Profound vs Otterly AI: Plans, Engines, Data and Fit in 2026

If you searched for a "profound ai otterly ai comparison", here is the summary. Profound sells custom-priced Enterprise packages after a free seven-day trial, tracks up to nine AI engines daily, and adds prompt-demand data and content agents. OtterlyAI publishes prices from $29 a month, includes four engines with three more as paid add-ons, and pairs daily tracking with audits and recommendations.

This comparison uses each company's pricing, product and help pages, plus the comparison page each publishes about the other, with prices and features as published in October 2026. Prime AI Visibility publishes this site, competes with both, and appears later with its own limitations.

Profound AI Otterly AI comparison: the short answer

• Choose Profound if AI search is a program of its own and you want daily tracking on up to nine engines, prompt-demand estimates, AI crawler and referral analytics, content agents, SOC 2 compliance and SSO in one contract bought through sales.
• Choose OtterlyAI if you want published prices, a self-serve start, monitoring with audits and recommendations, and engines you add one at a time. Seats are unlimited on every plan, and workspaces are unlimited from Standard.
• On data collection: both say they read answers from the consumer apps rather than from APIs. Otterly's help centre adds one exception: it uses an API for Claude.
• On prompt demand: Profound models prompt volumes from licensed panel conversations. Otterly gives an Estimated Intent Score instead. Neither is a count of real questions.
• On the vendors' comparison pages: most of Profound's claims about Otterly match Otterly's own pages. Several of Otterly's claims about Profound describe plans that Profound's pricing page does not show.

Who the two companies are

Profound. Profound was founded in August 2024 and is headquartered in New York. In September 2026 it raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, which the New York Business Journal also reported. It sells Answer Engine Insights, Prompt Volumes, Agent Analytics, ChatGPT Shopping tracking and Agents, coordinated by an orchestrating agent called AI Marketer, or Aim. Our review of Profound's products and company covers each one.

OtterlyAI. OtterlyAI, also written Otterly.AI, is based in Vienna, Austria, and was founded by Thomas Peham, its CEO, Josef Trauner and Klaus-M. Schremser. Its About page says the idea came in 2024 and that 40,000 marketing professionals were using the product by August 2026, which is the company's own figure, and that Gartner named it a 2025 Cool Vendor in AI in Marketing. In December 2024, TechCrunch reported that Otterly was leaving stealth after passing 1,000 users, described Profound as its New York-based competitor, and quoted Peham saying the company would not seek external funding.

If the category is new to you, start with our explainer on what these tools measure.

Plans, prices and engines on the same checks

Each row applies the same check to both vendors, using each vendor's pricing page.

Check	Profound	Otterly
Entry price	Quote	$29/mo
Free trial	7 days	7 days
Trial prompts	50, fixed	50
Plan prompts	Custom	15 to 400
Engines	Up to 9	4 plus 3
Claude	Enterprise	Paid extra
Cadence	Daily	Daily
Seats	No cap	No cap
Demand data	Volumes	Intent score
Crawler data	All plans	From $189
API	Enterprise	From $189
SOC 2	Listed	Roadmap
SSO	Enterprise	Enterprise

Notes:

• Profound. The trial runs 50 prompts daily for seven days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, from a recommended prompt set that its pricing FAQ says cannot be customized. It includes one language, one region, five Prompt Volumes searches and limited AI Marketer credits, with no history, exports, API or support. Enterprise is custom-priced and adds all-time history, CSV and JSON exports, an API, SSO and SOC 2 compliance, and ChatGPT Shopping. Both plans include unlimited seats.
• OtterlyAI. Lite is $29 a month for 15 prompts, Standard $189 for 100 and Premium $489 for 400, or $25, $160 and $422 a month billed annually. Enterprise is custom from 1,000 prompts and adds SSO, a quarterly GEO Health Check and a dedicated customer success manager. Every plan includes ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, unlimited team members, countries and languages, and daily tracking. Google AI Mode and Gemini cost $9, $59 or $149 a month each on Lite, Standard and Premium, and Claude costs $29, $109 or $439. Extra prompts cost $99 per 100.
• OtterlyAI by plan. Lite has one workspace and three recommendations a week. Standard adds unlimited workspaces and recommendations, API and MCP access, Agent Analytics and a Looker Studio connector. The trial lasts seven days without a card and includes 50 prompts, 100 GEO audit URLs, API and MCP calls and Agent Analytics events, according to Otterly's help centre.

