tobecited vs Otterly.ai
Otterly.ai starts at $29 a month, and Claude and Gemini are not in that price — both are paid add-ons. The four assistants tobecited checks on every plan cost $67 a month there, against $19 here. Otterly does track more buyer questions on its entry plan: 15 against our 10.
Where these numbers come from
Otterly figures were read from its own pricing page on August 28, 2026. Ours are printed from the plan catalogue this site runs on — the same file the billing system enforces — so the number in this table and the number on your invoice cannot drift apart. A dash means the vendor does not publish that figure.
| Compared on | tobecited Pro — $19/mo | Otterly Lite — $29/mo |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $19 (€17) | $29, or $25 paid annually |
| Assistants included at that price | All 4: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity — on every plan, free check included | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot |
| Price for the four assistants we check | $19 — nothing to add | $67 — Lite $29 + Claude add-on $29 + Gemini add-on $9 |
| Buyer questions per run | 10 | 15ahead of us |
| Answers per month at that price | 160 — 10 questions × 4 assistants × 4 weekly runs | — |
| Free check without a card | Yes — 3 questions × 4 assistants = 12 answers | No free tier |
| Competitors tracked by name | 3 on Pro, 5 on Max | — |
| Ready-to-publish fixes | Yes — llms.txt, schema markup, titles, FAQ blocks | No — monitoring only |
| Biggest published plan | Max $99 (€89) — 5 sites, 800 answers/mo | Premium $489 — 400 questions. Enterprise from $1,000ahead of us |
Cells marked "ahead of us" are the ones where the other tool wins.
What $29 covers, and what Claude and Gemini cost on top
Otterly Lite at $29 a month covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, with 15 tracked questions. Claude is a paid add-on: $29 on Lite, $109 on Standard, $439 on Premium. Gemini and Google AI Mode are further add-ons, priced between $9 and $149 depending on the plan.
So the panel this site runs — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity — costs $29 + $29 + $9 = $67 a month at Otterly entry level. That is the one number worth taking away from this page. It is not a discount argument: it is the same four assistants, priced two ways.
Annual billing takes 15% off the plans themselves — $25, $160 and $422 for Lite, Standard and Premium. The add-on prices quoted above are the monthly ones.
Why the assistant list decides more than the question count
A tracked question is worth what the assistant answering it is worth to you. If your buyers ask Claude and the tool does not check Claude, then 15 questions across the assistants it does check will never show you that gap. It will show a clean report and a blind spot in the same picture.
tobecited runs one panel for everyone: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, on every plan, including the free check. It is not a display option you switch on — it is how the audit is built, which is also why we cannot sell you Copilot or Google AI Overviews coverage. Those surfaces are not in our panel at all.
The trade is visible in the table: our entry plan asks 10 questions where Otterly Lite asks 15, and answers all of them on four assistants where Lite answers them on four different ones.
What each tool does after the report
Otterly is a monitoring product. It shows where you are named and where you are not, and that is where it stops — the work of changing anything is yours.
tobecited generates the files: an llms.txt, schema markup for pages that lack it, rewritten titles, and FAQ blocks built from the questions the assistants were actually asked. You download them and publish them; we do not deploy anything to your site.
We are careful about what we claim for those files. Nobody has shown at scale that publishing an llms.txt or a schema block causes an assistant to cite you. What they do is make a page unambiguous to a machine about what your business is and who it serves. That is a precondition, not a promise.
Where Otterly is ahead
Question volume, and it is not close at the top of the range. Otterly Lite tracks 15 questions to our 10, Premium tracks 400 for $489, and there is an Enterprise tier above that. If you need breadth of questions on one brand more than breadth of assistants, Otterly gives you more of it per dollar at every level.
Coverage we simply do not have: Otterly monitors Copilot and Google AI Overviews. We check neither, and no add-on on our side fixes that. If Microsoft or Google AI Overviews is where your buyers are, Otterly sees a surface we are blind to.
Otterly has also been in the market longer and is named in AI answers about this category more often than we are — including in answers to questions about us. We know because we run the same audit on our own domain that we sell.
Check your own site before you pick a tool
No card. Four assistants. The report is yours whether you buy anything or not.
What this comparison is not
- This is not a claim that Otterly is a weaker product. It monitors two surfaces we do not touch at all — Copilot and Google AI Overviews — and it tracks more questions on every plan than we do.
- We are not promising that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity will start recommending you. We measure what they answer today and hand you the changes worth making.
- These prices are a snapshot, not a live feed. Otterly figures were read from its pricing page on August 28, 2026 and can change without notice.
- Only published plans are compared. Enterprise pricing on either side is negotiated per customer and is not in this table.
Questions buyers ask before switching
- How much does Otterly.ai cost with Claude and Gemini included?
- $67 a month at entry level: Lite at $29, the Claude add-on at $29 and the Gemini add-on at $9. Higher up the range the Claude add-on is $109 on Standard and $439 on Premium. Prices read from Otterly's pricing page on August 28, 2026.
- Does Otterly.ai have a free plan?
- No free tier as of August 28, 2026. tobecited runs a free check with no card: 3 buyer questions across all 4 assistants, 12 answers, plus a readiness report on your site.
- Which tool tracks more buyer questions?
- Otterly. Its $29 Lite plan tracks 15 questions, our $19 Pro plan tracks 10, and Otterly Premium goes to 400. If question count is what you are buying, Otterly gives you more of it.
- Which assistants does tobecited check that Otterly charges extra for?
- Claude and Gemini. Both are in every tobecited plan, including the free check. At Otterly both are add-ons billed on top of the plan price, at $29 and $9 respectively on the Lite tier.
- Can I move my Otterly history into tobecited?
- No. No tool in this category imports another one’s answer history, and a series stitched together from two different question sets and two different methods would not be comparable anyway. Start a fresh series here and keep the old one as reference.
- Which one suits an agency better?
- It depends on which way your work scales. Otterly scales by questions on a single brand. tobecited Max monitors 5 sites for $99 a month with 5 named competitors each. Count sites if you run many small clients; count questions if you run one large brand deeply.