Otterly.AI alternatives in 2026: a buyer's guide with every feature compared
Six Otterly.AI alternatives sorted by budget band and team size, with plan limits, a feature-gap table from vendor pages, and the questions to ask before you sign.
Otterly.AI is often the first AI visibility tool a marketing team pays for. Lite costs €29 a month on the page we captured, every plan has unlimited team members and daily tracking, and citation source tracking, sentiment, Brand Profiling and GEO audits are included from Lite. For a solo marketer checking whether ChatGPT and Perplexity mention the brand at all, that is a sensible first purchase.
The reasons buyers come back to the market show up later. Every Otterly plan tracks the same four engines in the base price: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Gemini and Google AI Mode cost €9 to €149 a month extra each, depending on the tier, and Claude costs €29 to €439. Lite stops at 15 prompts and can't buy more. Standard (€189) has 100 and Premium (€489) has 400, with packs of 100 extra prompts at €99. API access, MCP access and Agent Analytics start on Standard, and Otterly's own llms.txt still describes Agent Analytics as a closed beta. Visitor analytics that tie AI referrals to conversions, Search Console data, article generation and CMS publishing are not listed on Otterly.AI's pricing or product pages (checked November 2026).
Otterly.AI's pricing page, captured November 6, 2026. Prices shown in euros for a visitor in the Netherlands.
This guide is for whoever signs the next contract. It sorts the alternatives by budget band, shows what each vendor's pages leave out, and ends with questions for the sales call. Promptwatch is the one we would evaluate first; AthenaHQ and Scrunch AI usually share the shortlist with Otterly.AI. The direct head-to-head is in Promptwatch vs Otterly.AI: which should you buy.
Quick verdict
Promptwatch is the alternative to evaluate first once your next question is why the numbers move. Visitor analytics with conversions, Search Console and Bing data, and claim-level Brand Narrative are on every brand plan from $95 a month, and IP-verified crawler logs and AEO articles start on Professional at $245. The rest of the shortlist suits narrower buyers:
- AthenaHQ: an in-app agent and action list, billed in credits.
- Scrunch AI: one brand in one country, with bot traffic and basic content on a $250 plan.
- Rankscale: every engine and hourly runs under €100, if you watch credit burn.
- LLM Pulse: the lowest published price, with weekly runs.
- Semrush AI Toolkit: AI mentions next to Semrush keyword and backlink data.
The shortlist at a glance
| Tool | Best for | Starting price | What it doesn't list |
|---|---|---|---|
| Promptwatch | Teams that need traffic, crawler and content data next to prompt tracking | $95/mo (Essential), 7-day free trial | Crawler logs and AEO articles are not on Essential; Ads Radar and ChatGPT Shopping start on Business ($579/mo) |
| AthenaHQ | Teams that want an agent and an action center | Free Essential tier; Starter $295/mo | AI crawler logs, social citation reports, MCP server; API is a paid add-on on Starter |
| Scrunch AI | One brand, one country, content-led | Core $250/mo, 7-day free trial | CMS publishing and AI-referred conversions; Claude, Gemini and AI Mode are Enterprise only |
| Rankscale | Technical buyers on a credit budget | €17/mo Essentials (billed yearly); Pro €99/mo | Article generation (its facts page says it doesn't generate text), personas, PDF reports |
| LLM Pulse | Small teams that accept weekly runs | €49/mo Starter (weekly tracking) | Personas and CMS publishing; crawler logs and the REST API start on Scale (€299/mo) |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | SEO teams already on Semrush | $99/mo per domain, billed annually | Query fan-outs and personas; crawler logs and AI traffic are on Enterprise AIO only |
| Otterly.AI (reference) | Solo marketers testing the category | €29/mo (Lite) | Visitor analytics, Search Console data, article generation, CMS publishing |
Prices and plan contents come from each vendor's pricing and product pages, captured November 6 and 8, 2026, plus vendor llms.txt files fetched November 8. Euro prices are what those pages showed a visitor in the Netherlands, and we haven't converted them. "Doesn't list" means the feature isn't on the pages we read, not that the vendor has said no.
