Surfais and Otterly.AI compared on engine add-ons, entry price, seats and published method, with all figures read from both sites on 6 September 2026.
Verified
6 September 2026
| Dimension | Surfais | Otterly.AI |
|---|---|---|
| AI engines included | All five on every plan, including the £69 Starter: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. | Four on every tier: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini are paid add-ons on top of every tier. |
| Engine gating | None. No engine add-ons and no engine unlocks by tier. | Yes, by add-on rather than by tier. AI Mode and Gemini are $9–$149/mo each, and Claude is $29–$439/mo, depending on the tier you are on. |
| Entry price | £69/mo Starter, ex-VAT. Growth £199, Scale £479, Enterprise from £1,999. 15% off annual. | $29/mo Lite ($25 on annual). Standard $189 ($160 annual), Premium $489 ($422 annual), Enterprise custom from around $1,000/mo. |
| Prompts at entry price | 20 prompts, 1 brand, 1 country, 2 competitors. Extra prompts £6 each on brand tiers. | 15 prompts at Lite. 100 at Standard, 400 at Premium. |
| Seats | Not published. Plans are scoped by brands, prompts, countries and competitors rather than by seat. | Unlimited team members and workspaces on every tier, from Lite up. |
| Refresh cadence | Twice weekly on brand tiers, weekly on Agency Mode, daily on Enterprise. | Daily. 50+ countries. |
| Published score methodology | AIS Score weights are published and versioned. Version 2, dated 10 June 2026: Visibility 60%, Position 15%, Sentiment 10%, Share of voice 15%. Published at surfais.com/methodology. | No published weighting or versioned methodology found as at 6 September 2026. |
| Free trial | 7 days, no card. 1 brand, one weekly scan plus two manual scans, one audit. | 7 days, no card, as stated on their homepage. |
| Agency / white-label | Agency Mode at £59 per client brand, minimum 5 brands, 20 prompts each, pooled. White-label reporting is scheduled to ship at the end of September 2026 and is not live. | Partner status after subscribing to Standard or Premium: extra prompts, unlimited workspace management, pitch workspaces and co-marketing. No white-label found. |
| API and integrations | No public API, no MCP server and no Looker Studio connector. | API and MCP server from Standard up, Looker Studio connector from Standard up, Agent Analytics bot-traffic add-on from Standard up, and 1,000–10,000 GEO URL audits per month. |
| Security certifications | None. No SOC 2 and no ISO 27001 — SOC 2 is budgeted, not achieved. No SSO or SAML. | No SOC 2 or ISO claim found. EU-based and therefore natively bound by GDPR. |
| Company stage | Early-stage UK company. Small customer base, no published customer count, no named enterprise logos. | Founded 2024, based in Austria. Funding not published. Listed as an app in the Semrush App Center. |
Verified 6 September 2026. Prices and features in this category change often; check each vendor's own site before you buy. Prices are shown in each vendor's own published currency and are not converted.
Otterly's entry price is the lowest in the category and the headline is honest as far as it goes: $29 a month buys fifteen prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. What it does not buy is Claude, Gemini or Google AI Mode. Those are paid add-ons sold on top of every tier, at $9–$149 a month each for AI Mode and Gemini and $29–$439 a month for Claude depending on which tier you are on. We verified that twice, because it is easy to read the pricing page and miss.
So the comparison a buyer should actually run is not £69 against $29. It is £69 for five engines against $29 plus whatever the three add-ons cost at your tier. On the Lite tier that is still cheap; on Standard or Premium it stops being cheap quickly, and the cost of full coverage is no longer a number on the pricing page.
Surfais includes all five engines on every plan with no add-on line at all, so the price you approve is the price of complete coverage. And the AIS Score publishes its weights and versions them — version 2, 10 June 2026 — where we found no published weighting or versioned methodology from Otterly as at 6 September 2026.
Otterly beats us on several rows and one of them is important enough to lead with.
Seats and workspaces. Unlimited team members and unlimited workspaces on every tier, including the $29 Lite plan. Surfais does not publish a seat allowance at all. For a team that wants everyone in the tool, Otterly's model is simply better.
