Profound vs Otterly: Which AI Search Visibility Tool Gives You the Edge in 2026?

If you’ve ever compared GEO tools, you’ve probably felt that moment where everything looks promising—until you realize each platform shows AI visibility in a completely different way. Teams flip between dashboards, debate which insights actually matter, and even seasoned leaders end up second-guessing whether they’re evaluating the right signals at all.

In those conversations, two names almost always rise to the top: Profound and Otterly.

Profound is known as the structured, analytics-driven option. It gives organizations a deep, organized view of how models talk about their brand and is designed for teams that want rigor, governance, and clarity in their decision-making.

Otterly has a different philosophy. It leans into speed, simplicity, and prompt-first visibility, giving marketers immediate answers without the overhead of a complex analytics stack.

Both take respected approaches—and choosing between them often comes down to classic trade-offs: depth vs. agility, ease vs. precision, cost vs. capability.

In the next section, we’ll break down these differences feature by feature so you can see which one actually fits your workflow.

And if you’re looking for a platform built to avoid those trade-offs entirely, there’s also a third option worth considering: Analyze.

Profound vs Otterly: Feature-by-feature comparison

Profound and Otterly both set out to solve the same problem: helping teams see where their brand appears across AI search engines and why. But their philosophies, depth, and workflows differ enough that the choice meaningfully shapes what your team sees—and how fast you see it.
This section begins with a quick comparison table and then breaks down each feature the way advanced GEO teams evaluate tools.

TL;DR feature comparison table

Prompt visibility & tracking

Prompt visibility is the backbone of GEO. Teams need to know which prompts trigger their brand, how often, and where competitors outrank them. This is where the two tools begin to show their philosophical differences.

Profound approaches prompt visibility with the depth of an enterprise analytics platform. Multi-region and multi-language tracking, plus historical modeling, make it easier to diagnose long-term visibility shifts. The trade-off is that insights take a bit more setup and interpretation.

Otterly prioritizes speed. Its prompt-first interface gives teams immediate clarity on how their brand appears across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot. What it gains in immediacy, it sacrifices in advanced segmentation.

Winner: Otterly — most teams benefit more from fast, prompt-first visibility than deep modeling unless they have an analyst dedicated to GEO.

Prompt suggestion & discovery

Prompt discovery is crucial because most teams only track a fraction of the actual conversational landscape. The tool that reveals real user phrasing faster usually wins the execution race.

Profound surfaces themes and question clusters inside its analytics suite. It’s strong for understanding patterns, but less direct when you want “the next 20 prompts to care about.”

Otterly converts keywords into real prompts users ask AI engines. It’s practical, fast, and built for marketers who want actionable discovery, not abstract clusters.

Winner: Otterly — it turns discovery into something teams can act on immediately.

Citation & hallucination analysis

As AI models increasingly hallucinate details, teams need to know whether mentions are correct, distorted, or fabricated. This is no longer optional for brand trust.

Profound clearly leads here. Its hallucination detection and citation accuracy scoring give teams a true signal on whether AI engines are representing their brand accurately. The only drawback is that someone must own the interpretation of those insights.

Otterly tracks basic citations reliably but doesn’t diagnose hallucinations or evaluate accuracy. It’s sufficient for surface-level monitoring but not enough for compliance-heavy brands.

Winner: Profound — it offers the only meaningful hallucination and citation intelligence between the two.

Competitive benchmarking

AI visibility doesn’t mean much in isolation. You need to know whether competitors dominate the answers that matter—and why.

Profound offers enterprise-grade benchmarking: share of voice, sentiment, multi-product tracking, and visibility modeling across entire competitive landscapes. It’s built for strategy, not just reporting. The cost is more configuration upfront.

Otterly keeps benchmarking simple. It shows which competitors appear in tracked prompts and provides quick snapshots. It’s helpful but not strategic.

