Rankscale vs Otterly vs Linkeddit (2026): Seventeen Engines on Credits, Four Engines Plus Add-Ons, or Four Engines With the Fix

01The short answer

Rankscale if you are an SEO team or agency that wants to track many engines, needs scheduling from hourly to monthly, wants unlimited seats and per-prompt engine selection, and can plan a credit budget, because nothing else covers seventeen engines from $99. Otterly if you want the cheapest honest look at four engines including Copilot and AI Overviews, the interface reviewers like most, 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 credit forecasting and 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 cover four engines and the other two cover more.

02Pricing on the day

Rankscale’s pricing page was fetched as plain text on 4 September 2026 so no price node was lost; it is now in US dollars, having priced in euros when we checked in August 2026. Otterly’s was read the same day. Linkeddit’s figures are our own pricing page.

03Credits, add-ons and engines, priced out

Rankscale’s meter rewards planning and punishes curiosity. Otterly’s add-ons reward a short engine list. Ours is flat and stops at four engines. Here is what the same programme costs on each, using printed figures and Rankscale’s own credit calculator, with a month taken as 30 days.

Three honest readings. Rankscale is the cheapest per engine in the category and the hardest to forecast; a daily four-engine programme with Claude in it lands on Growth, not Pro, and a team that keeps adding engines because they are there will find out at the end of the month. Otterly’s $29 is real for fifteen prompts on its base four, and the same team with Claude and Gemini on Standard is at $357 before it has bought a prompt. Our $99 covers the four engines we run and no others; if Copilot, AI Overviews, Grok or DeepSeek is where your buyers are, the other two cover them and we do not.

04What each does, and where it stops

Rankscale tracks visibility, sentiment, citations, competitors and search terms across its engine list, with per-prompt engine selection, scheduling from hourly to monthly, query fan-out on every tier, unlimited seats, and a recommendations layer called Scout. Its OMR reviewers praise flexibility, engine coverage, sentiment analysis, prompt research and support, and rate ease of use 82 percent against support at 98 percent, which is the honest summary of the product. Where it stops: reporting for clients stays manual, sentiment misreads negatives, the competitor whitelist and blacklist needs constant tuning, and it does not draft the fix against the cited evidence or re-measure to show it moved.

Otterly tracks brand coverage, ranks with sentiment, top cited domains, per-engine breakdowns and prompts with mention stats, keeps raw response runs, and adds a GEO audit of URLs for citation readiness, a recommendations section, 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”, tradeoff being depth. It stops at the recommendation: its own G2 reviewers say “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 seventeen engines, of hourly scheduling, of Copilot and AI Overviews today, and of in-app publishing; the does-not-do page lists the rest.

05MCP on all three, differently

This is the rare three-way where everyone shows up. Rankscale’s MCP server, described at rankscale.ai/mcp on 4 September 2026, connects Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, OpenAI Codex and other clients to live data on your normal login, no API keys, revocable at any time; it can look up and summarise visibility, competitors, sentiment, citations and search terms, and by design cannot change brands, search terms or settings. Otterly’s runs over streamable HTTP with OAuth or the API key, exposes coverage, ranks, domains, per-engine breakdowns, raw runs, cited URLs and recommendations, and is metered at 2,000 requests on Standard with none on Lite. Linkeddit ships every capability as an MCP tool on the $99 plan over one OAuth 2.1 connector; the playbooks are recorded transcripts. The distinction that matters: Rankscale’s and Otterly’s servers read, ours also writes, so drafting a fix, saving it for approval and starting a verification are tools your assistant can call.

06Reviews and Reddit

Rankscale: 4.6 out of 5 on OMR Reviews across 26 reviews, 21 five-star, 4 four-star, 1 three-star, all disclosed as incentivised, and 5.0 on G2 across only 2. Complaints: information density, reporting that stays manual for clients, sentiment that misreads negatives, a competitor whitelist that needs tuning, and the removal of a lower tier. Nobody says the data is wrong. An OMR reviewer who uses Rankscale said they prefer Peec for citation detail. On Reddit, an r/Superframeworks roundup put it plainly: “Rankscale’s $20 a month is actually hard to beat at early stage. Upgrade when you need a more polished shareable interface.”

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 ten first-page dislikes, four ask for deeper reporting, two name price, two say the prompt allowance runs out, 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.

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. Rankscale 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, no Rankscale domain was cited, and otterly.ai was cited three times, twice by Gemini and once by Perplexity. We re-checked the mention and citation tables for Rankscale on 4 September 2026 before publishing the row; the engines that Rankscale measures seventeen of did not name it once on our questions. That is not a judgement on the product. Like every vendor in this category, including us, it is mostly invisible to the engines it measures.

08Matrix

09Questions to settle before you buy, per vendor

Rankscale. Run your programme through the credit calculator before the trial: prompts times engines times checks per month, with Claude at two and DeepSeek at one. If the answer is over 1,200, you are buying Growth, not Pro. Ask what the Essentials tier at $20 actually includes, since it appears in the comparison table rather than as a plan card, and one OMR reviewer complained a lower tier was removed. Ask to see a client report exported, because the reviewers say that part is manual.

Otterly. Write down the engines your buyers use, then price Lite, Standard and Premium with the add-ons attached. 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.

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 Rankscale if engine coverage is the job: seventeen engines with per-prompt selection, hourly scheduling, unlimited seats, a read-only MCP on your normal login, and a credit meter you are willing to plan. Budget for Growth if Claude or daily checks are in the programme, and budget your own time for client reports.

Pick Otterly if you want the lowest real entry on four engines including Copilot and AI Overviews, the interface reviewers like most, a Gartner-listed vendor with a strong G2 record, and a documented MCP from the second tier, and you have priced Gemini, AI Mode and Claude as add-ons first.

Pick Linkeddit if you want four engines including Claude at a flat $99 with no credit forecasting and 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 engine breadth, for hourly scheduling, or for a review base; Rankscale and Otterly beat us on all three, and we say so.

11Frequently asked questions