Otterly.AI is a dedicated AI search tracker with audits and crawler analytics, and Surfer SEO is a content optimization platform that added AI answer tracking on top of its Content Editor. If you only need to measure AI visibility, Otterly.AI is the more focused buy, and if you write and refresh articles against what ranks, Surfer SEO fits better. DeepSmith is a strong third option because it tracks AI answers and also writes and publishes the articles on a schedule, with no one in the app.
If you are weighing Otterly.AI vs Surfer SEO, the real question is how much of the job you want one tool to do. Otterly.AI watches how AI engines answer questions about your brand. Surfer SEO helps you write and improve the pages, and it now tracks AI answers too. DeepSmith sits next to both, since it tracks and also produces the finished article. Framed as Otterly.AI vs Surfer SEO tracker or content editor, the choice comes down to measuring the problem or also fixing it.
Otterly.AI vs Surfer SEO: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI tracking and publish-ready articles in one self-serve platform, from $99 a month, with Autowrite producing pieces on a set date.
- Choose Otterly.AI if you only need tracking, with daily prompt checks from $29 a month, audits, and AI crawler analytics, and your writing happens somewhere else.
- Choose Surfer SEO if your team writes and refreshes articles against top-ranking pages and wants the Content Editor and Content Score, with AI tracking as an extra.
| DeepSmith | Otterly.AI | Surfer SEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price, monthly billing | $99/mo | $29/mo | Not listed |
| Entry price, billed yearly (per month) | $80/mo | $25/mo | $49/mo |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days, no card | 7-day Pro trial |
| Prompts on the cheapest plan with AI tracking | 50 | 15 | 50 |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 | 7, with 3 as paid add-ons | 5 |
| Tracks brand mentions in AI answers | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Writes full articles | Yes | Not listed | Yes |
| Grounds output in stored brand context | Yes | Not listed | Yes |
| Scores a draft against top-ranking pages | - | Not listed | Yes |
| Publishes directly to a CMS | Yes | Not listed | Yes |
| Writes and publishes on a schedule | Yes | Not listed | Partial |
| AI crawler analytics | - | Yes | Not listed |
| Public API | Yes | Yes, Standard and up | Yes, Peace of Mind and Enterprise |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.7/5 on G2 | 4.8/5 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 Austria. It runs your tracked prompts every day across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, which every plan includes, and it sells Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude as paid add-ons. It reports mentions, citations, position, sentiment and share of voice against competitors. Around that it offers prompt research, a GEO Audit, a Content Audit, ranked recommendations and Agent Analytics for AI crawler visits.
It is built for small and mid-sized marketing and SEO teams and for agencies, with unlimited seats on every plan. Plans run from Lite at $29 a month to Premium at $489 a month, and Enterprise is custom. The standout is how much tracking you get for a low published price, plus an API and MCP server from Standard.
The limits are real. Lite has 15 prompts and no API, and the next plan up is $189 a month. Otterly.AI does not document article writing, brand context grounding or CMS publishing, so the work after the insight happens elsewhere. On G2, reviewers rate it 4.7/5 across 54 reviews (a second listing shows 4.8/5 across 42), and they praise the setup and the support while asking for more filters and more actionable recommendations. TrustRadius lists 7.6/10 from 3 ratings, so the sample there is small.
Surfer SEO
Surfer SEO is a content optimization platform from Poland, best known for its Content Editor and a real-time Content Score that grades a draft against top-ranking and AI-cited pages. Around that sit Surfer AI for article generation, Auto-Optimize, internal linking, Content Audit, Topical Map and a WordPress plugin. Its AI Tracker checks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews and Gemini for each prompt.
It is built for SEO and content practitioners, in-house teams and agencies who write or refresh articles and want AI tracking in the same account. Public plans start at Discovery for $49 a month billed yearly, though Discovery has no AI tracking. The standout is the editor, which reviewers describe as clear and actionable.
The limits show up in plan gating and credits. Surfer says tracking starts on its AI Search Analytics, Standard and Pro plans, Surfer AI articles draw on separately sold credits, and there is no native workflow builder or scheduled publishing. Reviewers rate it 4.8/5 on G2 across 546 reviews, and the complaints are mostly about price, credit limits and keyword suggestions that feel formulaic. Capterra lists it at 4.9/5 across 422 reviews.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes on its own
Both tools leave a gap for a team that wants the loop closed. Otterly.AI tells you where you are missing from AI answers, and Surfer SEO helps you improve a draft you already wrote. Surfer SEO does write articles with Surfer AI, but it runs inside the editor from a keyword, and its automation goes through Zapier or MCP. Neither one starts from your tracking data and ends with a finished article on a set date.
DeepSmith does that in one platform. Its AI visibility module tracks mention rate, citation rate and share of voice across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and, on Enterprise, all ten engines it covers. It also shows which of your own pages AI engines cite and which competitor pages win the citations you want. Opportunity Agents read that data and return content ideas, each with the data point that justifies it attached.
From there the Writer takes one planned idea and researches the live web, then writes an article grounded in Deep IQ, which holds your company, product, persona, voice and content type once so every draft uses the same context. The output is publish-ready, with internal and external links, a cover image and metadata, and you can publish to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful. Autowrite goes a step further. You set it up when you plan an article, and it writes itself on the scheduled date and lands in Produced Content with no one in the app.
Pricing is public. Pro is $99 a month ($80 billed yearly) with 20 articles and 50 tracked prompts, Grow is $199 ($160) with 40 articles and 100 prompts, and Scale is $399 ($299) with 90 articles and 200 prompts. Every plan has a 7-day free trial, no long-term contract, SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certification, and a 4.8/5 rating on G2. DeepSmith's plans don't include crawler log analytics, and its tracking reports the pages AI actually cites while the Writer produces the pages that close the gap.
