Alternatives · researched 15 September 2026
By Advik Jain, Co-founder & CEO, Optivus Technologies · Published 12 September 2026 · Updated 15 September 2026
Otterly.AI is the low-cost daily tracker to beat, so teams that leave usually want more engines included or help acting on what it finds. We list the alternatives in the order our published scoring rules put them, with Veritas, our product, scored by the same rules.
If daily monitoring for everyone is the whole job, stay with Otterly.AI. Move when you need Claude, Gemini or AI Mode without add-ons, or want the tracker to help write the fix.
Ordered by the score our published rules calculate, with Otterly.AI included for reference. Veritas is ours, is scored by the same rules, and sits where they put it.
| Tool | Best for | From | Engines | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frase | Writers who want tracking inside a drafting tool | $49/mo | At least 1 of 7 | 74 |
| VeritasOurs | Teams that want the tracker to open straight into a cited draft | ₹20,000/mo | 5 of 7 | 68 |
| Semrush | Teams that want AI tracking beside a full SEO suite | $199/mo | At least 5 of 7 | 68 |
| Scrunch | Seven engines included, with persona benchmarks | $300/mo | 6 of 7 | 67 |
| Otterly.AI The tool you are comparing against | Teams that want daily, low-cost AI answer monitoring for everyone on the team, and do the content work elsewhere. | $29/mo | 4 of 7, +3 add-ons | 61 |
| AthenaHQ | Free to start, with 11 models on the first paid plan | Free plan | 5 of 7 | 57 |
| Profound | Enterprises that outgrow monitoring | $99/mo | 1 of 7 | 48 |
From is the cheapest published plan that tracks AI answers, with any add-on that tracking requires. Veritas bills in rupees, excluding GST; everything else is in US dollars as each vendor publishes it.
Want the tracker to help write the fix?
Veritas opens each gap into an editor that drafts from your own documents, with every knowledge-based claim cited, and tracks Claude and Gemini on the same plan.
On the cheapest plan that tracks AI answers. Most vendors list more engines than that plan includes, so this is what you get at the price shown, not the brochure maximum.
| Tool and plan | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity | AI Overviews | AI Mode | Copilot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Frase Starter | Included | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | unclear | unclear | Not on this plan |
VeritasOurs Content + SEO Premium | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Not on this plan | Not on this plan |
Semrush Starter | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | unclear | unclear |
Scrunch Starter | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Not on this plan |
Otterly.AI Lite | Included | add-on | add-on | Included | Included | add-on | Included |
AthenaHQ Essential (free) | Included | Not on this plan | Included | Included | Included | Not on this plan | Included |
Profound Starter | Included | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan | Not on this plan |
A tick is included. Add-on means an extra monthly fee. Pick means you choose a limited number of platforms. Unclear means the vendor’s wording does not say.
The cheapest published plan that fits each team, over twelve months, with seat fees and required add-ons. Where no published plan fits, the note says why instead of guessing.
| Tool | One marketer, one brand1 seat, 50 tracked prompts, 1 brand | Team of five, one brand5 seats, 100 tracked prompts, 1 brand | Agency, three brands10 seats, 300 tracked prompts, 3 brands |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frase | $588lowest | $2,244lowest | $5,328lowest |
| Profound | $1,188 | No published fit1 | No published fit1 |
| Otterly.AI | $2,268 | $2,268 | $5,868 |
| Semrush | $2,388 | $5,748 | No published fit1 |
| Scrunch | $3,600 | $4,200 | $5,700 |
| VeritasOurs | $3,780 | No published fit1 | No published fit1 |
| AthenaHQ | No published plan fits any of these setups2 | ||
Bars share one scale across the whole table, so cost growth shows as well as rank. A figure far above the rest is marked off scale.
Standard monthly rates, without annual discounts unless a vendor publishes only a yearly price. Taxes, overage and negotiated terms are excluded. Indian rupee figures are converted at 95.2 INR to the US dollar, a rate we maintain by hand and review periodically. It is an approximation, not a live rate, and Veritas bills in rupees.
Veritas costs more than Otterly.AI for tracking alone; the price also covers keyword research, site audits and cited drafting.Start a 7-day trialSee pricing
Best for writers who want tracking inside a drafting tool.
