Otterly AI vs AEOTrack: How to Compare AI Visibility Tools

If you are comparing Otterly AI and AEOTrack, the useful question is not which has more checkmarks on a feature grid — it is which one can tell you why an AI answer picked someone else. This page explains what AEOTrack does, precisely enough to verify, and gives you a test you can run against either product in an afternoon.

What both categories of tool have in common

Any AI-visibility tracker does roughly the same three things: it sends questions to answer engines, it stores the answers, and it counts how often you show up. Tools mostly differ in what they do with the third step — and that is where the useful comparison lives.

The distinction that matters most: named vs cited

An engine can use your page without crediting you. Being named means the answer text says your brand; being cited means one of your URLs was retrieved as a source. They fail for opposite reasons and need opposite fixes.

Across 446 answers we tracked for a single domain, 15% cited that domain as a source and only 9% named the brand. On one engine, 22 answers cited the site and none named it. A tool that reports a single "visibility" number cannot show you that split, and without it you will spend weeks fixing a crawling problem you do not have.

AEOTrack reports both per question and per engine, and sorts every tracked question into four states: named and cited, named but not cited, cited but not named, and absent from both.

What an engine read instead of you

In the same dataset, engines consulted an average of 7.7 other sources alongside the tracked domain. Your best page is roughly one-eighth of the evidence behind an answer. AEOTrack lists those other domains, how often each was retrieved, and whether each names you or a rival — which turns "we are not showing up" into a list of specific pages to go and earn a mention on.

Crawler visibility without JavaScript

Most AI crawlers fetch HTML and never run JavaScript, so a browser beacon cannot see them. AEOTrack ingests server logs directly from Vercel and Cloudflare log drains, and also ships a beacon — with the beacon presented as the smaller half of the picture, because it is.

Honest scoring

AI answers are non-deterministic, so every score carries sampling error. AEOTrack shows a range (the ± to expect between two checks) and a sample count with each score, versions its scoring method, and marks the chart where the method changed. It also scores questions containing your brand name apart from the headline, because they inflate every visibility number — including ours.

How to test either tool yourself

• Choose five questions a real buyer would type, at least three without your brand name in them.
• Run each question in the tool and in the engine directly. The stored answer should match.
• Take one answer where you appear and ask: were we named, were we cited, and which other domains were read?
• Ask whether crawler figures come from server logs or JavaScript.
• Leave the site unchanged for a week and see whether the score moves more than its stated range.

Where AEOTrack fits

AEOTrack suits teams who want the diagnosis rather than the headline: five engines with live calls, naming separated from citation, the full source list behind each answer, log-based crawler analytics, and a plan that ties each finding back to the check that produced it. Plans start at $39/month with a 7-day trial and no card required.

It is not the right tool if you want a single number to put on a slide. The whole design assumes you intend to act on the detail underneath it.