Engine coverage and tracking depth
Otterly.AI wins on tracking depth, and Surfer SEO covers a clean set of five engines per prompt. Otterly.AI includes four engines on every plan and reaches seven by adding Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude as paid add-ons, so covering all seven on Standard adds $227 a month. Surfer SEO tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews and Gemini together on AI Search Analytics, Pro and Peace of Mind, while its Standard plan tracks 25 ChatGPT prompts with a weekly refresh.
On depth, Otterly.AI's daily Brand Report scores mentions, coverage, position, sentiment, share of voice, and the domains and URLs cited, for your brand and named competitors. Its Gap Analyzer lists prompts where competitors are named and you are not. Surfer SEO's AI Tracker has mention gap, sentiment, sources and fan-out queries, and it says it scrapes the consumer interfaces and averages several runs a day. Neither publishes how many samples it takes per prompt or how long it keeps answer history.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, sentiment and visibility trend, with per-prompt answer history and a per-engine breakdown. Page-level attribution shows which of your pages earn citations, and competitor citations show which exact pages win them. The engine count rises with the plan, from ChatGPT on Pro to all ten on Enterprise.
Content writing and optimization
Surfer SEO wins this one clearly. Its Content Editor gives real-time guidance on terms, entities, structure and length from the top 10 results and AI-cited pages, and the Content Score now has an SEO half and an AI Search half. Surfer AI writes a full article of about 2,000 words or more from a keyword, and Custom Voice and Brand Knowledge shape the output on the plans that include them. Otterly.AI has no documented article writing. Its Content Audit grades an existing page on 15 structural checks and 13 AI readiness dimensions and lists improvements, but it does not rewrite the page.
For a team that writes by hand and wants a scoring layer, Surfer SEO's editor is the stronger answer. Reviewers do note that some suggestions feel formulaic and that AI drafts need a fact check, and Surfer's own docs warn that auto-inserted external links can be wrong.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith produces the whole article rather than grading a draft. The Writer researches the live web, grounds the piece in Deep IQ, adds internal and external links, and returns a finished, brand-voiced article with a cover image and metadata. Your editors review for strategy and judgment instead of fixing structure.
Audits and AI crawler analytics
Otterly.AI wins here, because Surfer SEO does not list a matching feature. The GEO Audit checks robots.txt and live server responses for 19 AI crawlers, and the Crawlability Check fetches a page the way those crawlers do. Agent Analytics, on Standard and above, separates AI bot visits from AI-referred human visits using server or CDN logs, through a file upload, a webhook, Cloudflare or a WordPress plugin.
Surfer SEO's audit work points the other way. Its Content Audit reads Google Search Console data to surface pages that are losing rankings and the best refresh opportunities, with weekly emails. If your question is whether AI crawlers can reach your site, Otterly.AI answers it. If your question is which existing articles to refresh, Surfer SEO does.
Pricing and value
Otterly.AI is cheaper to start, and Surfer SEO is the one whose plans include an editor. Otterly.AI's Lite is $29 a month ($25 billed yearly), Standard is $189 ($160), and Premium is $489 ($422). Surfer SEO's plans are listed at their yearly rates only, at $49 for Discovery, $82 for AI Search Analytics, $99 for Standard, $182 for Pro and $299 for Peace of Mind, and its monthly-billed prices were not available when we checked.
Each side has a gate to watch. Otterly.AI's Lite has 15 prompts and the jump to Standard is large, and reviewers flag it. On Surfer SEO, Discovery has no AI tracking, the API sits on Peace of Mind, and Surfer AI articles use credits whose prices are not published.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith puts tracking and writing on one self-serve price with a fixed article allowance. Pro at $99 a month includes 20 articles and 50 tracked prompts, Grow at $199 includes 40 articles and 100 prompts, and Scale at $399 includes 90 articles and 200 prompts, with annual billing lowering each rate. You do not need a second subscription for the writing side.
From insight to action
Surfer SEO wins on getting from a tracked gap to a better page, because its Recommendations feed tasks into Content Editor, Auto-Optimize and Content Audit in one account. Since August 2026 those recommendations include mentions to pursue and sentiment to fix from AI Tracker. Otterly.AI ranks recommendations across ten types with the affected prompt and the source that beats you, but the writing and publishing happen outside the tool, and its recommendations are limited to three a week on Lite.
Surfer SEO can publish to WordPress through its plugin, and its Zapier integration can create articles and publish to a CMS. It does not have a native workflow builder or scheduled publishing, and the Surfy Agent that would write and publish at scale is announced as coming soon.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith turns the insight into a queued, evidence-backed idea, plans it on a date, writes it, and publishes it. Opportunity Agents return ideas with the supporting data point attached, Planned Content gives each idea a date, and Autowrite writes the article on that date with the stored persona, voice, content type and link targets. Finished pieces go to your CMS from Produced Content, and Apps Library turns each article into versions for LinkedIn, X, newsletters and more.
Which should you choose
For Surfer SEO vs Otterly.AI, the split follows who writes your articles.
- DeepSmith fits marketing leads and content teams who want to see where AI engines skip their brand and have the articles that close the gap written, linked and published without extra tools. It suits a team that wants output to keep moving when a writer is out, since Autowrite runs on its own schedule.
- Otterly.AI fits a team that already has writers and an editor and only needs AI visibility tracking, audits and crawler analytics, especially a small team or agency that wants a published low entry price and unlimited seats.
- Surfer SEO fits SEO and content practitioners who write and refresh articles against what ranks, want a live Content Score, and are happy with AI tracking as part of the same account.
Ready to see tracking and writing in one place? Start a DeepSmith free trial and run your own prompts against real data and real drafts.
