One is a $30 one-time diagnosis of your website. The other is a subscription that watches AI answers every day. Here’s the honest version of which you need.
These tools answer different questions. AIMention answers “why isn’t AI recommending my business, and what exactly do I fix?” — a one-time audit of your website’s AI readability with a prioritized fix list, for $30. Otterly.AI answers “is my AI visibility trending up or down, and against whom?” — ongoing daily monitoring from $29 a month.
If you run one local business and haven’t diagnosed your website yet, start with the audit. If you’re an agency or a brand that needs trend lines and competitor share-of-voice, Otterly is the better tool — and we say so below.
| AIMention | Otterly | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | One-time purchase | Subscription |
| Entry price | $30 one-time | $29 a month (Lite) |
| Cost over 12 months | $30 a report — typically $30–$60 a year (initial report, plus an optional $30 re-check after fixes) | $300–$348 first year (Lite) |
| Free option | Free score, letter grade, and gap count — no credit card, no trial clock | No free tier — 7-day free trial (no credit card) with 50 prompts |
| AI platforms | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Claude are paid add-ons, not included in base tiers |
| Ongoing monitoring | No | Yes |
| Website fix list | Prioritized Action Checklist plus a 60-day roadmap, in plain English | Monitoring and weekly recommendations (3 a week on Lite) — not a prioritized website fix list |
| Built for | Local business owners | Marketing teams, agencies, multi-brand companies |
Otterly’s pricing is honest subscription pricing, and the entry point looks cheap: Lite is $29 a month. The catch is what Lite holds back. Fifteen tracked prompts sounds like plenty until you write out what a local business actually needs — “plumber in Bartlett,” “water heater replacement near me,” “best plumber in the western suburbs,” and a dozen more service-plus-city variations. The next tier with 100 prompts is $189 a month, a six-and-a-half-times jump. And the base tiers cover four AI engines; Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons.
Over a year, Lite costs $300 to $348. That’s not a lot of money for a marketing team. It is a lot of money for a single-location business paying for a dashboard it will check twice. AIMention’s model is the opposite shape: $30, once, for the complete diagnosis — six scored dimensions, a prioritized checklist, a 60-day roadmap, and a 48-answer AI Presence Scan across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Your score is free — no credit card. The full report with every fix, prioritized, is a one-time $30.
| Otterly.AI plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Lite | $29 a month ($25 a month billed annually) | 15 search prompts, 4 base AI engines, daily tracking, 1 workspace, 1,000 GEO URL audits monthly, 3 recommendations weekly |
| Standard | $189 a month ($160 a month billed annually) | 100 prompts, unlimited workspaces, 5,000 GEO URL audits monthly, API/MCP access, Looker Studio connector |
| Premium | $489 a month ($422 a month billed annually) | 400 prompts, 10,000 GEO URL audits monthly, personal onboarding |
| Enterprise | Quote-based | Custom limits |
Otterly is genuinely better at the thing it’s built for: watching. It checks your prompts daily, charts brand mentions and link citations over time, tracks sentiment, and shows which competitors AI cites instead of you. If you make fixes and want proof they moved the needle week over week, a monitoring tool is the right instrument — an audit can’t do that. Its workspace model and Looker Studio connector also make it a legitimately good agency tool, which AIMention is not.
AIMention is better at the step that comes first: finding out what’s broken. Otterly can tell you that you didn’t appear in an AI answer; it can’t tell you that your services are buried in vague marketing copy, your address isn’t machine-readable, your site has no structured data markup, and your pages never name the towns you serve. That’s what the six-dimension audit scores, and every gap comes with a specific fix in plain English. Monitoring an unfixed website just charts a flat line at zero.
Every price, platform, and feature claim on this page was verified against the official pages listed in Sources on July 19, 2026. Where a vendor doesn’t publish a number, we say “not published” instead of guessing, and third-party estimates are labeled as such. Review themes come from the cited G2 and Capterra pages, not our opinion of a competitor.
Yes, and the order matters. An AIMention report tells you what to fix on your website so AI systems can read and recommend you; Otterly then tracks whether your visibility improves over time. Auditing first means you’re monitoring progress instead of monitoring a problem you haven’t diagnosed.
No. Otterly offers a 7-day free trial with no credit card, but there is no permanent free tier — the cheapest ongoing plan is Lite at $29 a month. AIMention’s overall score, letter grade, and gap count are free with no trial clock.
Otterly’s base tiers monitor ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, with Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Mode available as paid add-ons. AIMention’s AI Presence Scan runs 12 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude — 48 AI answers per scan.
The Lite tier runs $300 to $348 a year depending on billing, and it includes 15 tracked prompts. The Standard tier, with 100 prompts, runs about $1,920 a year billed annually. AIMention’s full report is $30 — and each report is a separate purchase, so even re-checking after your fixes puts a typical year at $60, not a subscription.
Free score in about a minute: overall AI Visibility Score, letter grade, and how many fixable gaps we found.
Check Your ScoreYour score is free — no credit card. The full report with every fix, prioritized, is a one-time $30.