Winner: Profound — its competitive modeling is significantly deeper and more actionable for teams making roadmap decisions.

AI traffic analytics

Visibility is one thing; understanding its potential impact on demand is another.

Profound includes directional AI traffic analytics that estimate how much influence certain prompts have on buying journeys. The models are early, but they give teams a valuable signal once integrated into planning.

Otterly doesn’t offer traffic analytics. Visibility stops at prompt outputs.

Winner: Profound — it’s one of the few GEO tools experimenting meaningfully with AI traffic modeling.

Usability & time to value

A tool only works if teams adopt it. Here, simplicity often wins.

Profound is extremely powerful, but teams need onboarding and workflow adaptation before unlocking its full value. Once integrated, it becomes a strong strategic asset—but it asks more of the team.

Otterly is built to be used instantly. The interface is simple, the workflows are familiar, and the insights are clear. The limitation is that this ease comes with less depth.

Winner: Otterly — its clarity and speed reduce friction for most marketing and content teams.

Pricing

Budgets matter, especially as GEO becomes a new line item for many organizations.

Profound sits in the enterprise tier. The pricing reflects its depth, compliance posture, and analytics suite. For global brands, this cost aligns with the value. For smaller teams, it’s often too steep.

Otterly is more accessible for SMBs, mid-market companies, and agencies. It’s easier to adopt early and scale without financial strain.

Winner: Otterly — it meets a wider range of teams where they are, without requiring enterprise-level investment.

If you're a modern growth team or an SMB, there's a third—and better—alternative: Analyze

Profound AI delivers enterprise-grade depth, while Otterly focuses on speed and prompt-first clarity. Both succeed in their own lanes, but they also introduce real constraints. Profound can feel heavy, expensive, and slow to adopt. Otterly is fast and intuitive, but the lack of depth becomes limiting as soon as your visibility needs grow.

Analyze was built to bridge that exact gap. It gives teams the simplicity they want with the strategic insight they need—without the complexity of an enterprise platform or the ceilings of a lightweight tracker.

Here’s how Analyze stacks up.

Comparison Table: Analyze vs Profound vs Otterly

Unified GEO stack (all features in one platform)

Most tools solve one part of the problem—visibility, analysis, or traffic. Analyze does all three. It’s built to give you total control over how LLMs describe your brand, why competitors are winning prompts, and whether those mentions actually drive traffic.

If AthenaHQ offers ease and Profound offers depth, Analyze combines both—with none of the trade-offs. It’s the only platform that gives you prompt-level intelligence across search, ranking, performance, and impact—all under one roof.

Prompt search

Most teams have no idea what ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini are saying about them until someone on the team manually checks—and by then, it’s too late. Analyze eliminates that guesswork with an instant search feature that works just like AI users think: type in a natural-language prompt, hit search, and see how your brand shows up (or doesn’t) across major models.

There’s no setup. No tracking configuration. Just real-time results from real prompts—ranked by relevance, broken down by LLM, and complete with visibility, citations, and brand positioning insights. You can run up to 100 prompt searches per month, giving you a full lens into how LLMs are shaping perception around your brand and your market.

You’ll see:

• Whether you’re mentioned—and who else is

• The top 3 brands/models per prompt

• Position, visibility score, sentiment, and citation density

• What each model is saying, side-by-side

If you're flying blind on AI perception, this is where clarity starts.

Prompt tracking

Once you’ve identified high-value prompts, you need to monitor them over time—especially for competitive, buyer-intent queries where visibility can change daily. Analyze lets you track up to 30 prompts per month (more on custom plans), running daily queries across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity to monitor changes in rank, sentiment, and citation behavior.

Each tracked prompt feeds into a real-time dashboard with:

• Position tracking by model

• Visibility % over time

• Mention deltas (e.g. dropped from top 3, replaced by X competitor)

• Citation trends and sentiment shifts

You don’t just see how you're performing—you see when and how things are changing, so you can react with speed.

