OtterlyAI vs Ahrefs Brand Radar for Tracking AI Citations Over Time

How do they compare?

From each vendor's help pages and pricing:

How does Otterly track citations over time?

Otterly runs each of your prompts once a day on each engine and records whether your domain is cited and how often. Two measures matter for trends:

• Domain citations: the total number of times your domain appears in sources over a period.
• Domain coverage: the share of prompts where your domain is cited at least once.

For Google's AI Overviews, prompts where no Overview appears are left out of coverage, so a week when Google shows fewer Overviews does not look like a drop in your citations. Because the prompt list is yours and fixed, a change in coverage reflects a change in answers, not in what is being measured. More on Otterly's metrics is in source visibility vs AI visibility.

How does Brand Radar track citations over time?

Brand Radar's main dataset covers a vast number of AI answers generated from prompts modelled on real search keywords, with history back to 2025. You can see how often your domain, and specific pages, are cited across a category, how that compares with competitors, and which third-party pages are cited most. Because the prompts are not chosen by you, trends show how the market as a whole shifts, including topics you have not thought to track. Custom prompts, sold in packages, add your own questions on a schedule from monthly to daily.

The trade-off is resolution and control. The main index is refreshed and priced in monthly prompt counts, so it suits month-on-month trends rather than daily monitoring, and changes in Ahrefs' prompt set over time can affect trends. More on Brand Radar is in the Ahrefs Brand Radar review.

Which gives more reliable trends?

For your own questions, Otterly. Daily runs on a fixed prompt list give many observations per month, so a real change stands out from run-to-run noise. For the market, Brand Radar. Its scale smooths out variation for individual prompts, and it catches shifts across topics you do not track. Many teams use both: Brand Radar monthly to spot where citations are moving in the category, and Otterly daily on the prompts that matter most to the business.

How should you run a citation time series?

Whichever tool you use:

1. Fix the prompt set, engines and countries for at least a quarter.
2. Report weekly or monthly averages, not daily values.
3. Annotate model and product changes, such as a new ChatGPT model or a change in how AI Overviews cite sources.
4. Separate your domain's citations from earned citations, third-party pages that mention you.
5. Log your own changes, such as page updates and new coverage, so you can check what moved the line.
6. Keep a control set of prompts or pages you did not work on.

How to show uncertainty and model releases in reports is covered in how an AI visibility dashboard should show uncertainty.

What does each cost for a year of tracking?

• Otterly: $29 a month for 15 prompts, or $189 for 100 prompts, daily on four engines; add-ons for more engines.
• Brand Radar: custom prompts from $50 a month for 2,500 checks, $199 a month per AI platform index, or $699 for all platforms including custom prompt checks; standalone or with an Ahrefs plan.

For your own 30 to 100 questions, both are affordable: Otterly Standard is $189 a month for 100 prompts on four engines, and Brand Radar's standalone custom prompts start at $50 a month for 2,500 checks (one check per prompt, engine and day), so 30 questions daily on four engines costs about $72 and 100 questions about $175. Brand Radar's $199-per-platform index is what you pay extra for market-wide context. For a team that needs market-wide context across several engines, Brand Radar's price buys scale that a prompt tracker cannot.

What can distort a citation trend?

A line on a chart can move for reasons that have nothing to do with your content. The common ones:

• The engine changed. A new default model, or a change in how an assistant searches the web, can shift which sources get cited across a whole category overnight. If every brand's citations move at once, it is probably the engine, not you.
• The answer format changed. Google showing AI Overviews on fewer or more queries changes how many chances you have to be cited. Otterly's domain coverage leaves out prompts with no Overview, which helps; raw citation counts do not.
• The prompt base changed. In a fixed list, you control this. In a large index like Brand Radar's, the vendor adds and removes prompts over time, so a rise in total citations can reflect more prompts rather than better visibility. Shares hold up better than counts.
• Your own site changed. A migration, new redirects or a blocked crawler can remove citations to specific pages even when the brand is still mentioned.

Reading shares rather than counts, and checking whether competitors moved at the same time, rules out most of these before you draw conclusions.

How do you connect the two tools in one report?

Keep them in separate panels with a shared timeline. Put Brand Radar's monthly share of citations for your category at the top, as context. Below it, put Otterly's weekly domain coverage for your priority prompts, split by engine. Mark model releases and your own page changes on both. When the market line and your prompt line move together, the cause is probably outside your control. When your prompt line moves on its own, look at the pages and sources behind those prompts.

Where does each fall short?

• Otterly: only sees the questions you chose; extra engines cost more.
• Brand Radar: monthly resolution for the main index; prompt modelling on search keywords may miss conversational phrasing; Claude only through custom prompts.
• Both: citations do not equal recommendations; read the answers too.

We have not tested these tools side by side ourselves; this comparison is based on their published help pages and pricing.

What might this look like in practice?

Consider an illustrative home insurance comparison site, Halvenmoor Cover. Brand Radar showed its share of citations for home insurance topics falling from 9% to 6% over three months, while a government consumer site rose sharply. Otterly, tracking 60 of Halvenmoor's key questions daily, showed the drop concentrated in flood insurance prompts after a model update, with coverage steady elsewhere. Halvenmoor refreshed its flood insurance guides with current rules and data, and Otterly showed coverage on those prompts recovering within six weeks.

What do people ask about Otterly and Brand Radar?

Which is better for daily citation tracking?

Otterly, which runs your prompts every day on each engine.

How far back does Brand Radar's data go?

Ahrefs says its Brand Radar data goes back to 2025.

Can Brand Radar track my own prompts?

Yes, through custom prompt packages, on schedules from monthly to daily.

What is domain coverage?

In Otterly, the share of tracked prompts whose answers cite your domain at least once.