OtterlyAI vs Profound: Which AI Visibility Tool Fits Your Team?

OtterlyAI is the better choice for most marketing teams and businesses, while Profound fits large enterprises that need SOC 2 Type II, SSO and a dedicated AI search team. OtterlyAI publishes its prices (from $29 per month), tracks four AI engines on every plan and adds unlimited seats and 65+ countries, with prompts in any language. Profound doesn't show a public price for brands: you get a free 7-day trial, then a custom Enterprise quote.

Both tools answer the same question, and they show whether ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and other AI engines mention your brand, which pages they cite and how they describe you. The difference is who they're built for and what you'll pay to find out.

This comparison uses the live pricing, feature and help pages of OtterlyAI and Profound as of October 2026. You'll find cost per tracked prompt, engine coverage, analytics, execution features, security, trials and agency use, and the last section gives a clear recommendation.

Note: This article was created in partnership with OtterlyAI. OtterlyAI reviewed the facts about its product; our assessment of all tools is our own.

OtterlyAI vs Profound at a glance

OtterlyAI is a self-serve AI search monitoring tool with transparent plans, and Profound is a sales-led AI marketing platform priced for enterprise budgets. Here's how the buying facts line up side by side.

Prices as listed on the vendors' pricing pages in October 2026, in US dollars excluding tax.

What are OtterlyAI and Profound?

OtterlyAI and Profound are AI search visibility platforms for answer engine optimization (AEO): they run a set of prompts against AI engines every day and report brand mentions, citations, sentiment and share of voice. Both are a faster way to check the AI visibility of your website than typing questions into ChatGPT by hand, because they repeat the same prompts daily and keep the history. Both started as monitoring tools, but in 2026 they're heading in different directions.

OtterlyAI

OtterlyAI is an AI search monitoring and optimization tool from OtterlyAI GmbH, based in Persenbeug, Austria. Thomas Peham, Josef Trauner and Klaus-M. Schremser founded it and launched the first product in October 2024.

According to the company, 40,000 marketing professionals were using OtterlyAI as of August 2026. Gartner named it a 2025 Cool Vendor for AI in Marketing, and G2 lists it as a High Performer for answer engine optimization tools.

OtterlyAI is built for marketers who want answers without a sales call. You don't need a credit card for the trial, you add your own prompts and you're tracking without ever booking a demo.

Profound

Profound is a New York company that sells an "AI marketing platform" built around AI search insights, prompt volume data and AI agents. In September 2026 it announced a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.

Profound says more than 25,000 marketers in 90+ countries use the platform, and it names customers such as Ramp, MongoDB, Plaid and Statsig. Its 2026 product shift added an AI Marketer called Aim and no-code Agents that turn insights into content and workflows.

Profound is built for enterprise marketing organizations, and access beyond the trial goes through a demo and a tailored package. A buyer who wants to start next week on a credit card isn't its target customer, and Profound doesn't pretend otherwise. Its sales team builds packages around prompts, engines, regions and agent credits.

How much do OtterlyAI and Profound cost?

OtterlyAI costs $29, $189 or $489 per month for 15, 100 or 400 prompts. Profound publishes no price for brands beyond a free trial and custom Enterprise packages. For most buyers that gap is, without question, the biggest difference between the two tools.

OtterlyAI pricing

OtterlyAI lists four plans on its pricing page. Annual billing lowers the three self-serve plans to $25, $160 and $422 per month, and monthly subscriptions can be cancelled at any time.

Every OtterlyAI plan includes ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Google AI Mode and Gemini cost $9 per month each on Lite, $59 on Standard and $149 on Premium. Claude costs $29, $109 or $439 per month on the same plans. Extra prompts come in packs of 100 for $99 per month on Standard and Premium. Standard can add up to 300 extra prompts. At that point Standard costs $486 per month for 400 prompts, almost exactly the $489 of Premium. Beyond that, OtterlyAI moves you to Premium.

Profound pricing

Profound's pricing page shows two plans for brands: a free Trial and a custom Enterprise plan. There's no monthly price, no annual price and no prompt bundle with a dollar figure for brands, so you won't know the cost until after a demo.

Many comparisons still quote self-serve Starter and Growth plans for Profound. Those plans aren't on Profound's pricing page in October 2026, so you'll want to budget for an enterprise sales process instead.

The only public Profound price applies to agencies. On the Agency Growth plan, each full client workspace costs $399 per month and tracks 100 prompts daily on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews in one language. The base fee for Agency Growth itself isn't listed, and the page doesn't say whether one applies.

How many prompts do you need?

The number of prompts you need depends on the markets, languages and products you track, and OtterlyAI offers a free prompt calculator for the estimate. Teams that need 16 to 100 prompts land on Standard, and anything up to 400 fits Premium.

