The fit call was going fine. The prospect ran marketing at a Series B B2B SaaS company. They’d done their homework, read three of the Field Notes posts, asked smart questions. About two minutes in, they paused and said, “Sorry if this is dumb, but are you basically the same thing as Otterly with a different name?”
It was the first time anyone had asked. I didn’t have a clean answer prepared. The answer I gave on the spot was technically correct but not memorable, and the prospect spent the next ten minutes asking measurement-flavored questions because the Otterly-shaped slot in their head hadn’t gone anywhere.
After the call, I sat down and wrote out the answer I should have given. Here it is, for the next time the question comes up (probably soon) and for anyone reading who’s also been trying to figure out where the line is between us and the AI search citation tracking tools.
Otterly is one of a small handful of tools that tracks where your brand gets cited across AI search engines. You connect your domain. The tool runs queries on a cadence (daily, weekly). The dashboard shows you which queries cited your site in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Copilot.
Profound is another tool in the same category. So is Goodie. So is Peec AI. The category is real and the tools work. If you want a clean measurement layer for AI citations, one of these is what you’d buy.
We’re not in that category.
NetPageTwo is a productized SEO and AI search optimization service. We’re an agency, not a tool. The work we do is the technical, content, schema, and entity-binding work that makes your site cite-worthy in the first place. The output is shipped code, deployed schema, new pages, edited pages, validated entities. Real changes to your site that someone made by hand.
The cleanest way to put it: Otterly tells you if you’re getting cited. We do the work that gets you cited.
A couple of reasons.
We use a lot of the same words. Both our marketing and Otterly’s use phrases like “AI search,” “AI citations,” “GEO,” “AEO,” “get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity.” The vocabulary is shared because the underlying domain is shared. A prospect reading both sites in the same hour sees the same nouns and assumes the products overlap more than they do.
The category is also young enough that the layers haven’t separated yet. In mature categories (CRM, email marketing, paid ads), the distinction between “tool” and “service” is well-understood. In AI search, both grew up at the same time. The mental model hasn’t stabilized.
And most prospects researching in this space have looked at four products and three agencies in one week. Everything starts to blur together.
The version that would have landed:
“Think about SEO in 2008. You could pay Moz to tell you where your site ranked for keywords. Or you could pay an SEO agency to do the work that changed those rankings. Moz was measurement. The agency was execution. Different categories, both useful, you usually needed both at different points.
Otterly is the Moz of AI search. We’re the agency. Most companies eventually need both, but they need them at different stages. You usually start with the agency, get the citations actually happening, then use the tracker to verify the lift.”
That would have done the work. It pulls on a mental model the prospect already has (Moz vs SEO agency, 2008), then maps the categories cleanly. The Otterly-shaped slot in their head gets replaced with a tracker-shaped slot. An agency-shaped slot opens up next to it.
The version I actually gave was directionally similar but I didn’t make the analogy vivid enough. The prospect nodded and kept asking measurement questions. They left the call confused about what slot we fit in. They didn’t book a follow-up.
If you’re reading this because you’re trying to figure out whether to buy Otterly, Profound, Peec, Goodie, NetPageTwo, or some combination, the right question isn’t “which one is better.” It’s “where am I right now in figuring out AI search.”
Three stages to think about.
If you suspect you’re getting cited but you have no measurement layer, a tracker is the right purchase. $200-$500 a month depending on plan. You get a dashboard. You learn what you’re already cited for. Most brands are surprised by the answers.
If you have measurement and you know your citation rate is low, you need execution. An agency, an internal hire, or DIY work. The work itself is schema, content, entity binding, structured data, internal linking for AI engines, llms.txt, Wikidata. This is what NetPageTwo does. We charge $489 a month for it. It costs more than a tracker because the work is heavier and requires a human to make judgment calls.
If you have execution shipping and you want to verify it’s producing lift, you need both. The tracker confirms what the agency claims is happening. The agency keeps shipping. Total monthly investment: $700-$1,000 across both layers, depending on which tools and which agency.
Most brands skip stage one and jump to stage two because they correctly suspect their citation rate is low. That shortcut works fine. The cleanest sequence would be tracker first, then agency, then tracker continuing. The practical sequence most people run is agency first, tracker added six months in.
We’re not building a tracker. The product layer Otterly sits in requires real engineering investment: retrieval infrastructure, query distribution, dashboards, constant testing against engines whose behavior shifts weekly. That’s not what we do. We’re pointed at the service layer, where the value comes from operator judgment and execution velocity, not from product engineering.
If anything, we’re complements. A prospect using Otterly who realizes their citation rate is low needs someone like us. A prospect using NetPageTwo who wants verification of the citation lift could use Otterly. The two purchases compose cleanly.
The category will probably get more confusing before it gets less confusing. Trackers and services will keep borrowing each other’s vocabulary. New tools will launch with names that sound like agency names. The way out is the same as the way out of every emerging category: ask what layer the company operates at, and what the actual deliverable is.
If you’re evaluating NetPageTwo and you’re still not sure whether we’re a tool or a service after reading this, book the fit call. The answer takes about five minutes.
Related reading:
– NetPageTwo vs a traditional SEO agency
– GEO 101: Generative Engine Optimization Explained
– How ChatGPT actually decides what to cite (three signals tested)
– About the operator