The most complete research-to-publish loop among content optimisers, at a low entry price.
Article generation is capped at 10, 40 or 100 a month by plan.
Best for teams that want the tracker to open straight into a cited draft.
Every knowledge-based claim in a draft opens the passage it came from, so review is a check rather than a rewrite.
AI answers are re-checked every two weeks, with on-demand checks in between. Several dedicated trackers refresh daily.
Best for teams that want AI tracking beside a full SEO suite.
The deepest historical keyword and backlink data of any tool compared here.
Daily prompt tracking starts on the $199 Starter plan; the $139 SEO plan shows no tracked-prompt allowance.
Best for seven engines included, with persona benchmarks.
Seven engines on every plan, the broadest coverage at a self-serve price.
The entry price is $300 a month, or $250 billed annually.
Best for free to start, with 11 models on the first paid plan.
A free plan, so tracking can start before a budget conversation.
Usage is metered in credits, where one credit is one AI response.
Best for enterprises that outgrow monitoring.
The deepest measurement of any dedicated tracker compared here, including real prompt volume data.
The $99 Starter plan tracks ChatGPT only, with 50 prompts and one seat.
Veritas on Content + SEO Premium, Scrunch on every plan, AthenaHQ on Starter, Semrush on its AI search plans, and Frase on Scale, on pages read 11 and 12 September 2026.
AthenaHQ has a free Essential plan with 300 credits. Among paid plans, Otterly.AI’s $29 Lite is the lowest entry point we found.
Veritas drafts cited content from your documents, Frase drafts with an AI agent, and Profound Agents create and publish content. Scrunch and AthenaHQ focus on monitoring and recommendations.
Every feature, price, pro and con, each fact linked to the vendor page it came from.
Best for: Writers who want tracking inside a drafting tool
Frase pairs AI visibility with research, drafting, optimisation, site audits and publishing from $49 a month, with engines widening by plan to five on Scale. Articles are capped at 10, 40 or 100 a month by plan.
Frase began as a SERP research and brief tool and now covers the loop from research to publishing: topic clusters, an AI agent that drafts with your brand in context, brand voice, content optimisation for Google, GEO optimisation for AI citation, site audits, backlinks with drafted outreach, Content Guard for ranking decay, and its own FraseCMS.
AI visibility tracking covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI across its plans, widening as the price rises. It publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity and Wix, and connects to Claude and Cursor through MCP and a CLI.
Trial: 7 days, no credit card. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Teams that need every claim traced to their own documents, or high monthly volume without article caps.
frase.ioBest for: Teams that want the tracker to open straight into a cited draft
Veritas includes ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews on Content + SEO Premium, with no engine add-ons, and opens each gap into an editor that drafts from your documents with a citation on every claim. It costs more than Otterly.AI for tracking alone, re-checks every two weeks rather than daily, and has no API or MCP.
Veritas is an AI content and SEO platform built by Optivus Technologies. It organises a company’s own documents into a knowledge graph and drafts marketing content from it, attaching a numbered citation to every knowledge-based claim that opens the passage it came from. Claims it cannot trace to your material are left out rather than filled in.
Around the editor it bundles keyword research and gap analysis, competitor and SERP analysis, a live content score, site audits, backlinks, Google Analytics with Search Console, and AI visibility tracking across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Plans are priced per workspace in INR with users included.
Trial: 7 days on one SEO domain; nothing is charged until it ends. source, 12 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Solo writers, teams that need market-wide historical SEO data or an API, and anyone who needs AI answers re-checked daily.
See Veritas pricingBest for: Teams that want AI tracking beside a full SEO suite
Semrush tracks five engines including Claude, 50 to 200 prompts a day by tier from $199 a month, beside keyword research, backlinks, technical audits and content creation. Extra users cost $45 each, which adds up for teams.
Semrush is an all-in-one search marketing platform covering keyword research, competitor analysis, backlinks, rank tracking, local search visibility, technical site audits, digital PR and content creation. Its keyword database holds over 27.3 billion keywords, by its own count, which is the depth most teams buy it for.
It has moved hard into AI search. Its Research and Track toolkits now include AI Visibility, Prompt Research and AI Brand Sentiment across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews. Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush on 28 April 2026, and says customers can expect an expanded roadmap as the two integrate.
