Head to head
Profound vs Otterly
ninety-nine dollars
against twenty-nine.
We make a tool that competes with both of these, so read this knowing that. Profound’s cheapest plan is $99 a month and Otterly’s is $29. That is the comparison a real buyer has, and the interesting part is that the cheaper one watches more assistants, not fewer.
Every figure links back to the page it was read from. There is nothing to buy from us, so this page is not trying to close you on anything — it ends with where each of them beats us and what we could not check.
Reviewed 3 September 2026 Profound figures read from tryprofound.com on 31 August 2026 · every Otterly price, tier, assistant count and add-on here was re-read on 31 August 2026; four capability lines across the two of them were not, and each says so where it appears · prices in this category move fast, so open the links before you buy
The short answer
What does the extra
seventy dollars buy?
Not more assistants watched. The two products are priced three and a half times apart and they are answering different questions — one of them writes content for you, the other tells you where you stand across a wider set of surfaces for less money.
Profound
A platform built only for AI answers, with a writing layer.
Starter is $99 a month, billed for a year with two months free. On that plan it is ChatGPT tracking only, with 50 tracked prompts, 100 “Agents credits” a month and email support.
Growth is $399 a month for three answer engines, 100 tracked prompts and 400 credits. Above that sits a custom-priced tier listing up to nine answer engines, several companies in one account, and SSO/SAML with SOC2.
tryprofound.com/pricing · read 31 August 2026
Otterly
A tracker, and the cheapest of the eight tools we track.
Lite is $29 a month, or $25 a month paid annually at 15% off. It comes with 15 search prompts, daily tracking, one workspace, three recommendations a week and 1,000 GEO audits a month. ChatGPT Ads tracking is on it too — that line was read on 30 August and not since.
Standard is $189 a month, Premium $489, and Enterprise is listed as starting from $1,000 a month. Their free tools sit on a separate site and cost nothing to run; a seven-day trial with no card was on the pricing page on 30 August.
otterly.ai/pricing · prices and tiers read 31 August 2026
Side by side
What the money
actually buys.
Four columns, because these are the four things that change the answer.
| Tool | Cheapest paid plan | AI assistants watched for that | Separates “named you” from “linked to you” | Hands you the fix |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Profoundtryprofound.com · read 31 Aug | $99 / monthBilled for a year, two months free. Growth is $399 a month; the tier above is custom-priced. | 1 on the $99 plan — ChatGPT only.3 on the $399 plan, and up to 9 on the custom tier. The wider list is what the platform can do, not what the entry plan watches. | No. “Citations” is used throughout with no stated separation.Carried forward from 30 August. | Yes, as generated content. Their Agents write for you, paid for in credits.What one credit buys is not verified — their page says a credit is consumed each time an Agent runs, and never says what a run produces. |
| Otterlyotterly.ai · read 31 Aug | $29 / month$25 a month paid annually, 15% off. Standard $189, Premium $489, Enterprise from $1,000 a month. | 4 — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, MS Copilot.Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini are paid add-ons on top. Their page prints $9 a month for AI Mode, $9 for Gemini and $29 for Claude. Extra prompts are $99 per hundred a month. | Partly. They ship Link Citations Analysis, and never say that being named without a link is a different thing.Carried forward from 30 August. | Not as a file. Smart recommendations and content briefs to work from — guidance, not drafted pages or generated schema. |
| Answermendthat’s us | Nothing to buy yet.There is no paid plan and no checkout. What is open costs nothing and takes no account. | 2 — ChatGPT and Gemini, the pair whose cost per call we have actually measured against a live key.Google’s AI Overviews is on no plan here: it has no public API, and we would rather call it unmeasurable than scrape it and present that as a measurement. | Yes, and it is the reason this business exists — but it is a rule we keep, not a thing only we do. Ahrefs publishes the same distinction. | In part, today: the generators hand you the block of text or the small file to paste in. |
Where they part company
Four differences that
change the decision.
The places where a $29 product and a $99 product answer a buyer’s question differently.
The cheaper one watches more assistants.
Otterly’s $29 plan states four: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and MS Copilot. Profound’s $99 plan is ChatGPT tracking only, with three arriving at $399.
Read the small print before you make that the deciding factor, though. Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini are add-ons on the Otterly side: their page prints $9 a month for AI Mode, $9 for Gemini and $29 for Claude, so a wider set costs more than the headline — but not much more, and that is cheap next to what the rest of this category charges for one more assistant.
otterly.ai/pricing · tryprofound.com/pricing · both read 31 August 2026
Both promise a fix. They are not the same fix.
Profound ships Agents that generate content, metered in credits, from its cheapest plan. Otterly ships smart recommendations and content briefs — guidance to work from, rather than drafted pages or generated schema.
“A fix” covers both of those, and they cost very different amounts of your time. If you want something written, one of these two writes it. If you want to know what to write, the other is a fifth of the money.
tryprofound.com/pricing · otterly.ai · both read 31 August 2026
Neither one separates being named from being linked to.
