average position, sentiment and share of voice against competitors. It is built for small and mid-sized marketing teams and for agencies, and every plan includes unlimited seats and unlimited brand reports.
The standout is Agent Analytics, which classifies AI bots, agents and AI-referred human visitors by name from your server or CDN logs. It reads those logs through a file upload, a webhook, Cloudflare or a WordPress plugin, and it sits on Standard and above. The real limit is packaging. Lite has 15 prompts, one workspace and no API or Agent Analytics, and the next step up is $189 a month. Otterly.AI also documents no article writing or CMS publishing.
On G2, the OtterlyAI listing shows 4.7/5 from 54 reviews and a separate Otterly.AI listing shows 4.8/5 from 42, both checked in September 2026. Reviewers praise the interface, quick setup and responsive support, and some ask for more flexible filters and deeper history.
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit in brief
The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit launched in March 2025 as the AI Toolkit and is a product inside the Semrush platform, which Adobe has owned since April 2026. It measures how often ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity mention and cite a brand, and it adds competitor gaps, prompt research, sentiment, daily Prompt Tracking and an AI search site audit. It is built for SEO and marketing teams, agencies and mid-market companies that already use Semrush.
The standout is the research database. Semrush says it holds more than 317 million prompts and responses, so you can benchmark any domain without first building a tracking campaign. The limits show up in the allowances. The standalone toolkit includes 25 tracked prompts and one Brand Performance domain, extra prompts cost $60 a month per 50, and every additional user needs their own $99 license. Engine coverage also varies by report, and Brand Performance sentiment and share of voice refresh weekly.
The G2, Capterra and TrustRadius ratings all cover Semrush as a whole, with G2 at 4.4/5 from 4,046 reviews. None of them rates the toolkit by itself, and the suite reviewers often mention price and paid add-ons.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks citations and writes the content that earns them
Both trackers end at the report. Otterly.AI ranks recommended fixes and audits your pages, and the Semrush toolkit points you to its AI Insights and, for the writing itself, to separate Semrush tools. Neither one writes an article for you. DeepSmith's plans don't include AI referral visit reporting or crawler log analytics, and what they cover instead is everything that happens after the measurement.
DeepSmith's Pages view shows which of your pages AI engines actually cite, each page's share of your total citations and the prompts driving them. Competitor citations show who wins the prompts you lose, and on which exact pages. Opportunity Agents read that data and return content ideas with the data point that justifies each one attached. The Writer then turns a planned idea into a finished article, researched, linked internally and externally, with a cover image and publish-ready metadata. Deep IQ grounds every draft in your stored product, persona and brand voice context, so the article reads like your company and describes your real products. Autowrite can run the whole thing on a schedule without anyone in the app. The DeepSmith vs Otterly comparison goes through that gap in more detail, and the DeepSmith vs Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit comparison does the same for Semrush.
Finished articles land in Produced Content, where you review them and publish straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks.
Pro costs $99 a month ($80 billed annually) with 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts, 5 seats and ChatGPT tracking. Grow is $199 with 40 articles, 100 prompts and Perplexity added, and Scale is $399 with 90 articles, 200 prompts and Gemini added. Enterprise covers all ten engines. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract, and DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified and rated 4.8/5 on G2.
AI referral traffic and crawler visits
Otterly.AI wins this one, and it is the question the title asks. If AI referral visits are what you need to see, the two tools are not close. Its Agent Analytics separates AI-referred human visits from bot fetches, names the bots (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot and others) and gives page-level views. It counts visits and does not claim conversions. Standard includes 200,000 events a month and Premium includes 1 million, and the 7-day trial includes 50,000 events, so you can test it on your own logs before paying.
The Semrush toolkit gets partway there, and the gap is mostly about whose data it is looking at. Its Site Audit checks whether robots.txt blocks 8 AI crawlers, but it does not monitor visits. An AI Traffic dashboard in the separate Traffic & Market toolkit estimates traffic from AI assistants to any domain. A Google Analytics connection for AI return on investment is listed as coming soon. Log file analysis of AI bot access is an Enterprise AIO feature, which is a separate, sales-led product.
What DeepSmith does: it reports Citation Rate, Mention Rate and Share of Voice for each tracked prompt, and the Pages view ties citations to individual pages on your site. That tells you which pages AI points readers toward, and the Writer produces more pages like them.