Trial: 7 days on SEO, Starter and Pro+; none listed on Advanced. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Small teams that mainly need content and AI visibility and do not want to pay per user.
semrush.comBest for: Seven engines included, with persona benchmarks
Scrunch includes seven engines, among them Claude, Gemini, AI Mode and Meta, on every plan, plus AI bot traffic insight, persona benchmarks and AXP. It starts at $300 a month with three seats and a card-free trial.
Scrunch is an AI visibility platform for brands and agencies. It tracks performance for prompts, topics and entities with citations, competitors and rankings, benchmarked by persona, topic and geography, across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews and Meta on every plan.
Beyond monitoring it shows how AI bots crawl your site in a real-time feed, flags pages AI bots cannot crawl, analyses the sources AI relies on, and offers AXP, an agent experience platform that serves compressed, machine-readable versions of pages to AI agents while leaving the human site unchanged. It says more than 500 companies and agencies use it.
Trial: Trial of 7 days on Starter, no card required. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Teams on a tight budget, or teams that want content drafted in the same tool.
scrunch.comBest for: Free to start, with 11 models on the first paid plan
AthenaHQ covers five engines free within its credit allowance and 11 models on the $295 Starter, adding sentiment analysis, hallucination detection, a recommendation engine and a Shopify integration. Credits make costs variable as tracking grows.
AthenaHQ tracks brand visibility across 11+ AI models with sentiment analysis, real-time brand mention alerts and hallucination detection, and pairs it with a recommendation engine that suggests on-page and off-page actions.
Its Athena Citation Engine analyses citation sources for link building, a content optimisation agent and AI-friendly templates help produce content, and a Shopify integration ties AEO content to revenue. It integrates with GA4, Search Console, Webflow, Framer, Tableau, Power BI and Looker, with API access as a paid add-on.
Trial: Free Essential plan. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Teams that want predictable flat pricing or SEO tooling in the same product.
athenahq.aiBest for: Enterprises that outgrow monitoring
Profound adds real prompt volume data, crawler analytics and Agents that draft and publish content with approvals. It is far more expensive for broad coverage: ChatGPT only at $99, three engines at $399 a month, more on Enterprise.
Profound is a dedicated answer engine optimisation platform built for large brands. Its core modules are Answer Engine Insights for how brands appear in AI conversations, Prompt Volumes for what people actually ask AI systems, and Agent Analytics for how AI crawlers read your site, across engines including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews.
It has added execution on top of measurement. Profound Agents create net-new content, refresh declining pages and generate FAQs using your brand kit, knowledge base, Answer Engine Insights and prompt data, with human approval before anything is published through a CMS integration. Profound raised a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation in February 2026.
Trial: “Try for free” offered on Growth; none listed on Starter. source, 11 Sept 2026
Not the right fit for: Small teams tracking more than ChatGPT on a budget, or anyone who needs a full SEO toolkit alongside.
tryprofound.comWhere a figure below is missing, the charts say so rather than estimate it.
Every fact about a tool other than Veritas comes from that vendor’s own pricing page, product pages, documentation or announcements. Each one is linked where it appears, with the date we read it.
We build Veritas and use it every day. We have not run paid accounts of every other tool on this page, so we describe what each vendor publishes rather than scores from tests we did not run. Where a capability was not described on a vendor’s pages, the table says exactly that, which is not the same as saying the product lacks it.
G2, Capterra and TrustRadius blocked our automated reads, so any rating shown is the figure the vendor publishes about itself, labelled as such.
Prices and plans change. We re-read every vendor page at least every 90 days and record what changed in the update log below.
The scores and cost figures on this page are calculated, not assigned. Our full methodology sets out every rule, what each criterion is worth, and where our evidence runs out.
Disclosure. Veritas is our product. It appears on this page because it competes in this category, and we have tried to state its limits as plainly as anyone else’s. If anything here is wrong or out of date, write to support@getveritas.io and we will correct it and note the change in the log.
How this page was made. Veritas is our product. This page was written with AI assistance and checked against the vendor pages linked beside each fact, on the dates shown. Scores and costs are calculated by our published rules.
7 days on one domain. Nothing is charged until the trial ends.
