OtterlyAI
Updated 2026-08-16Bootstrapped AI-search monitoring platform positioned as "Semrush for AI search," tracking brand visibility across six engines. Customers include BenQ, Videoloft, Stella Rising, and Bacula Enterprise. No outside funding, 30,000+ users. Recent releases: Agent Analytics, a redesigned Citations report, and write endpoints on its API and MCP server.
Three scores, refreshed weekly from live market signals rather than a once-a-year analyst report. Presence is how established a vendor is in the market right now. Velocity is how fast they are shipping, raising, and winning customers. Agent Readiness is how easily your own agents can build on them through an API, MCP server, SDK, or CLI. Scores are relative across the vendors we track; the raw inputs ship in the downloadable dataset.
The Solution & Approach
OtterlyAI monitors where a brand shows up in AI answers, what gets said about it, and which sites get cited across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. Its GEO Audit scores a site on 25+ on-page factors, including content, page speed, structured data, and AI readiness, then generates a prioritized fix list. The pitch is "Semrush for AI search," and the product is built to match: self-serve, cheap to start, aimed at SEO professionals rather than enterprise brand teams.
The distribution angle is the interesting part. Otterly entered the market inside an incumbent's channel instead of against it, launching in the Semrush App Center in January 2025 with single sign-on for Semrush users. It repeated the move with Storyblok, where AI search monitoring ships as a bundled Content Observability add-on for Premium and Elite customers with no separate contract, and with Press Ranger, which named Otterly its preferred AI-search tracking partner. Founded in 2024 and fully bootstrapped, it is the self-serve floor of the AEO/GEO category against venture-funded peers Profound and Peec AI.
Otterly also spends its POV budget on citation research rather than category vocabulary. Its studies found that 95% of AI search citations draw from third-party sources rather than brand-owned content, and that YouTube is the second-largest social source of AI citations at 31.8%, behind Reddit. Peham's framing: "When people search with AI, they're not clicking links anymore. They're reading answers." Since May 2026 the company has been opening the platform up, shipping a Public API, a Claude Skill, an MCP server, and a marketplace of 101+ prebuilt marketing workflows.
Best for
SEO and agency teams that want AI-search visibility data on a self-serve budget, especially anyone already living inside Semrush or Storyblok.
Pricing & trial
Self-serve from $29/month (Lite) through $189 (Standard) and $489 (Premium), with Enterprise on contact sales, no free plan, and a 7-day, 3-prompt free trial that does not require a card. otterly.ai/pricing. Pricing.
Agent Experience
How you build on this platform (or wire it into your own agents):
| Surface | Available | Docs |
|---|---|---|
| API | Yes | docs |
| MCP | No | — |
| SDK | No | — |
| CLI | No | — |
| llms.txt | No | — |
Stronger than its price band suggests: a versioned REST API with read-only and read-write keys, a live MCP server that gained write endpoints for prompt and tag management in July 2026, a packaged Claude Skill for Claude Desktop, and a marketplace of 101+ prebuilt workflows.
Reference customers
BenQ, Stella Rising, RDA, Videoloft, Bacula Enterprise, Skale, Downtown Ecommerce.
Recent moves
- 2026-08-04Shipped Agent Analytics, showing which AI agents and crawlers visit a site and which pages they reach, with data connected via file upload, webhook, Cloudflare, or a WordPress plugin. source
- 2026-07-22Redesigned the Citations report with a Top Winners and Losers view, a bookmark feature for flagging cited URLs, and a Citations Over Time chart. source
- 2026-07-21Added prompt and tag management endpoints to the REST API and MCP server, so developers can create, update, and delete prompts programmatically instead of through the dashboard. source
- 2026-06-25Added Query Fan-Out to the GEO Audit tool, surfacing the related, implicit-intent, and comparative queries engines expand from a single prompt, each taggable as a monitored prompt. source
- 2026-06-24Became headline sponsor of BrightonSEO San Diego 2026, its first major US conference sponsorship, with North America now 47% of a 30,000+ user base. source
- 2026-06-01Formalized the Public API and Claude Skill and launched a Marketplace of 101+ production-tested marketing workflows covering visibility checks, share-of-voice comparisons, citation gap analysis, and GEO audits. source
Company, Financials & Funding History
Founded in 2024 in Vienna, Austria by Thomas Peham (CEO, formerly VP Marketing at Storyblok and first growth hire at Usersnap), Josef Trauner (former Usersnap CEO), and Klaus-M. Schremser (former Usersnap head of growth, who runs the GroWTF incubator that backed Otterly). Trauner and Schremser sold Usersnap to saas.group in 2023. The company remains fully bootstrapped with no outside funding sought, and went from 1,000 users at its December 2024 stealth exit to 10,000 by September 2025 and 30,000+ by May 2026.
Analyst placement
Named one of five vendors in the 2025 Gartner Cool Vendors in AI for Marketing report. Placed 10th on G2's Rookies of the Year in the 2026 Best New Software Awards, the only AEO vendor in the overall top 10. Won Best AI Search Software Solution at the European Search Awards 2026.