They fall short of it in different ways. Profound uses “citations” throughout with no stated separation — one blended figure. Otterly gets closer: they ship a Link Citations Analysis feature alongside brand tracking, but the copy never says that a mention without a link is a different fact.
Those are two different problems with two different fixes. Being named from a model’s memory is a reputation and entity problem; being read and linked to is a crawler and content problem. A single number covers up the one you would act on. We do not claim this as ours — Ahrefs publishes both definitions on a live page.
tryprofound.com · otterly.ai · both lines read 30 August 2026
Otterly publishes a limitation of its own tool.
On their crawler simulation they state it plainly: “It sends actual HTTP requests using the specific user-agent strings of each AI crawler, but does not check robots.txt files — it only tests how the server responds to the crawler’s user-agent.”
That is a vendor telling you what its own check does not establish, on a tool that costs nothing to run. It is the posture we think this whole category should have, and they got there first. We are not going to pretend we invented it.
geo.otterly.ai/geo/ai-crawler-simulation · read 31 August 2026
Where we lose
Where each of them
beats us.
A comparison page from a vendor that never loses a row is worth nothing to you. Here is every row we lose to these two.
Both of them can be bought today.
Ours cannot. There is no paid plan, no checkout, no sign-up. If you have a decision to make this month, we are not on the shortlist, and nothing else on this page changes that.
Otterly is the cheapest tool we track.
If all you want is a number — does AI name my business, yes or no — then $29 a month is a fair price for it, and we are not trying to win that buyer. Saying so here is cheaper for both of us than you finding it out later.
Otterly states what its own tool does not check.
The robots.txt caveat above is the single thing in this competitive set closest to the way we want to work, and it is already shipped, on a public tool, by somebody else. Being honest about a check’s limits is not a position we get to claim as ours.
Otterly watches ChatGPT advertising. We do not.
ChatGPT Ads tracking was listed on their $29 plan when we read it on 30 August, and that line is one of three here we did not re-read on the 31st. We do not do it, it is not on any roadmap we would show you, and if paid placement inside AI answers is the thing you are watching, that is a real reason to pick them.
Profound is built for a buyer we are not built for.
Seats, a security review, a vendor questionnaire, SSO/SAML, SOC2, several companies in one account. That is their end of the market and it is not ours. If that is your purchasing process, we are the wrong answer.
Profound reads answers off a harder surface.
Their own words: responses captured from the consumer experience rather than from API outputs. That is more work than reading a developer connection, and it is closer to the screen your customer is actually looking at. We read the developer connection.
The blanks
What we could not
check, and left blank.
A blank is more use to you than a guess. Here is each thing we wanted to compare, and the reason it is not in the table.
- 01Which four lines here are a day older than the rest. Every price, tier and assistant count on both sides was read on 31 August 2026. Four capability lines were not: on the Otterly side, ChatGPT Ads tracking, Link Citations Analysis and the seven-day trial with no card; on the Profound side, that “citations” is used throughout with no stated separation. Each is marked where it appears rather than dated to the freshest reading on the page. This is not fussiness — our own competitor file has had to withdraw a different vendor’s entire tier structure this week, prices included, after a summary of their pricing page turned out to describe a page that no longer existed.
- 02How often Otterly’s top plan refreshes. Their Lite and Standard bullet lists both say “daily tracking frequency”. Premium’s does not repeat it, and nothing on the page says either way. Daily is almost certainly the answer and almost certainly is not a reading, so there is no refresh row here and their Premium tier gets no frequency claim from us.
- 03What one Profound Agents credit actually buys. Their pricing page says a credit is consumed each time an Agent runs, and does not say what a run produces — a drafted page, an optimisation pass, one API call. So “100 credits a month” is a number we can repeat and not a quantity we can compare against briefs.
- 04Where either sign-up wall actually falls. Profound’s report form has exactly one input, placeholdered “Enter your website URL”, with no email, name or company field on the form itself. Otterly’s tools take a “Website URL” and the button reads “Start Crawler Simulation”, with no wording either way about signing up — and their form posts rather than putting the result on a URL, so there is no address to open and check without submitting. What happens after either submit button is unverified, because submitting a form on another company’s site is not something we will do on your behalf.
- 05How many times either one asks a question before reporting a number. Ask an AI assistant the same thing five times and you can get five different answers, so a figure from a single ask is close to meaningless. Neither company says what it does here, and read that as not stated rather than as once. Ours asks each question once rather than averaged, and one pass is not a trend.
- 06Anything at all about how the two compare on results. We have no customers, no case studies and no before-and-after, so there is no outcome column and there is not going to be a fabricated one. Every claim on this page is about what these two companies publish, on pages you can open yourself.
The other half of this comparison is the product gap rather than the price gap: Profound against Ahrefs Brand Radar puts the same platform next to a checker that costs nothing and watches six. The full eight-tool comparison has the rest.
Or skip the comparison
and just look.
Our own check asks one brand, ten questions, two assistants, no account and no email.