Start with your budget band
Under $100 a month
Otterly Lite, Rankscale Essentials or Pro, LLM Pulse Starter, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit Base, Promptwatch Essential and AthenaHQ's free tier. Each leaves something out: Promptwatch Essential has no crawler logs, Otterly Lite has no API or MCP, LLM Pulse Starter runs weekly.
$150 to $300 a month
Otterly Standard, Rankscale Pro+, Promptwatch Professional, Scrunch Core, AthenaHQ Starter and LLM Pulse Scale. Most teams leaving Otterly land here, and nearly every plan in this band shows some crawler data. Compare what sits around the logs: bot verification, the link to citations, and whether a visit becomes a conversion you can report.
Over $300 a month
Otterly Premium, Rankscale Growth, Promptwatch Business, LLM Pulse Scale+ and the Enterprise tiers. Buy here for tracking faster than daily, location below country level, shopping and ads data, or automated publishing.
Seats rarely change the band. Otterly, Promptwatch, AthenaHQ, LLM Pulse and Rankscale (from Pro) list unlimited seats; Scrunch Core has 5 user licenses and Semrush sells extra users from €43 a month.
1. Promptwatch: the most complete plan in each band
Promptwatch costs more than Otterly at the bottom and covers more at every step. Essential is $95 a month (€85) for 1 project, 50 prompts and 6,000 responses. Professional is $245 (€205) for 2 projects, 150 prompts and 18,000 responses. Business is $579 (€499) for 5 projects, 350 prompts and 42,000 responses. Every paid plan has unlimited seats, a 7-day free trial on monthly billing, and can track any of the supported engines with no per-engine surcharge. Agency plans (Kick-off $199, Growth $399, Scale $799) have unlimited projects and prompts.
Visitor Analytics is on every plan (200K events on Essential) and counts AI-referred visits and conversions from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and others. 360 Insights, on every brand plan, puts Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster clicks and impressions next to AI crawls, citations and clicks for each page.
Promptwatch 360 Dashboard Search insights, from the Promptwatch changelog. Example project data.
Brand Narrative, also on every plan, breaks tracked answers into individual claims, groups them by theme, scores each theme and sets competitors beside you. Fact Check (Business) searches pages crawled from your site for ones that state a claim or contradict it. From Professional, Agent Analytics verifies AI crawler hits against each operator's published IP ranges and shows a citation rate per page, which tells an access problem apart from a content problem. Professional also adds 5 AEO articles a month (10 on Business) that publish to WordPress, Webflow or Framer, and Business adds the automated Content Agent. Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram citation reports and a Page Tracker for any URL, including a competitor's, round it out.
The weak spots: Essential costs more than three times Otterly Lite, has no AEO articles, and leaves out crawler logs and the Looker Studio connector, both of which Otterly puts on Standard at €189. Ads Radar and ChatGPT Shopping start on Business, while Otterly lists ads and shopping tracking without naming a plan. Agency plans don't include AEO articles or the Content Agent.
2. AthenaHQ: an agent on the free plan, credits on the paid one
AthenaHQ has the most generous free entry here. Essential is free with 300 credits across ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot, unlimited users and the Athena AI agent. Starter is $295 a month with 3,600 credits (one credit is one AI response), a one-month rollover, unlimited topics, prompts and competitors, and 11 models including AI Mode, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral. AthenaHQ lists SOC 2 Type 2.
AthenaHQ's pricing page, captured November 6, 2026.
Do the credit math before you sign. Thirty prompts on four engines, checked daily, is 3,600 responses a month, which is the whole Starter allowance. Extra credits and API access are paid add-ons with prices on request. Starter covers one region and language; multi-region, personas and claim review sit on Enterprise. AI crawler logs and an MCP server are not listed, and no tracking frequency is stated.
3. Scrunch AI: bot traffic and content on one plan, four engines
Scrunch AI sells one self-serve plan. Core is $250 a month for 125 prompts, 5,000 responses, 5 user licenses, one country and one persona, with basic content generation, 5 site audits a month, and AI bot traffic split into training, indexing and retrieval. There is a 7-day free trial.
Scrunch's Agent Traffic page, captured November 8, 2026.