Both vendors' pages vary on engines. Otterly's alternatives pages say "up to 6" engines, its features page says it tracks "all 7 major AI search engines" including Claude, and its pricing page includes four and sells three as add-ons. Profound's pricing page and its Answer Engine Insights FAQ each list nine engines, but not the same nine: the pricing page names Exa Search, and the FAQ names Grok in its place. Ask each vendor which engines your contract covers.

Methodology note: this is a comparison of public specifications, not measured product performance. It draws on each company's pricing, product, help and comparison pages plus independent press coverage, and where a vendor's own pages disagree, both figures are reported. Affiliation: Prime AI Visibility competes with both vendors, and it has a commercial relationship with Percepture and Pyra, which appear near the end.

How each tool collects AI answers

The collection method decides what a score can tell you, so settle it before comparing numbers.

Profound says it queries "the front-end experiences that normal users see" on each AI platform rather than making API calls, and that it runs every tracked prompt daily so a visibility score reflects an average across responses.

OtterlyAI's help centre says it posts prompts through each AI platform's public website, such as chatgpt.com, rather than through APIs, monitors every prompt daily, and queries each prompt from the country you assign to it. It adds one exception: "we only use API for Claude tracking."

In our judgement, the two are closer on method than either sales pitch suggests, and Profound's own comparison calls Otterly's collection the "same methodology as Profound". The difference is Claude: Otterly reads it through an API, so its Claude answers may name different sources than the Claude app shows. Ask both vendors how many times each prompt runs per day, from which locations, and whether answers come from logged-in or logged-out sessions.

Prompt research: two kinds of estimate

Both vendors help you decide which prompts to track, and each attaches a different kind of demand figure.

• Profound Prompt Volumes. Profound says it licenses conversations from double-opt-in consumer panels, at "hundreds of millions of prompts per month", and models volumes to reflect the full population. Its comparison page cites a dataset of more than 2 billion prompts. The trial includes five searches.
• Otterly's AI Prompt Research. Otterly generates prompts from a seed topic, brand, URL or Google Search Console keywords, groups them by intent and funnel stage, and attaches an Estimated Intent Score. Its feature page says it built that score because "OpenAI doesn't disclose Prompt Volume data directly". A query fan-out tool shows the sub-queries an engine may generate from one prompt.

Profound's comparison describes Otterly's suggestions as converted SEO keywords with AI-generated "Intent Volume" estimates rather than counts from real conversations.

In our judgement, both are estimates. Profound's starts from panel conversations and scales them up; Otterly's is a directional score. Neither tells you how often your exact question was asked in an AI assistant. Use either to choose which questions to track first, then judge progress by the answers to the questions you track.

What each platform measures

Profound. Answer Engine Insights reports visibility scores, share of voice, sentiment, keyword themes and citation sources, and the pricing FAQ adds ranking and competitive presence. Agent Analytics tracks AI crawler visits and AI-sourced traffic through integrations with Akamai, AWS, Cloudflare, Fastly, Google Analytics, Google Cloud Platform, Netlify, Vercel and WordPress, on both plans.

OtterlyAI. Brand reports show brand mentions, share of voice, brand coverage, a Brand Visibility Index, sentiment, and the domains and URLs that answers cite, with daily changes in link position. Agent Analytics, launched on August 13, 2026, reads server logs through file upload, a webhook, Cloudflare, Netlify or a WordPress plugin, and groups visits into on-demand fetchers, search-index crawlers and training crawlers. Otterly also tracks ads and shopping cards in ChatGPT and Google ads inside AI Overviews.

The five AI visibility signals

Each signal moves on its own, so it helps to see which product covers which:

1. Mention (the answer names the brand): both.
2. Citation (the answer links your site or a source about you): both, with citation sources at Profound and link-position tracking at Otterly.
3. Recommendation (the answer suggests your brand over others): Profound reports ranking and sentiment. Otterly's sentiment analysis asks whether a brand is "recommended enthusiastically, mentioned with caveats, or dismissed outright", which comes closest. Read the answer text either way.
4. Referral (someone clicks through to your site): Profound's Agent Analytics tracks AI-sourced traffic and attribution. Otterly's Agent Analytics page lists AI referral tracking alongside crawler data.
5. Conversion (the visit becomes a lead or sale): Profound says key events and revenue appear in the same view as crawler and citation data. Otterly's launch post lists connecting AI referral traffic "all the way to signups and revenue" as a next step, so it is not in the product yet. Confirm what reaches your CRM with either tool.

