The Otterly.AI alternative that measures AI visibility honestly, inside your analytics

Name: BusinessMCP
Brand: BusinessMCP

Otterly is the cheapest way to start tracking AI search; BusinessMCP is the way to know whether the number you are looking at actually moved.

Try BusinessMCP free How we do ai visibility

Free plan available · No credit card

Price: Otterly: $29 (15 prompts) / $189 (100) / $489 (400) per month, Gemini + AI Mode extra; enterprise from $1,000 · BusinessMCP: free AI recall, grounded engines from $79/mo
Switching gets you: Five grounded engines with Wilson intervals, share of voice, cited domains, AI-crawler hits and AI-referral traffic in one first-party analytics + CRM platform.
Stay with Otterly.AI if: You want the lowest entry price, daily runs, hundreds of prompts, Copilot coverage or an API/MCP on a paid tier; Otterly delivers those and we do not.

Feature comparison — pricing verified September 2026. Sources: public pricing pages + published teardowns.
	BusinessMCP	Otterly.AI
Entry price	Free (AI recall); grounded engines from $79/mo	$29/mo (15 prompts)
Engines measured (web-grounded)	Up to 5: AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude	4 included (ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot); Gemini, AI Mode, Claude as add-ons
Web-grounded probes (not model recall)	Yes, from Growth ($79); Free/Starter = AI recall only	Yes, all tiers, daily
Confidence intervals on every rate	95% Wilson interval, always shown	No
Share of voice vs tracked competitors	Yes	Competitor comparison
Cited third-party domains list	Yes	Yes
AI-crawler hit tracking (GPTBot, ClaudeBot...)	Yes	No
Bundled with analytics + CRM + AI business analyst	Yes	No

The full picture

Otterly.AI is the accessible entry point in AI search monitoring. Its Lite plan is $29 per month for 15 prompts, Standard is $189 for 100 and Premium $489 for 400, with enterprise from $1,000; annual billing takes about 15% off. Every plan tracks ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot daily, while Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude are paid add-ons priced per plan. It is a focused, well-liked tool, and for a solo marketer who wants to see AI mentions this week it is hard to argue with.

BusinessMCP is a different shape of product. AI visibility is one module of a first-party analytics, CRM and AI-analyst platform, so the citation rate sits beside the AI-crawler hits and the AI-assistant referrals in your traffic. Grounded engines are included per plan rather than sold as add-ons (Growth $79: AI Overviews + Gemini; Scale $199 adds Perplexity + ChatGPT; Business $499 adds Claude), and every rate carries a 95% confidence interval. You track fewer questions — 15 to 40 — measured weekly with several samples each, and you give up Copilot, daily cadence and Otterly’s prompt volume.

Why teams switch

Gemini and AI Mode are not extras

On Otterly, Gemini and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons on top of the plan price, and Claude is an add-on too. BusinessMCP includes Google AI Overviews and Gemini from Growth, and Claude on Business, with nothing bolted on afterwards.

A number you can trust at small sample sizes

Fifteen prompts checked once a day produce a rate that swings with every run. BusinessMCP samples each question several times per engine per week and prints the 95% Wilson interval beside the rate; a change is only called conclusive when the intervals separate.

From citation to visit

Otterly stops at the answer. BusinessMCP is also your web analytics, so the same dashboard shows GPTBot and ClaudeBot crawling your pages, the AI channel referrals those citations produce, and which companies those visitors were — with the AI business analyst able to reason across all of it.

Competitors mined from the engines themselves

When an engine answers "best X for Y" it names the vendors it recommends instead of you. BusinessMCP reads the answers it already paid for and proposes those brands as competitors, so share of voice is measured against the rivals that actually appear.

Real data, not a mockup

What it looks like in BusinessMCP

Recorded on our own site, PII scrubbed — the same product you get on the free plan.

app.businessmcp.com/insights

Today's insights

4 from the daily analysis · Sep 22

Risk

Visitors are getting frustrated on /

17% of clicks on / are rage or dead clicks (32 of 184, 6 people) — a sign of broken, unresponsive or misleading UI.

Ask the analyst

Opportunity

18 "striking distance" keywords to win

You rank on page 1–2 (pos 5–20) for 18 queries with real impressions — e.g. "skills directory" at position 11. Small on-page moves could push these into the top 3.

Opportunity

HubSpot is cited 26 points more often than you

Across your tracked prompts, AI answers name HubSpot in 48% of grounded answers vs your 22% — and 1 other tracked brand also out-rank you. The sources those answers cite are the fastest lever.

Anomaly

Visitors jumped 58%

visitors moved from 118 to 186 week-over-week.

Runs every morning, on every plan. Real cards from our own workspace.