A simple rule of thumb: count your core product categories, add your top comparison questions against each main competitor, then multiply by the number of countries. One product line with 30 questions in three countries already needs 90 prompts. Lite's 15 prompts only cover a first test for a single brand in one market.

Cost per tracked prompt

OtterlyAI costs between $1.06 and $1.93 per tracked prompt per month, while Profound's only public rate works out to $3.99. The figures divide each plan's monthly price by its included prompts, with no add-ons.

Engine count changes the math too, and it's where the gap widens. OtterlyAI Standard runs each prompt on four engines, so you pay about $0.47 per prompt per engine. Profound's agency workspace runs each prompt on three engines, which comes to about $1.33.

A full seven-engine setup on OtterlyAI Standard costs $416 per month: $189 for the plan plus $59 for Google AI Mode, $59 for Gemini and $109 for Claude. That's still a published number you can put in a budget today, whereas a comparable Profound setup needs a custom Enterprise quote.

Which AI engines and countries does each tool track?

OtterlyAI tracks ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot on every plan and adds Google AI Mode, Gemini and Claude as paid add-ons, for seven engines in total. Profound tracks three engines on its trial and up to nine on Enterprise, and its agency workspaces track ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.

Profound wins on raw engine count, flat-out.

If DeepSeek or Exa Search matters to your audience, OtterlyAI can't cover it.

For most marketing teams the four included OtterlyAI engines are enough to start, and the add-ons let you expand one engine at a time instead of jumping to a new plan.

Country coverage is where OtterlyAI's model really pays off.

OtterlyAI supports 65+ countries on every plan, and each prompt is tied to one country. Prompts can be monitored in any language. Tracking the same 30 questions in the US, the UK and Germany therefore uses 90 prompt slots, which still fits inside the 100 prompts of the Standard plan.

Profound's trial and agency workspaces track one language, and the brand trial is also limited to one region. More regions and languages come with a custom Enterprise package.

Both tools try to capture answers the way users see them. OtterlyAI queries the public web interfaces of the AI engines. Profound says it runs structured prompts across AI platforms on a daily schedule.

Visibility analytics: mentions, citations and prompt research

OtterlyAI and Profound both track brand mentions, citations, sentiment and share of voice every day, but Profound has the deeper prompt demand data. That's an honest win for Profound.

OtterlyAI's daily brand reports cover four areas.

• The mention rate shows how often each brand appears across your prompts and engines.
• Citation tracking lists the domains and URLs the engines cite as sources.
• Sentiment and a Brand Visibility Index compare you with named competitors.
• Brand Profiling lists the attributes AI engines tie to your brand and the objections they raise.

Profound covers the same ground in Answer Engine Insights, and it adds FactCheck, which flags what AI answers get wrong about your brand. Its Prompt Volumes product draws on more than a billion real user conversations, according to Profound, so you can see what people actually ask AI engines.

OtterlyAI's AI Prompt Research tool generates prompt suggestions from a seed topic or URL, tags intent and adds intent volume (an estimate). It can also turn your Google Search Console queries into prompts, and that's a fast way to build a solid tracking set. Teams that plan content around real prompt demand at scale will still find Profound's data stronger, and that's worth saying plainly.

One detail applies to OtterlyAI: tracking starts when you add a prompt, and there's no backfill of older data, so it's worth setting up your core prompts early.

Optimization and execution: GEO audits vs AI agents

Profound adds AI agents that create and optimize content inside the platform, while OtterlyAI gives you audits and recommendations and leaves the execution to your team. Which approach is better depends on whether you'd rather have software or people doing the writing.

OtterlyAI's GEO audits check a page's crawler access for each AI agent, its content readiness and its structured data, and each audit returns a scored issue list. Lite includes 1,000 GEO audits per month, Standard 5,000 and Premium 10,000 URL audits. Recommendations are capped at three per week on Lite and unlimited from Standard upward.

Profound's AI Marketer and Agents go a step further, and they're the core of its 2026 product. Agents are no-code workflows for recurring marketing work such as content creation and optimization. Profound Sheets runs them at scale.

The catch is cost control.

Profound's agents run on credits, and credit packages beyond the trial come with an Enterprise package, so the final bill isn't something you can check on a pricing page.

For a team that already has writers, an SEO lead and a CMS, OtterlyAI's audit-plus-recommendation model is enough, and it keeps the bill predictable. Profound's agents pay off when the organization wants to automate content production across many brands or markets.

AI crawler analytics, ChatGPT ads and shopping

Both tools offer Agent Analytics for agent and crawler visits, but OtterlyAI includes ChatGPT ads tracking on every plan, while Profound reserves ChatGPT Shopping for Enterprise.

OtterlyAI's Agent Analytics names crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User and PerplexityBot and separates bot visits from AI-referred human visits. It's included from Standard with 200,000 events per month, and Premium raises the limit to 1 million.

