Profound vs Otterly vs Linkeddit (2026): The Top of the Market, the Bottom, and the One That Drafts the Fix

01The short answer

Profound if AI visibility is someone’s job title, procurement wants SOC 2 and 1,128 reviews, you want prompt volume data and agents, and you budget from $399, because the $99 tier is a one-engine sample. Otterly if you want the cheapest honest look at four engines, the interface every reviewer praises, and an MCP server from the second tier, and you have priced the add-ons for the engines you actually need. Linkeddit if you want four engines including Claude at a flat $99 with no add-on line, MCP that carries the actions, and the measurement to end in a sourced fix and a re-measurement, accepting that we have neither Profound’s review base nor Otterly’s Copilot and AI Overviews coverage today.

02Pricing on the day

Profound’s pricing page and Otterly’s were read on 4 September 2026 for their reviews. Profound prints only yearly-billed prices. Otterly prints monthly and annual, and prints its add-ons, which is where its real price lives. Linkeddit’s figures are our own pricing page.

03Engines, priced out

The three sell engines differently. Profound sells them by tier: one, three, or up to nine on Enterprise. Otterly includes four and sells three more as add-ons priced by tier. Linkeddit includes four and sells none. Here is what each engine list costs, using printed figures only.

Two honest readings. Otterly’s base four is a genuinely good four for the price, and it is the only one of the three with Copilot below Enterprise. Its add-on model is also the reason its G2 complaints name price on a $29 product: a team that needs Gemini and Claude on Standard is at $357 before it has bought an extra prompt. Profound’s tiers are simple and expensive; the honest way to read the $99 is as a ChatGPT-only trial of the platform. Our flat $99 covers four engines and stops there. If AI Overviews or Copilot is your buyers’ engine today, Otterly covers it and we do not yet.

04What each does, and where it stops

Profound tracks visibility, citations and sentiment per prompt, and adds the features its reviewers pay the premium for: Prompt Volumes from real-user data, Agent Analytics for crawler and referral behaviour, Profound Agents on credits for content and AEO tasks, shopping visibility, and Ask Profound for natural-language questions about your own data. Reddit’s verdict in r/DigitalMarketing was “the most serious platform I tested” and, on who should buy it, “enterprise or a company where AI visibility is already a KPI”. Where it stops is the execution layer: a month-long r/Agentic_Marketing comparison found it “gives you the most sophisticated visibility intelligence in the market and then nothing happens”.

Otterly tracks brand coverage, ranks with sentiment, top cited domains, per-engine breakdowns and prompts with mention stats, keeps the raw AI response runs, and adds a GEO audit of URLs for citation readiness, a recommendations section its reviewers call new, a prompt research tool, and a Looker connector from Standard. The r/DigitalMarketing tester who ran more than ten tools called it “probably the easiest one to recommend to someone just getting started” with the tradeoff being depth, and its own G2 reviewers say where it stops: “it’s not always clear what specific actions should be taken based on the findings”.

Linkeddit Answer Radar asks your approved buying questions of four engines, grades every sample for admissibility, reports six defined metrics per engine, records every cited page and every fan-out search, ranks recommendation gaps by intent and evidence, assembles a fix skeleton from the recorded evidence with no prose generated, rejects any draft citing a source the run never recorded, saves it for a person to approve, and re-measures after an indexing delay as an observed delta. It stops short of prompt volume, of Copilot and AI Overviews today, of agents, and of in-app publishing; the does-not-do page lists the rest.

05API and MCP

Otterly is ahead of most of the category here. Its MCP server, described at otterly.ai/features/mcp on 4 September 2026, runs over streamable HTTP, authenticates with OAuth or the public API key, connects to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and any MCP client, and exposes brand coverage history, ranks with sentiment, top domains, per-engine breakdowns, prompts with mention stats, raw response runs, cited URLs with share of citations, crawlability checks and recommendations. The pricing page meters it: 2,000 MCP and 2,000 API requests on Standard, none on Lite. Profound’s self-serve plans have no API and we found no MCP server; that is an Enterprise conversation. Linkeddit ships every capability as an MCP tool on the $99 plan over one OAuth 2.1 connector, measurement and actions alike; the playbooks are recorded transcripts. The difference between Otterly’s MCP and ours is that Otterly’s reads and ours also writes: drafting a fix, saving it for approval and starting a verification are tools.