Agents, content and integrations

This is where the two products differ most.

Profound. AI Marketer proposes projects from Profound's data, and Agents carry them out, with a person approving each accepted project. Agent templates span content, research, optimization, reporting and outreach. Agents run on credits: the trial includes limited credits, the self-serve Agency Growth plan mentioned in the pricing FAQ includes 400 credits per client workspace a month, and larger allowances need an Enterprise package.

OtterlyAI. Otterly diagnoses and recommends rather than writing inside the product. Every plan includes crawlability and content audits, GEO URL audits (1,000 a month on Lite, 5,000 on Standard and 10,000 on Premium) and recommendations drawn from brand report data. In June 2026 it launched a public API, a Claude Skill and a Marketplace of more than 100 workflows, many of which connect to Claude or n8n, and it now lists an MCP server. A separate free tools site includes a content creator and a landing page creator.

In our judgement, the split is about who writes. Profound builds content production into the subscription and charges for it in credits. Otterly tells your team what to fix and leaves the writing to people or to workflows you run elsewhere. Count units carefully: Otterly's "5,000 articles" claim refers to the Standard plan's audits of existing pages, while Profound's Agents create or refresh content.

Claim check: what each vendor says about the other

This table is the original analysis in this comparison. Profound publishes "Profound vs. Otterly: Which platform is right for your brand?", dated May 15, 2026 and written by Nick Lafferty; it already describes Otterly's August 2026 Agent Analytics launch, so it has been revised since. Otterly publishes an undated page presenting itself as the best alternative to Profound. The table checks claims each makes about the rival against the rival's own pages.

Claim	Made by	Rival's page says
Reads live apps	Profound	Not Claude
No panel data	Profound	Matches
No agent built in	Profound	Matches
No public SOC 2	Profound	Matches
Revenue link planned	Profound	Matches
$399 per 100 prompts	Otterly	No price
3 engines on Growth	Otterly	Up to 9
1 to 3 seats	Otterly	No cap
3 articles a month	Otterly	Credits
Tracking only	Otterly	Has agents

Notes, row by row:

• Reads live apps. Profound's page says Otterly uses front-end data collection, the "same methodology as Profound". Otterly's help centre agrees for every engine except Claude, which it tracks through an API.
• No panel data. Profound says Otterly has no real user prompt data and turns SEO keywords into prompts. Otterly's Prompt Research page describes generated prompts with an Estimated Intent Score and a Search Console workflow, not panel data.
• No agent built in. Profound says Otterly's recommendations wait for a person and that drafts come from a standalone GEO Content Creator or Marketplace agents. Otterly's pages describe recommendations, audits and briefs in the app, with content creation on its free tools site and agent workflows in the Marketplace and Claude Skill.
• No public SOC 2. Otterly's compliance article, dated June 18, 2026, says its SOC 2 Type II audit is "an item on our roadmap but no date has been set". Its Enterprise plan lists "Enterprise-grade compliance" and SSO. Profound's page lists SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA for itself.
• Revenue link planned. Profound says connecting agent activity and AI referral traffic to signups and revenue is on Otterly's roadmap. Otterly's Agent Analytics launch post lists it as a next step.
• $399 per 100 prompts. Otterly says Profound charges $399 for 100 prompts. Profound's pricing page shows a free trial and custom Enterprise packages, and its FAQ mentions a self-serve Agency Growth plan without a price. Otterly's figure may describe an earlier plan, so ask Profound for a quote.
• 3 engines on Growth. Otterly says Profound's Growth plan is limited to three engines. Profound's trial covers three, no Growth plan appears on its pricing page, and Enterprise lists up to nine.
• 1 to 3 seats. Otterly says Profound limits seats. Profound's pricing FAQ says both of its plans include unlimited seats.
• 3 articles a month. Otterly says Profound caps content optimization at three articles a month, against Otterly's 5,000. Profound's pricing page lists no article cap; Agents run on credits. Otterly's 5,000 is the Standard plan's GEO URL audits, a different unit.
• Tracking only. Otterly's FAQ says Profound "provides citation tracking only". Profound's pricing page lists Agents, AI Marketer and Profound Sheets on both plans.