The catch for Otterly leavers is engines. Core tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot, the same base set as Otterly, and Claude, Gemini, AI Mode, Meta AI and Grok are Enterprise only. So are MCP, the API, Looker Studio and AXP, which serves AI-optimized versions of your pages to agents. Then the volume: 125 prompts on four engines is 500 responses per full run, so 5,000 responses covers about ten full runs a month. IP verification and a crawl-to-citation link aren't listed for the bot data.
4. Rankscale: every engine and hourly runs, paid in credits
Rankscale is the cheapest way onto 17+ engines. Essentials is €17 a month on yearly billing, Pro is €99 with 1,200 credits (up to 4,800 answers), Pro+ is €229 and adds the REST API, Growth is €385 with white-label dashboard links, and Enterprise is €780. Every plan can schedule runs hourly, and query fan-outs and the MCP server come with every plan too. Pro adds AI Visits (bot visits via Cloudflare), shopping and ad analytics.
Rankscale's pricing page, captured November 6, 2026. Prices shown in euros for a visitor in the Netherlands.
Engines cost different amounts per run: 0.25 credits for ChatGPT, AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini, 1 for DeepSeek and 2 for Claude. At 0.25 credits, Pro's 1,200 credits cover about 40 prompts a day on those four engines. Add Claude and the number drops fast. Rankscale's facts page says it doesn't generate text, PDF reports aren't listed, and AI Visits syncs daily from Cloudflare only.
5. LLM Pulse: the lowest published price, weekly by default
LLM Pulse Starter is €49 a month (€40.83 billed annually) for 50 prompts, one project and five engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini. Other engines are add-ons from €8 a month; Claude is €25 on weekly Starter. Growth (€99) adds AI traffic analytics with conversions and revenue by AI source. Scale (€299) adds Agent Analytics, the REST API, Looker Studio, shopping and ads tracking. The MCP server and unlimited seats are on every plan, and the 14-day trial on weekly plans is twice as long as Promptwatch's.
Those prices are for weekly runs. Daily tracking is sold as separate plans with no trial, and personas and CMS publishing aren't listed.
6. Semrush AI Toolkit: AI mentions inside an SEO suite
Semrush AI Toolkit makes sense when you already run SEO in Semrush. The AI Visibility Toolkit Base plan is $99 a month per domain, billed annually, for 25 prompts tracked daily on ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, plus 300 instant AI visibility reports a day for any domain. The surrounding suite brings 28B+ keywords and 43T+ backlinks, which no dedicated GEO tool here matches.
The AI layer is thinner. Query fan-outs and personas aren't listed, and crawler log analysis, GA4 or Adobe conversion data and shopping tracking appear only on the Enterprise AIO page. PDF and scheduled reports need a €9.59 a month add-on.
Feature gaps, row by row
| Capability | Promptwatch | Otterly.AI | AthenaHQ | Scrunch AI | Rankscale |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Engines without per-engine add-ons | Yes, every paid plan | Add-on: Gemini, AI Mode, Claude | 11 models on Starter, no add-on listed | Claude, Gemini, AI Mode: Enterprise only | Yes, priced in credits |
| Prompt volumes and difficulty | Yes, every plan | Partial: prompt generator only | Partial: volume estimates | Partial: approximate volumes | Partial: volumes, no difficulty |
| Personas | Yes | Not listed | Enterprise only | Yes, 1 on Core | Not listed |
| State, city or coordinate targeting | State/city on Business and agency plans; coordinates on Business, Agency Scale | Not listed | Not listed | Not listed | Not listed |
| Tracking faster than daily | Business, Agency Scale, Enterprise | Not listed | Not listed | Not listed | Yes, every plan |
| Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram reports | Yes | Not listed | Not listed | Partial: "Social" segment | Not listed |
| Track any URL, incl. a competitor's | Yes, Page Tracker | Not listed | Not listed | Partial | Partial: page audits |
| IP-verified crawler logs with crawl-to-citation | Yes, Professional and up | Not listed | Not listed | Partial | Partial: 404 signals |
| AI-referred visits and conversions | Yes, every plan | Not listed | Partial: via GA4 | Not listed | Partial: GA4 beta |
| Search Console and Bing next to AI data | Yes, every brand plan | Not listed | Partial: GSC | Not listed | Partial: GSC beta |
| Claim-level narrative and fact check | Brand Narrative every plan; Fact Check Business | Partial: sentiment, Brand Profiling | Enterprise only | Partial: sentiment | Partial: sentiment from Pro |
| Article generation | Professional and up | Not listed (briefs only) | Partial | Yes, basic on Core | No (facts page) |
| CMS publishing | Yes; automated on Business | Not listed | Partial: Shopify | Not listed | Not listed |
| Coding agent visibility | Yes: Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode | Not listed | Not listed | Not listed | Not listed |
Values come from each vendor's pricing and product pages (November 6 and 8, 2026); "Not listed" means we didn't find it there.