Profound's Agent Analytics connects at CDN or platform level through Akamai, AWS, Cloudflare, Fastly, Google Cloud Platform, Netlify, Vercel and WordPress, plus Google Analytics for attribution. For a large site with its own CDN setup, that's the more complete integration list, and OtterlyAI doesn't match it.

OtterlyAI's ChatGPT Ads Tracking records which prompts trigger sponsored placements and Shopping Cards, which brands pay for them and what the ads say. It runs in every brand report at no extra cost, and you don't need a separate setup. Profound lists ChatGPT Shopping analysis as an Enterprise-only feature.

Integrations, API and MCP access

OtterlyAI opens its API and MCP server from the $189 Standard plan, whereas Profound keeps API access for Enterprise customers. For reporting teams that's a practical difference, because you won't need an Enterprise contract to pull data into your own dashboards.

OtterlyAI Standard includes 2,000 API requests and 2,000 MCP requests per month, and Premium includes 5,000 of each. The MCP server lets you ask Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or another MCP client plain-language questions about your brand reports, citations and GEO audits.

OtterlyAI also ships a Google Looker Studio connector from Standard, and it's what agencies use for branded client dashboards. Profound offers a REST API, CSV and JSON exports and SSO on Enterprise, while its trial has no exports and no API.

Enterprise readiness, security and data location

Profound is the stronger enterprise choice: its enterprise page advertises SOC 2 Type II compliance, SSO via SAML or OIDC, role-based access control and support options up to a dedicated specialist with a 24-hour SLA. If your procurement team requires a SOC 2 report from the vendor, Profound clears that bar outright.

OtterlyAI covers the essentials for most companies. Its Enterprise plan adds single sign-on, custom terms, custom payment options and a dedicated customer success manager.

According to its security page, OtterlyAI runs on AWS and hosts its software in the EU-Central-1 region in Frankfurt. The public monitoring data it collects (the AI answers themselves) is stored in AWS's North Virginia data center, and OtterlyAI acts as a data processor under the GDPR. It points to the SOC and ISO 27001 certifications of its AWS data centers rather than publishing its own SOC 2 report, so ask for its security documentation if your vendor review needs more than that.

For a European company, an Austrian vendor with EU hosting and a GDPR processor agreement is often the easier fit, since your data protection team won't have to review a US-only setup. For a US enterprise with a formal SOC 2 requirement, Profound is the safer pick.

How do the free trials of OtterlyAI and Profound compare?

Both OtterlyAI and Profound offer a 7-day free trial with 50 prompts, but only OtterlyAI lets you choose your own prompts during its free trial. Profound's trial uses a recommended prompt set for your industry that you can't edit, and it covers ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.

A seven-day trial is short, so it's worth planning it before you sign up:

1. Write 20 to 30 prompts your buyers actually ask, including category questions such as "best tool for X" and comparison prompts with your main competitor.
2. Add your top three competitors as tracked brands.
3. Check the first daily report for brand mentions, cited URLs and sentiment.
4. Run a GEO audit on the three pages you most want AI engines to cite.
5. On the last day, compare which tool gave you findings your team can act on next week.

On Profound's trial you can't run your own prompts, so step 1 only works on OtterlyAI.

OtterlyAI vs Profound for agencies

OtterlyAI is the more affordable agency platform: its Agency Partner program adds prompts to Standard and Premium and keeps unlimited client workspaces, while Profound charges $399 per month for each full client workspace.

Approved OtterlyAI Agency Partners get 150 prompts on Standard instead of 100 and 500 on Premium instead of 400. They also get pitch workspaces for prospect audits, branded Looker Studio reports and one invoice for all workspaces, so there's no per-client billing to manage.

Profound's Agency Growth plan includes 10 pitch workspaces per month with 25 prompts each and five agency seats. Full client workspaces cost $399 per month each, and five extra trial workspaces cost $199 per month.

The math is clear for a small agency.

Five clients with 100 prompts each cost $1,995 per month in Profound client workspaces before the Agency Growth base fee. On OtterlyAI, a Premium account with 500 prompts as an approved Agency Partner covers the same five clients for $489 per month.

Which should you choose: OtterlyAI or Profound?

OtterlyAI is the better choice for most marketing teams, SMEs and agencies, and Profound is the better choice for enterprises that have a dedicated AI search team, a formal SOC 2 requirement and a budget for a custom contract.

Start with OtterlyAI if you want published prices, fast setup and enough data to act on within a week. Most marketing teams don't need nine engines or an agent platform to find out where AI answers mention competitors instead of them, and they won't want to wait for a sales cycle to get started.

Choose Profound when AI search is a board-level program with its own team and procurement process. You'll get more depth, and you'll pay for it. Its depth in prompt volume data, agents and enterprise security is real, and so is the custom price tag.

If neither tool fits, our list of Profound alternatives compares other options, and our Profound review covers its modules in more detail. For the wider market, see the best AI visibility tools.

FAQ about OtterlyAI and Profound