Profound vs Otterly vs SE Visible: GEO Tracking Pricing Compared

At $99 per month, Profound’s Starter tier monitors ChatGPT only—exactly one engine, 50 prompts annually. That’s not a GEO tracker; that’s a ChatGPT monitor with delusions of grandeur. But flip to Growth at $399/month and you get three answer engines, 100 prompts, and six monthly optimized articles. The trap is real, and we rage-quit it so you don’t.

GEO tools all promise the same thing: “See where your brand shows up in generative AI.” They’re not wrong. The difference is whether you’re buying monitoring or optimization, whether you’re tracking one AI engine or four, and whether that monthly cost scales with your actual tracking volume or eats your SaaS budget alive.

What You’re Actually Buying: Monitoring vs. Optimization

Here’s the thing most GEO reviews skip: these tools do two different jobs, and the cheaper tiers don’t do both.

Monitoring is passive. You set up a brand query, the tool runs it daily through one or more AI engines, and it reports back whether your site got cited and in what position. That’s it. No optimization recommendations, no rewriting, no agent telling you what to do next.

Optimization is active. The tool doesn’t just tell you where you’re invisible—it suggests rewrites or generates new content to improve your visibility. Profound and SE Visible try this. Otterly stays honest about what it does.

Most teams need both, which means you either pay for a GEO tracker that does monitoring well and keeps a separate optimization tool in your stack, or you pay premium prices for a tracker that attempts both and succeeds at neither.

Profound: $99 Starter Is a Trap

Profound’s pricing page pulls the oldest SaaS trick: low anchor price up front, buried scope behind it.

Starter at $99/month: ChatGPT only. Fifty prompts per year. That’s 4.2 prompts per month. If you’re tracking more than four brand variations or competitor names, you’re overdrawn before mid-month. The engine selection is embarrassing—no Google AI Overviews, no Perplexity, no MS Copilot. This tier is for a solo founder testing the concept.

Growth at $399/month: Now you get three engines (we haven’t tested which three firsthand, but the published tiers tell us it’s the mix most brands care about), 100 prompts per month, and—the actual value prop—six monthly optimized articles. That’s the difference between “here’s where you’re invisible” and “here’s a rewrite that might fix it.” For an in-house team tracking three brand variants across a competitive niche, $399/mo is plausible. For a freelancer, it’s not.

Enterprise: Profound doesn’t publish pricing. That’s code for “call us,” which means $1,500+/month and a contract.

The insidious part: at $99/mo, Profound looks cheaper than Otterly Standard ($189). But you get 50 prompts per year versus Otterly’s 100 per month (1,200 annually). That’s 24× fewer prompts. The math breaks in Growth’s favor only if you actually use those six monthly articles.

Otterly: $29–$489, The Honest Pricing

Otterly doesn’t pretend to be an optimization tool. It monitors. Four AI engines across all tiers (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, MS Copilot), daily tracking, unlimited brand reports. The question is which prompt bucket fits your volume.

Lite at $29/month: 15 prompts per month. That’s enough to track one primary brand name and maybe one competitor variant. Teams of one. This is not nostalgia pricing—it’s legitimately cheap entry because the product scope is ruthlessly honest.

Standard at $189/month: 100 prompts per month. This is the real baseline for small agencies or in-house teams with 3–5 tracked queries. It’s also where Otterly becomes cheaper than Profound Growth on a per-prompt basis (if you care about that math).

Premium at $489/month: 400 prompts per month, Google Looker Studio integration, and the ability to run 10,000 GEO URL audits monthly. This is the tier where you’re tracking 15+ queries or running brand-monitoring for a client base.

The upgrade path is linear. Otterly doesn’t hide features behind tiers; it hides volume. That’s how you should buy monitoring tools.

Add-ons for Gemini and Google AI Mode run $9–$149/month depending on tier. If you need bleeding-edge engine coverage, you’re adding to your tab. But you know exactly what you’re adding.

SE Visible: The Multi-Market Play

SE Visible’s pricing is mid-range and tied to a different variable: number of brands, not just prompts.

Basic at $99/month: 200 prompts, three brands. Same price as Profound Starter, way more useful—you get 200 prompts instead of 50, multi-engine coverage, and tracking for three distinct brands (Profound Starter monitors one engine for unlimited brands, which is backwards).

Core at $189/month: 450 prompts, five brands. This overlaps with Otterly Standard in price ($189) but gives you 350 fewer prompts per month. The trade-off is that SE Visible tiers are also available as add-ons to SE Ranking plans—if you already pay for SE Ranking, the GEO layer might be cheaper than a standalone tracker.

Plus at $355/month: 1,000 prompts, ten brands. This is where SE Visible becomes interesting for agencies tracking brand visibility across client portfolios in multiple countries (SE Visible supports 50+ geographies and unlimited seats per plan).

SE Visible’s optimization angle is gentler than Profound’s. They don’t claim to rewrite your content; instead, they integrate with SE Ranking’s broader optimization toolkit. If you think of SE Visible as “GEO monitoring + feed to an optimization tool you already own,” the pricing makes sense.

Side-by-Side: Prompts Per Dollar

*Profound Starter is 50 prompts annually (4.2/month) — a functional mistake if you track more than one query variant.

SE Visible wins on raw prompts-per-dollar. Otterly wins on entry price and honest scoping. Profound wins if you want articles rewritten alongside monitoring—but only at Growth tier and above, where the math is no longer cheap.

Where Each Tool Actually Fits

Profound Growth ($399/mo) is your move if:

• You have a content person who can use the six monthly optimization articles as a starting point
• You’re tracking 3+ answer engines and need monitoring + suggested rewrites in one platform
• Budget isn’t your limiting factor

If you’re on Starter tier, you’re not using Profound. You’re paying $99/mo to feel like you’re using Profound.

Otterly is your move if:

• You want honest monitoring without optimization promises
• You need multi-engine coverage from day one
• You’re in a 5–15 query range and Lite/Standard fits your volume
• You don’t want to Frankenstein a GEO tracker to a separate optimization tool

SE Visible is your move if:

• You’re running multi-brand or multi-geography tracking (especially agencies)
• You already own SE Ranking and want to slot GEO in alongside it, or you’re considering Surfer SEO as your optimization layer
• You care more about prompts-per-dollar than feature breadth
• You want to distinguish monitoring (SE Visible) from optimization (Frase or Clearscope if you’re in the content angle game)

If you already pay for SEMrush, their AI visibility add-on may be cheaper than a separate tracker—worth checking before committing to a standalone GEO tool.

Our Call: Which Budget Gets Which Tool

Under $50/month? Otterly Lite. You get honest scoping, four engines, and you’re not lying to yourself about what monitoring can do.

$150–$250/month? Otterly Standard or SE Visible Basic. Standard gives you volume; Basic gives you a brand-multiple angle. Both beat Profound Starter by 4–10× on prompts-per-dollar.

$300+/month? This is where it gets interesting. You can:

• Go Profound Growth + a separate rewrite tool like Writesonic ($40–100/mo depending on tier)
• Go SE Visible Plus + an optimization tool you already own
• Go Otterly Premium and feed the data to Jasper’s Optimization Agent if you’re rewriting in-house

The mistake everyone makes is buying a GEO tool at the wrong tier and wondering why it doesn’t move the needle. Profound Starter costs less than Otterly Standard because it’s a different product pretending to be in the same category. SE Visible’s prompt count looks weak until you realize you’re also getting multi-brand and multi-country scope. Otterly’s pricing is boring because Otterly isn’t trying to be exciting.

Pick the tool that matches your budget AND your actual prompt volume. Run the math. Then rage-quit the ones that don’t fit.