AI Summary
Otterly.AI is one of the few AI visibility trackers with outside validation. Gartner named it a Cool Vendor for AI in Marketing in October 2025, one of only five tools on that list. We wanted to know what that recognition looks like from the inside, so we created a free account, pointed it at a real brand, and ran the same hands-on test we run on every tool in this category.
Here is the short version. Otterly.AI is a clean, focused share-of-voice tracker that reads the actual AI answers, scores sentiment, and shows you which sources get cited. It starts at $29 a month, the free trial needs no credit card, and the dashboard is the easiest to read of any tool we have tested. The one thing to price in: the entry plan tracks four engines, and the two people usually ask about next, Google AI Mode and Gemini, cost extra. Here is everything we saw.
What Otterly.AI is
Otterly.AI launched in 2024 out of Vienna, Austria, built by a bootstrapped team that previously ran Storyblok marketing and sold Usersnap to saas.group. The company says more than 20,000 marketers now use it. It does one job: it measures how visible your brand is inside AI answers, then shows you who is beating you and why. That job is the whole category we track in our best AI visibility tools roundup, and Otterly is one of its cleanest entries.
The Gartner recognition is real, and worth a caveat. Gartner states plainly that it “does not endorse any vendor, product or service.” Cool Vendor is an analyst opinion, not a certification. It signals that the category matters, which our state of AI search data backs up, and that Otterly is a credible name in it. Nothing more, but nothing less either.
How we tested
We created a free trial with no credit card, added a single brand, and let the platform build a prompt set around it. Our test brand was HubSpot, benchmarked against Salesforce, Zoho, and the rest of the CRM field, in the United States. Otterly generated 15 conversational prompts, ran them across its engines, and returned a full report in a few minutes. Every number and screenshot below is from that live account.
The dashboard: share of voice, read clearly
The overview is the strongest part of the product. It leads with your share of voice, your average position when you do appear, and a coverage line that tracks how often you show up over time. For HubSpot it reported 33 brand mentions across the sampled answers, an average position of 1.47, and a positive sentiment lean.
Scroll down and you get the competitive picture: a brand ranking that lines every player up by share of voice. This is where our test brand told the real story. Otterly ranked Salesforce first at 32 percent, HubSpot second at 29 percent, and Zoho third at 13 percent, with sentiment and mention counts beside each row.
That 29 percent is worth holding onto. When we ran the same brand through other tools for our Profound alternatives test, the score swung from 29 percent here to 90 percent on another platform. It is a clean reminder that a share-of-voice number is only as meaningful as the prompt set behind it, so treat any single tool’s figure as directional rather than exact.
Reading the actual answers
Most trackers give you a score. Otterly lets you open the prompt and read what each AI engine actually said. The prompts view lists every query with its brand coverage and a sentiment score, so you can see which questions you own and which ones hand the answer to a competitor.
For HubSpot, five prompts returned 100 percent coverage, questions like “what CRM unifies data with built-in AI automation.” Others dropped to 25 percent, where the answer named rivals first. That granularity is the point. It turns a vague visibility score into a list of specific answers you can go and influence, which is how real GEO work gets prioritized.
Citations: who gets cited as the source
The citations tab is the other half of the story. It lists the exact URLs AI engines pulled from when they answered your prompts, flags whether your brand was mentioned in that answer, and names which competitors showed up. For our test, hubspot.com was cited, but so were zendesk.com, shopify.com, and a handful of third-party comparison pages we did not control.
This is the view GEO work runs on. If a comparison article on someone else’s domain is feeding the AI answer, that is a page you either pitch, match, or displace. Otterly makes that list visible in a couple of clicks, which is the same job as the dedicated AI search citation trackers we have reviewed, folded into one dashboard.
Recommendations: a good frame, on a timer
Otterly has a recommendations engine that promises actionable steps to improve your visibility, sorted by impact, with a to-do workflow. On our day-one account it was not ready. The tab told us the analysis was in progress and that reliable recommendations take up to three days of observation.
We call this out because a recent Semrush roundup claimed Otterly “tells you what is happening but does not recommend how to improve.” The feature exists and looks well designed, so that critique is out of date. The honest caveat is the opposite: you will not see a single recommendation on your first day, so budget a few days before you judge this part.
What it tracks, and the engine catch
Every paid plan covers four engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. The engines people ask about next are add-ons. Google AI Mode and Gemini start at $9 a month each on the entry plan, and Claude costs more. If AI Mode coverage matters to you, and for many brands it now does, price it in before you compare Otterly to a tool that includes it by default.
Pricing
Otterly is priced per prompt, billed monthly or annually, with roughly 15 percent off for annual. The free trial needs no credit card, which is rarer in this category than it should be. Prices below are from Otterly’s pricing page.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per mo) | Prompts | Notable inclusions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lite | $29 | $25 | 15 | Core 4 engines, 1 workspace, GEO URL audits |
| Standard | $189 | $160 | 100 | API, MCP server, Looker Studio, unlimited workspaces |
| Premium | $489 | $422 | 400 | Personal onboarding, higher API and audit limits |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | SSO, quarterly GEO health check, dedicated CS |
Add-on engines (AI Mode, Gemini, Claude) and extra prompts are billed separately. Compared with AthenaHQ, which offers a free tier, and SE Ranking, which folds AI tracking into a full SEO suite from around $103 a month, Otterly sits in the middle: cheaper than the enterprise trackers, more focused than the all-in-one suites. For the wider cost picture, see our guide to GEO pricing.
Where it wins, where it does not
Strong:
- The cleanest dashboard we have tested: share of voice, sentiment, and citations without clutter.
- You can read the actual AI answers, not just a score.
- A free trial with no credit card, and a genuinely usable $29 entry plan.
- API, MCP server, and Looker Studio connector on higher tiers, which agencies will want.
- Coverage across 50 or more countries.
Limited:
- The entry plan is four engines; AI Mode and Gemini cost extra.
- Recommendations need about three days of data before they appear.
- Share of voice is prompt-set dependent, so read the absolute number as directional. Our Profound alternatives test shows how far it can swing.
- No keyword research or rank tracking. This is a visibility tracker, not an SEO suite. For that, SE Ranking fits better.
The bottom line
Otterly.AI earns its Cool Vendor mention. If you want to start measuring AI visibility this week, read the answers behind the score, and not overpay, the $29 plan and the no-card trial make it one of the easiest tools in the category to say yes to. Go in knowing that the engines you probably care about next cost extra, and that its smartest feature, recommendations, needs a few days to warm up. If you are still deciding which platform to run, our best AI visibility tools roundup and our hands-on AthenaHQ review are the next two reads.