Prompt suggest

Knowing what to track is just as important as knowing how you're performing. Analyze includes an AI-driven prompt suggestion engine that identifies new prompts you should be monitoring—based on your brand, competitors, and evolving model behavior.

Suggestions are ranked by relevance and visibility potential. Each includes:

• The exact prompt text

• Option to accept or reject with one click

This is live prompt mining from the actual AI search layer—showing you the questions real users (and LLMs) are shaping your category around. Whether you’re expanding coverage, filling competitive gaps, or adjusting to how models are shifting, Prompt Suggest keeps your strategy moving with the market.

Citation analysis

Knowing what to track is just as important as knowing how you're performing. Analyze includes an AI-driven prompt suggestion engine that identifies new prompts you should be monitoring—based on your brand, competitors, and evolving model behavior.

Suggestions are ranked by relevance and visibility potential. Each includes:

• The exact prompt text

• Option to accept or reject with one click

This is live prompt mining from the actual AI search layer—showing you the questions real users (and LLMs) are shaping your category around. Whether you’re expanding coverage, filling competitive gaps, or adjusting to how models are shifting, Prompt Suggest keeps your strategy moving with the market.

Citation analysis

In AI search, getting mentioned isn’t enough—how you’re mentioned matters. Are LLMs citing your content? Are they hallucinating claims about your brand? Are competitors being cited more often? Analyze provides prompt-level analysis with complete citation visibility across all tracked models, enabling you to identify competitors and develop strategies to outrank them.

Every prompt response includes:

• A list of URLs cited by each model (yours and competitors’)

• Number of citations per domain or page

• Which brands were mentioned without being cited (potential hallucinations)

• Trends in citation volume and source repetition over time

This lets you spot false claims, uncover underperforming assets, and see which content actually earns model trust. You can also correlate changes in citation patterns with visibility shifts—so when you drop in rank, you’ll know if it’s because you lost a link, not just an algorithm tweak.

No other platform makes LLM citations this transparent or actionable.

Competitive insights

If you’re being outranked in AI results, you need to know by who, where, and why. Analyze’s competitive insights module aggregates prompt-level tracking into a strategic dashboard that shows how your brand stacks up across your tracked landscape.

Key views include:

• Share of voice: Brand-level distribution of mentions across all tracked prompts

• Average rank: How your brand compares to others in model-generated lists

• Top cited competitors: Who’s earning the most citations per model

• Prompt-level displacement: Which competitor replaced you and when

You can filter all of this by model (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity), prompt category, date range, and sentiment. You’ll go from “We’re losing ground” to “We lost position 2 in X prompt to Y competitor due to citation shift”—and that kind of specificity unlocks meaningful strategy. That’s also why we built Analyze.

Profound AI vs Otterly AI vs Analyze: Which is best for you?

If you’re comparing Profound with Otterlye and wondering which one actually fits your workflow, the decision usually comes down to trade-offs. Profound AI gives you depth but demands complexity. Otterly gives you speed but caps your visibility once you scale. Most teams land somewhere in the middle—wanting the power of one without losing the usability of the other.

That’s exactly where Analyze steps in. It blends Otterly’s ease of use with the analytical strength teams look for in Profound, then adds what neither offers: real-time prompt search, smart discovery, source-level citation insights, full competitor tracking, and true AI traffic attribution. You don’t just see visibility—you see impact, movement, and revenue signals.

And here’s the takeaway: each tool solves a different problem.

Profound AI is best when:
You need enterprise-level depth and have teams who can manage complex analytics.

Otterly AI is best when:
You want something lightweight, fast to adopt, and centered on prompt visibility.

Analyze is best when:
You want a full-stack, affordable GEO platform that shows what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what to do next.

If you want clarity without trade-offs—and insights that tie AI visibility directly to traffic, conversions, and revenue—Analyze is the platform built for exactly that.
Try it now!