Profound vs Scrunch vs Otterly.ai Compared.

Profound vs Scrunch vs Otterly.ai is the comparison most marketing leaders reach for once they accept that AI engines now shape a chunk of their buyer research and decide they need a dashboard to prove it. All three are real, credible platforms that track how often a brand gets named in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and the rest. The differences that actually matter are pricing tier, which engines each one covers at that tier, and who owns the acquiring company since June 2026.

What do Profound, Scrunch and Otterly.ai actually track?

All three track the same core job: they run a set of prompts against AI engines on a schedule and report whether, and how, your brand gets named in the answer. Profound builds its pitch around Answer Engine Insights and Agent Analytics, tracking crawl and citation behaviour across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Copilot, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews, aimed at AEO, content, PR and agency teams. Scrunch tracks citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews and Meta, adds page audits for crawlability, and positions itself at enterprise brands with governance needs. Otterly.ai covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot as standard, with Claude and Gemini available as paid add-ons, and leans toward smaller marketing teams that want a leaner monthly tracker.

None of this is a knock on any of the three. It is the same job three different companies chose to build, aimed at three different budgets.

How do Profound vs Scrunch vs Otterly.ai compare on pricing?

Profound vs Scrunch vs Otterly.ai on price is not close: Otterly starts under $30 a month, Profound starts under $100, and Scrunch starts at $250, each unlocking a different slice of engine coverage and prompt volume.

The entry tier is a trap if you read it in isolation. Otterly's Lite plan is cheap but tracks only 15 prompts, too few to represent a real buyer-question set. Profound's Starter tier is ChatGPT-only, which misses Perplexity, the engine most likely to link straight to your source. Scrunch's Starter tier is the most expensive by far but is the only one of the three that ships broad engine coverage and real prompt volume from day one, which is also why it is priced for an enterprise budget rather than a first tool purchase.

Which AI engines does each platform cover at scale?

Profound covers the widest single-vendor engine list, up to nine answer engines on its Enterprise plan, including Grok and DeepSeek alongside the four majors. Scrunch's top tier adds Meta and Google AI Mode to the standard ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity set. Otterly is the outlier: its four core engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot) are bundled at every tier, but Claude and Gemini cost extra, from $9 to $439 a month depending on the plan, so a full five-engine Otterly setup can end up costing more than it first looks.

If your buyers concentrate on ChatGPT and Perplexity specifically, any of the three will cover you at their mid tier. If you need Gemini or Copilot data from day one because your category over-indexes on Microsoft or Google shops, check the entry tier's engine list before you buy, not the marketing page's full list.

What happened to Scrunch after the Sitecore acquisition?

Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore, the digital experience platform vendor, in June 2026, according to Sitecore's own announcement. Sitecore frames the deal around combining answer-engine insight with its existing omnichannel content stack, which points toward Scrunch's roadmap folding into a broader digital-experience platform rather than staying a standalone point solution. That is worth knowing before you sign a multi-year contract: you are buying into Sitecore's product direction, not just Scrunch's current feature set.

What do these tools not do that a low citation rate still needs?

None of the three platforms runs the off-site work that actually earns a citation. Profound, Scrunch and Otterly.ai all report the number, and each ships useful diagnostic detail (Scrunch's page audits, Otterly's GEO URL audits, Profound's Agent Analytics), but none of them contacts a review site, pitches a directory listing, or negotiates the third-party mention an AI engine treats as corroboration. SourceRank AI audit data shows the average B2B company is cited in fewer than 5% of relevant AI prompts, and closing that gap usually needs on-site entity and schema work plus off-site citation building that a self-serve dashboard was never built to execute.

This is the same split that shows up whenever a category matures from measurement to action: a rank tracker never fixed a crawl error, and an AI-visibility dashboard never fixed a missing citation on its own. The fuller breakdown of software versus a managed AEO program covers this operate-it-yourself-versus-run-it-for-you distinction against these same three vendors in more depth.

How should a B2B team choose between them?

1. 1. Get your baseline citation rate first. A free audit tells you how big the gap is before you commit a monthly software budget to tracking it.
2. 2. List the engines your buyers actually use. Pull this from your own analytics or CRM source data, not a guess, then match it against each platform's entry-tier engine list, not its full feature-page list.
3. 3. Decide who executes the fix. If your team has content, schema and outreach capacity, a tracking platform plus internal execution can work. If that capacity does not exist, a managed AEO program closes the gap a dashboard only reports.
4. 4. Price the real tier you need, not the entry tier. Compare Otterly's Standard, Profound's Growth and Scrunch's Starter against each other, since those are the tiers with prompt volume and engine coverage most B2B teams actually need.

Frequently asked questions