One more of Otterly's claims holds: Profound limits languages and countries outside Enterprise, and its trial lists one of each. Both pages may have been accurate when written, and plans change quickly. Treat any vendor's comparison, including this one, as a list of points to confirm in a trial or demo.

A side-by-side evaluation plan

Both vendors offer a seven-day trial, so a parallel test is practical if you start both in the same week:

1. Write your prompts first. List 20 to 50 questions buyers ask, grouped by product and persona, and keep the exact text outside both tools.
2. Note the trial differences. Profound's trial uses a recommended prompt set you cannot edit, so record where it overlaps your list. Otterly's trial includes 50 prompts.
3. Fix the engines. Compare ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, which Profound's trial and every Otterly plan include.
4. Fix the market. Use the same country and language in both.
5. Save evidence. Screenshot five full answers with cited URLs in each tool, since Profound's trial has no exports, and export Otterly's results to CSV.
6. Test variance. Note how far each score moves across the seven days for the same prompts.
7. Price your real plan. For Otterly, add the engines you need, extra prompt packs and agency partner status. For Profound, ask for a quote covering prompts, engines, credits and history.
8. Ask for security documents. Request Profound's SOC 2 report and Otterly's current security documentation if your procurement team needs them.

The guide on how to choose an AI visibility tool explains each evaluation axis in more depth.

Who each tool fits

Profound is a likely fit for:

• Enterprise and mid-market brands that want tracking, prompt-demand research, AI traffic analytics and content agents in one contract.
• Teams that need DeepSeek, Exa Search or Google AI Mode in a daily program, or need SOC 2 and SSO from the vendor.
• Teams that want agents to draft and refresh content from the same data, with a person approving each project.

OtterlyAI is a likely fit for:

• Solo marketers and small teams that want published prices from $29 a month and a trial without a card.
• Agencies that want unlimited workspaces, pitch workspaces, Looker Studio reports and the agency partner program, which raises Standard to 150 prompts and Premium to 500.
• Teams that want monitoring, audits and recommendations, and prefer to write content themselves or through their own Claude or n8n workflows.

Weaker fit for either: teams that only need saved evidence for a small set of buyer questions and do not plan to use agents, audits or traffic analytics. For a wider shortlist, see our guide to AI visibility tools for B2B companies, or our four-tool comparison table, which adds Peec AI.

Where Prime AI Visibility fits

Prime AI Visibility is an AI visibility tracker for teams that want to run a smaller set of saved buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and an AI Overview-style preview, then read every saved answer with the brands named and the links shown. It reports Brand named, Website cited, Source links and Explicit recommendation, each defined on the metrics page.

The Prime AI Visibility features include an AI Search Predictor that finds questions worth pursuing and a Content Studio that drafts source-enriched pages as files, with nothing published without approval. Flash is free each month for five questions across ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, with up to 15 answers and no card. Starter is $69 a month for all five, and the pricing page lists every plan.

Limitations: Prime AI does not report sentiment, rank, AI crawler visits, traffic or conversions, so referral and conversion data must come from your analytics. It has no prompt-volume data, no auto-publishing and no ad tracking. It checks monthly by default, with weekly, temporary daily and on-demand checks on paid plans, and does not track Microsoft Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI or Google AI Mode. PyraBuilds' Prime AI agent profile describes the product in Pyra's agent catalogue.

When the next job is implementation

An AI visibility tool, whether Profound, OtterlyAI or another, shows where a brand stands and suggests fixes. Earning coverage on the publications, forums and review sites that answers cite, and fixing technical problems across a site, is still work for people.

If you want a partner for that work, Percepture, founded in 2004 and Inc. 5000-recognized, offers generative engine optimization services and, for site-wide technical work, enterprise SEO services. Fit: a team that wants SEO, GEO, digital PR and content aimed at the sources AI answers cite, done by people. Limitation: Percepture is a services firm, not a tracking platform, so it pairs with a tool rather than replacing one. Prime AI has a commercial relationship with Percepture.

Teams that like running workflows outside the dashboard, as Otterly's Marketplace does, can also look at Pyra's AI agents for marketing and sales, which include human-approved content operations agents. Pyra is also commercially connected to Prime AI.