Which rows matter depends on who signs. A marketing lead who reports to finance should weight conversions and Search Console first, since those turn a visibility score into a traffic line, and only Promptwatch lists both natively on its entry brand plan. A technical SEO should read the crawler row: Otterly, Scrunch and Rankscale show bot visits, but none lists IP verification or a per-page crawl-to-citation link. Content teams should read the article and CMS rows together, because a draft you paste into WordPress by hand is half a workflow. Multi-location brands should note that Promptwatch is the only tool here with self-serve state, city and coordinate targeting; Semrush describes city-level detail only on its Enterprise AIO page.
Questions to ask any vendor before you sign
- How many responses does one prompt use each month at my engine count? Otterly doesn't state a response allowance, Scrunch caps Core at 5,000, and AthenaHQ and Rankscale bill in credits.
- Are your crawler hits verified against the bot operators' IP ranges, and can you show which crawled pages got cited? Otterly's llms.txt calls its Agent Analytics a closed beta, so ask for a demo on your own logs.
- Which plan includes ads and shopping tracking? Otterly lists ChatGPT ads and shopping tracking but doesn't name a plan.
- Can I export a PDF or schedule a report for leadership? Otterly lists CSV export and, on its agency page, weekly automated reports. PDF isn't listed.
- Are citations refreshed daily? Otterly's pricing page says daily tracking, while its llms.txt says domain citations are monitored weekly.
- How long is the trial? Otterly's home FAQ says 7 days and its features page sign-up box says 14.
Who should pick which
- Promptwatch, if leadership wants to see which AI answers drove visits and conversions. Start on Professional for crawler logs.
- AthenaHQ, if you want an in-app agent from day one and will watch credits.
- Scrunch AI, if one brand in one country is the whole scope.
- Rankscale, if engine breadth and hourly runs beat content tools.
- LLM Pulse, if price is the constraint and weekly data is enough.
- Semrush AI Toolkit, if you want AI mentions inside your SEO suite.
- Stay on Otterly.AI if up to 100 prompts on four engines answers your question and nobody asks for traffic numbers yet.
Our recommendation
Most teams leave Otterly when someone asks whether any of these AI answers sent a customer. Promptwatch is built around that question. Visitor Analytics counts AI-referred visits and conversions on every plan, and from Professional, Agent Analytics shows whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot reached the page you want cited. Book a Promptwatch demo, bring the six questions above, and ask them to show the crawl-to-citation rate on one of your own pages. If you need to justify the spend internally, our guide on what a visibility platform should be able to prove before you approve the budget pairs well with that call.
FAQ
Is there a cheaper alternative to Otterly.AI?
Rankscale Essentials is €17 a month on yearly billing, against Otterly Lite at €29. Promptwatch Essential costs more at $95 but covers 50 prompts, where Otterly needs Standard (€189) above 15.
Which alternatives include AI crawler data on a lower plan?
Scrunch Core ($250) lists bot traffic, Rankscale has AI Visits from Pro (€99), and Otterly has Agent Analytics from Standard (€189). Promptwatch's crawler logs start on Professional ($245) and add IP verification, a citation rate per page and error explanations, which the others don't list.
Does Promptwatch charge extra for Gemini or Claude?
No. Promptwatch has no per-engine surcharge, and every paid plan can track any of the supported engines. Claude is tracked through its API rather than the consumer interface.