Honest comparison · made by the AI Visibility Checker team

AI Visibility Checker vs Otterly.ai

Both names sound like they do the same thing. They do not. Here is the difference, written by the people who make one of them.

TL;DR

AI Visibility Checker audits the technical layer that decides whether AI agents can find, parse, and cite your site — robots.txt, llms.txt, schema, headers, rendering, Cloudflare. We fix the root cause. Otterly.ai monitors brand mentions in AI answers — it tells you whether you are showing up across many queries over time. We focus on the cause; they focus on the result. Most teams need cause-fixing first; some teams need monitoring on top.

Feature-by-feature

FeatureAI Visibility CheckerOtterly.ai
Audits robots.txt, llms.txt, schema, headers for AI bots
Per-agent severity tagging (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Doubao, Grok)
Detects Cloudflare bot-fight blocking AI crawlers
Block AI bots per-URL (no robots.txt all-or-nothing)
Charge AI bots per request — HTTP 402 paywall
llms.txt generator
JavaScript rendering comparison (no-JS bots vs. humans)
Brand-mention tracking across AI assistants
Citation source tracking
Competitor share-of-voice in AI answers
Site-wide BFS crawler (up to 500 pages)
Google + Bing Merchant Center feed generators
Doubao (ByteDance) coverage
Grok (xAI) coverage
Public shareable reports with score badge
Scheduled monitoring + regression alerts
Free tier with no credit card
Starting price (paid)$5/mo~$49/mo

AI Visibility Checker is the better choice if…

  • You want to know why ChatGPT does not cite you — and exactly what to fix in your code.
  • You sell to AI shoppers (ecommerce) and need product schema + Merchant Center feeds.
  • Your audience reaches into Doubao or Grok and you want coverage no other tool offers.
  • You need a fast, free, no-signup audit you can share with clients.
  • You operate on Indexed ($5) or Featured ($14) — budget-friendly for SMB / indie founders.
  • You want to block — or monetize — AI bot access to specific pages of your site, not just send robots.txt and hope.

Otterly.ai is the better choice if…

  • You already have great technical SEO and want to track brand share-of-voice in AI answers.
  • You need to monitor competitor citations and report on AI-mention growth over time.
  • You have an enterprise budget and a dedicated team that consumes share-of-voice dashboards.

FAQ

Can I use both?

Yes — they are complementary. AI Visibility Checker is technical infrastructure: it makes you visible to AI agents. Otterly.ai is reporting: it tracks the resulting brand mentions over time. Most users start with us (to be cited at all), then add a monitoring tool once they are getting cited.

Why is Otterly more expensive?

They sell a different product — share-of-voice and citation tracking, which requires running many real queries through ChatGPT / Perplexity / Gemini per customer per day. That has a recurring API cost. Our audits are run on-demand against your site, which is cheaper per check.

Does AI Visibility Checker also track AI mentions?

Not today. We audit the technical layer (crawler accessibility, schema, llms.txt, JS rendering, headers). Brand-mention tracking is a different surface that lives downstream of being visible — you have to be cite-able before you can be cited. We plan to add lightweight citation tracking but it is not the primary focus.

Which one improves my AI rankings faster?

Honestly: us, if you have technical gaps (blocked crawlers, missing schema, no llms.txt, JS-only content). Otterly will tell you "you are not being cited" — but not why. We tell you exactly why, and what to change. If your technical layer is already solid, Otterly will tell you whether your content strategy is working.

Start with the cause, not the symptom.

Free quick check, no signup. See exactly why AI agents do or do not cite you today.