06Reviews and Reddit

Profound: 4.5 out of 5 on 1,128 G2 reviews, 97 percent four or five stars. On the first page of reviews, price, learning curve and reporting limits each account for three of ten complaints; data accuracy is not among them. Reddit is blunter: “profound is way too expensive” in r/aeo.

Otterly: 4.7 out of 5 on 54 G2 reviews, 83 percent five-star and 16 percent four-star, plus a Gartner Cool Vendor designation for AI in Marketing in 2025, announced on GlobeNewswire on 4 November 2025. Of the ten dislikes on the first page, four ask for deeper reporting or customisation, two name price, two say the prompt allowance runs out, and none say the data is wrong.

Linkeddit: far fewer reviews than either. The evidence for our product is the recorded playbooks and the methodology page, and a buyer should weigh that against two vendors with a track record on G2.

07Measured: what four AI engines say about the three

This section is ours and labelled as such, and one of the three vendors is us. On 4 September 2026 we ran our own Answer Radar project for linkeddit.com, 21 approved buying questions about AI visibility and competitive intelligence tools, through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity via their official APIs with grounded search. Profound and Otterly are not tracked competitors on that project, so their numbers are volunteered mentions; Linkeddit is the tracked brand. Per engine, admissible samples only, counts stated, per the methodology.

Across our full population of 220 completed answers about this category, tryprofound.com was cited three times, twice by Perplexity and once by Gemini, and otterly.ai three times, twice by Gemini and once by Perplexity. Neither was cited by ChatGPT or Claude. Our own recommendation rate on our own prompts is 0 of 10 on Claude and 1 of 15 on Gemini, which is the reason this page exists.

08Matrix

09Questions to settle before you buy, per vendor

Profound. Ask which engines your prompts run on at the tier you are quoted, because the printed answer is one at $99 and three at $399, with Claude on Enterprise only. Ask what an agent credit buys and what happens when the 100 on Starter run out. Ask for the monthly-billed price, since the page prints only yearly.

Otterly. Add the add-ons before you compare: write down the engines your buyers use, then price Lite, Standard and Premium with them. Ask how the 2,000 MCP and 2,000 API requests on Standard are counted and what happens past them. Ask whether the GEO audit covers a competitor’s URL or only yours. Ask how many prompts the recommendations section covers, since two first-page G2 reviewers ran out of allowance.

Linkeddit. Run the usage tool before the first audit so the allowance is a number you saw. Ask to watch the faithfulness guard reject a source on your own project, not in a recorded playbook. Ask what the verification reads when the outcome is not comparable or ambient change not isolated, because both exist and neither is a success; the verify a fix help page lists every outcome.

10Verdict, including against us

Pick Profound if AI visibility is already a KPI with an owner, you want prompt volume data, agents and up to nine engines, procurement needs SOC 2 and a long review base, and you budget from $399. The $99 tier is a ChatGPT-only look at the platform, not the platform.

Pick Otterly if you want the lowest real entry in the category on four engines including Copilot and AI Overviews, the interface reviewers like most, and a documented MCP server from the second tier, and you have priced Gemini, AI Mode and Claude as add-ons before comparing the $29 with anyone else.

Pick Linkeddit if you want four engines including Claude at a flat $99 with no add-on line, MCP that carries the actions as well as the data, the measurement to end in a fix built only from what the engines actually read and a re-measurement that says whether it moved, and a weekly competitor brief on the same bill. Do not pick us for Copilot, for AI Overviews today, for prompt volume, or for a review base; Otterly and Profound are the better-reviewed choices, and we say so.

11Frequently asked questions