Entry cost. $29 a month, or $25 annually, is the cheapest way into this category. If your budget is genuinely tight and four engines is enough, that is a legitimate reason to choose them.
Cadence and coverage. Daily refresh against our twice weekly below Enterprise, and 50+ countries against one country at our Starter tier.
Integrations. An API, an MCP server and a Looker Studio connector from Standard up, plus a bot-traffic Agent Analytics add-on and up to 10,000 GEO URL audits a month. Surfais has no API, no MCP server and no Looker Studio connector.
Citations. Otterly reports citations at URL level and shows the sentence that triggered a sentiment reading, which is a genuinely useful piece of interface design.
Distribution. Listed as an app in the Semrush App Center, which matters if your team already works there.
Choose Otterly.AI if price per seat is your binding constraint, or if your whole team needs access. Unlimited seats and workspaces from $29 is the best value on that dimension in this category, and if ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot cover where your buyers actually ask, you should not pay us more for engines you do not need. Their URL-level citations, daily cadence and Looker Studio connector are real advantages too.
Choose Surfais if Claude and Gemini matter to you. Priced out at Standard or Premium, three add-ons on top of the base plan changes the arithmetic substantially, and the number you end up paying is not the number on the pricing page. Also choose Surfais if you want to be able to read how your score is calculated.
The practical test: work out Otterly's true cost at the tier you would actually buy, with every engine you care about switched on, and compare that.
Otterly.AI is an Austrian product, founded in 2024 and listed as an app in the Semrush App Center. It monitors brand presence in AI search across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot as standard, with Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode available as paid add-ons. It includes a gap analyser, sentiment analysis that shows the sentence which triggered the reading, URL-level citation reporting, and between one and ten thousand GEO URL audits a month depending on tier.
Surfais is a UK measurement product covering five engines on every plan, scored on a published, versioned 0–100 scale, with a monthly deep-dive audit included at every tier.
Otterly's approach to engine access is different from everyone else's in this set. Profound and Peec gate by tier; Otterly charges per engine, on top of whatever tier you are on. It is arguably the more honest structure — you pay for what you use, and a customer who does not care about Claude never subsidises those who do. It is also the structure most likely to produce a surprise at renewal, because the cost of full coverage is spread across several optional lines rather than shown as one number.
Neither approach is wrong. But the comparison a buyer runs should be like for like: Surfais at £69 with five engines, against Otterly at your chosen tier with the add-ons you need. On Lite, Otterly may well still win. On Premium, the Claude add-on alone is priced up to $439 a month, and that changes the picture.
Unlimited seats and unlimited workspaces from the $29 tier upward is the most generous access model in this comparison, and it is the row we would look at hardest if we were buying. Surfais does not publish seat allowances at all. Otterly also refreshes daily where we refresh twice weekly below Enterprise, covers 50+ countries where our Starter tier covers one, and ships an API, an MCP server and a Looker Studio connector from Standard upward. We have none of those.
Neither company is being audited by an outside body here, so the only thing a buyer can check is what is published. Surfais publishes the AIS weights — Visibility 60%, Position 15%, Sentiment 10%, Share of voice 15%, version 2 dated 10 June 2026 — and versions them, so you can reproduce a score and see when the definition changed. That version was a downward recalibration made against our own commercial interest, after a customer with six mentions across sixty-nine runs was being described as competitive.
We found no published weighting or versioned methodology from Otterly as at 6 September 2026. That is a statement about what is published, not a claim that their numbers are wrong.
Surfais has no SOC 2 and no ISO 27001 — SOC 2 is budgeted, not achieved — no SSO, no public API and no Looker Studio connector, and white-label reporting does not ship until the end of September 2026. We found no SOC 2 or ISO claim from Otterly either; as an EU company they are natively bound by GDPR. Otterly's funding is not published, and their agency partner programme has no white-label component that we could find.
Verified 6 September 2026. Prices and features change; check the vendor's own site.