Otterly.AI pricing, broken down

Plan	Price	Notes
Lite	$29/mo	15 prompts; ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot; daily
Standard	$189/mo	100 prompts; same four engines; API + MCP access on paid tiers
Premium	$489/mo	400 prompts; 100-prompt add-on packs $99/mo
Gemini / AI Mode / Claude	Add-on, priced per plan	teardowns cite roughly $9–$149/mo per engine depending on tier
Enterprise	From $1,000/mo	SSO, custom prompt tracking, dedicated CSM
BusinessMCP Growth / Scale / Business	$79 / $199 / $499/mo	2 / 4 / 5 grounded engines included, 15 / 25 / 40 questions, weekly, month-to-month

Otterly’s pricing page renders client-side; tiers are cross-checked against two published teardowns from August 2026. Annual billing is about 15% less. BusinessMCP Free and Starter report AI recall, not a citation rate.

Where BusinessMCP is NOT the right choice

An alternatives page you can trust has to cut both ways. Honestly:

We measure five answer engines at most (Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude). Profound’s enterprise tier tracks up to nine platforms and Scrunch adds Meta AI; nobody, including us, can probe Copilot or Bing since Microsoft retired those APIs in 2025.
We measure weekly, not daily. Profound Growth, Otterly and Semrush’s toolkit re-run prompts every day. If you need to see a change within 24 hours of shipping a page, they are faster.
Sample sizes on the cheaper plans are small, so the intervals are wide. Zero mentions in five Gemini answers still leaves a 95% upper bound near 28% — we print that interval instead of a false-precision "0%", which some people find less satisfying than a single number.
We do not estimate prompt volume. Ahrefs Brand Radar ranks prompts against a 475M-prompt database and Semrush ships prompt research; we tell you whether you are cited for the questions you chose to track, not how often people ask them.
There is no AEO content writer or page-recommendation engine here. We surface the third-party domains the engines cite so you know where to earn placements; writing the content is on you.
Free and Starter measure AI recall only — whether a model knows the brand from training data — because those plans include no web-grounded engine. A grounded citation rate starts on Growth, or on any plan once you connect your own OpenAI, Gemini or Anthropic key.
API answers are not what a person sees in the chat UI (published overlap studies put brand agreement well under 100%). Every tool in this category has that caveat; we label the numbers directional rather than pretend otherwise.

Frequently asked questions

Is BusinessMCP cheaper than Otterly.AI?

Not at the entry. Otterly Lite is $29 per month; BusinessMCP’s first grounded plan is Growth at $79. BusinessMCP includes Gemini and AI Overviews rather than selling them as add-ons, and the $79 also buys first-party analytics, a CRM and the AI business analyst — so the comparison depends on whether you want a visibility tool or a platform.

Does BusinessMCP track Microsoft Copilot like Otterly?

No. Microsoft retired the Copilot and Bing APIs in August 2025, so any Copilot number is produced by driving the UI. We chose not to; Otterly includes Copilot on every plan, so if that surface matters to you it is a real reason to stay.

Why does BusinessMCP show a range instead of one percentage?

Because a rate measured from ten answers is uncertain, and pretending otherwise leads to reacting to noise. We compute a 95% Wilson interval, which stays sensible even at zero mentions, and pool across engines by trials rather than averaging percentages.

Can I track more than 40 questions?

Not on self-serve plans (Free 5, Starter 8, Growth 15, Scale 25, Business 40); Enterprise is unlimited. Otterly’s Premium tracks 400 prompts and sells 100-prompt packs, so for wide prompt coverage it is the stronger choice.

Other honest alternatives

Peec AI

EU-built self-serve tiers from €70/mo billed annually, three engines of your choice.

Compare

Profound

The enterprise standard: $99–$399/mo billed yearly, custom above that.

Compare

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Prompt-volume data from a 475M-prompt index, from $199/mo.

Compare

How to migrate

1
Keep Otterly Lite running if $29 buys you daily reassurance; the two do not conflict and BusinessMCP’s free plan already measures AI recall.
2
Move your best unbranded prompts into BusinessMCP (15 on Growth); leave the branded ones behind — they measure recall, not recommendation.
3
Install the tracking script so the AI-crawler and AI-referral panels fill; that is the half of the picture Otterly cannot show.
4
After two weekly cycles, compare the cited-domain lists — they should largely agree, and the differences are where the sampling shows.

Sources & verification

Every price on this page traces to a public source, last verified September 15, 2026. Spotted a change? Tell us and we'll re-verify.

Keep reading

AI visibility: what we measure and how Generative engine optimization (GEO), explained AI visibility metrics that actually mean something How to get cited by ChatGPT Grade your site’s AI readiness (free tool)

Companies running MCP servers with us

Makers and companies publishing a server in the BusinessMCP directory.

34M+ companies in our database 165 tools on one MCP endpoint Custom MCP servers over your systems Cookieless & GDPR-first Security code published (MIT)

Browse the directory

Test it on your own traffic — free

Install one cookieless script next to Otterly.AI and compare on your own numbers. Free plan, no credit card, cancel anytime — the opposite of an annual contract.

Get started free

Free plan available · No credit card