Engine coverage
Otterly.AI covers more engines, with a cost attached. Every plan includes four, and Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude are add-ons at $9, $9 and $29 a month on Lite or $59, $59 and $109 on Standard. All seven on Standard adds $227 a month. Grok, Meta AI and DeepSeek are not offered.
The Semrush toolkit lists five engines, and the spread depends on the module. Perplexity appears only in Brand Performance, and AI Overviews is missing from it. Claude and Microsoft Copilot are not tracked as answer engines by the self-serve toolkit. Semrush says Enterprise AIO covers 10 LLMs but does not name them.
What DeepSmith does: it tracks ten engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek), with Pro on ChatGPT, Grow adding Perplexity, Scale adding Gemini and Enterprise covering all ten.
Tracking depth and data method
This one splits. Semrush is the better starting point when you want a market view, and Otterly.AI is the better tool for watching your own prompt set. The Semrush research reports run on its large prompt database and update daily, and Semrush says the answers come from real requests and not from model APIs. Prompt Tracking runs your chosen prompts daily, but the weekly Brand Performance reports mean sentiment and share of voice lag behind.
Otterly.AI runs your whole prompt set daily on every plan. It says it submits prompts to consumer-facing AI websites, with Claude the exception, and it keeps each answer inspectable, with raw responses exportable as CSV or JSON. Neither vendor publishes answer-history retention or sampling detail. AI answers also shift from run to run, so a small week-to-week change in either tool may be ordinary variation, and a steady direction over a few months tells you more.
What DeepSmith does: it checks your tracked questions on a schedule and keeps full answer history per prompt, with per-prompt mention and citation rates and the cited pages behind them.
Pricing and value
For AI visibility alone, Otterly.AI is the cheaper of the two. Lite is $29 a month ($25 billed annually) with 15 prompts, and Standard is $189 ($160 annually) with 100 prompts, unlimited seats and the traffic reporting. Semrush's standalone toolkit is $99 a month with 25 prompts, so a team of three needs three $99 licenses. Semrush One bundles SEO with AI visibility at $199, $299 and $549 a month for 50, 100 and 200 prompts, which makes more sense when you were going to pay for the SEO suite anyway.
Otterly.AI's trial is 7 days, needs no card and includes API and MCP allowances. The standalone Semrush toolkit has no free trial, although a 7-day trial exists on the Semrush One Starter and Pro+ plans. One more cost sits on the Otterly.AI side, because the step from Lite to Standard is where AI referral reporting begins, and reviewers do raise that jump.
What DeepSmith does: the $99 Pro plan includes 20 articles a month as well as tracking, so measurement and production share one price, and five seats come with it.
From insight to action
Neither tool writes. Otterly.AI has the more built-in help, with ranked recommendations across ten types, a Content Audit that grades pages on 15 structural checks and 13 AI readiness dimensions, and Content Briefs that its pages name without describing what one contains. The Semrush toolkit offers AI Insights and AI Strategic Opportunities in Brand Performance, and its documentation sends content work to other toolkits. This one is close to a tie, with Otterly.AI slightly ahead on how much it tells you to do.
What DeepSmith does: it turns a citation gap into a planned idea with its evidence attached, writes the article in your Deep IQ brand context and publishes it to your CMS. The loop from tracking to a live page runs inside one platform.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits marketing teams who treat content as a growth channel and want tracking and production in one place. It covers the engines you track, shows which pages AI cites, writes the articles that close the gaps and publishes them, all on a self-serve plan.
- Otterly.AI fits a team that mainly needs to see AI-referred visits and AI crawler activity on its own site, and can pay for Standard to get them. It also suits agencies that want unlimited workspaces and seats.
- Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit fits a team already using Semrush that wants AI visibility beside Google rankings and can accept small standalone allowances. If it is mostly an SEO team, Semrush One is probably the version to price.
If you are still weighing Otterly.AI or Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit against each other, the traffic question is the one that separates them, and the rest comes down to budget and the suite you already use. For a wider shortlist, there is a three-way comparison of Semrush's toolkit with Ahrefs Brand Radar and Profound.
Start a free 7-day DeepSmith trial at app.deepsmith.ai to see which of your pages AI cites and the articles that can win more.
