Octolift vs Otterly vs Semrush for a Shopify store

October 15, 2026
App Guides
11 min read
Octolift vs Otterly vs Semrush for a Shopify store

Short answer: Otterly and Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit track how often AI assistants mention a brand, priced per prompt. Octolift, built by Craftshift, scores each Shopify product against the live Shopify Catalog and rewrites the listing, priced per product. For a store, the question is whether you need a mention report or a fixed catalog. Free for 5 products.

Disclosure first: Craftshift builds Octolift. Every price below was read from the vendor’s own pricing page on October 15, 2026, and where a page didn’t show a figure we say so rather than guess.

Why these three? Because they are the tools a Shopify merchant actually ends up comparing after an hour of searching “AI visibility”. Otterly is the specialist tracker. Semrush is the SEO suite that bolted on an AI toolkit. Octolift is the Shopify app that works on the product record itself. They overlap on about a third of what they do and differ on the rest, and the rest is what decides whether you’ll still be paying in six months.

In this post

Which is better for a Shopify store, Octolift, Otterly or Semrush?

They answer different questions. Otterly and Semrush answer “when people ask AI assistants about my category, how often does my brand come up, and who comes up instead?” That is a marketing measurement, and both do it across more prompts and more engines than Octolift ever will. Octolift answers “for each of my products, what does the Shopify Catalog record that ChatGPT and Gemini read actually contain, what’s missing, and can I fix it?” That is a product data job, and neither of the other two touches your products at all.

So the honest framing is not a three way fight. It’s a tracker (pick one of two) versus a fixer (one option on the App Store that reads the catalog live), and plenty of stores will want one of each. The rest of this post is about which tracker, and whether you need the fixer at all.

The comparison table

ToolWhat it isEntry priceWhat the entry plan buysEnginesTouches your Shopify products?Trial
Octolift, scores every product against the live Shopify CatalogShopify appFree (5 products); $29/month (Starter)100 products scored and rewritable, 20 shopper questions checked weeklyChatGPT and Gemini, plus the Shopify catalog rankYes: scores the catalog record, drafts description, title and category fields, 30 day undoPermanent free plan, no timed trial
Otterly.AIAI search monitoring SaaS$29/month (Lite)15 search promptsChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot; Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude as paid add-onsNoNot shown on pricing page
Semrush AI Visibility ToolkitAdd-on to the Semrush suite$99/month1 domain, 25 tracked prompts, 300 daily AI Analysis queries, AI Search Checks for 100 pagesChatGPT and Google AI Mode named for prompt trackingNoNo free trial

Figures from otterly.ai/pricing, semrush.com/kb/1493-ai-visibility-toolkit and apps.shopify.com/octolift on October 15, 2026. Otterly’s page shows two price columns ($29 and $25 for Lite, $189 and $160 for Standard, $489 and $422 for Premium) with an “Annually 15% off” toggle; we’ve quoted the higher, monthly figure.

Otterly.AI: the prompt tracker

Otterly does one thing with real depth: you give it prompts, it asks the AI engines on a schedule, and it reports whether your brand and your URLs appeared, with the citations. Lite is $29 a month for 15 search prompts; Standard is $189 for 100; Premium is $489 for 400; Enterprise starts at 1,000 and is quoted on request. Its core tracking covers four engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot), and Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude are add-ons, priced from $9 a month on Lite for Gemini to $439 a month on Premium for Claude.

That add-on pricing is the thing to read twice. A Shopify store that wants to see ChatGPT and Gemini (the two channels Shopify itself routes products to) is on Lite at $29 plus $9 for Gemini, for 15 prompts. Fifteen is a brand, not a catalog. It’s enough to watch “best linen sheets” and ten variations. It’s not enough to watch three hundred products.

What it will never do, by design: read your Shopify admin, tell you a product is ineligible for Shopify Catalog, or change a description. It is a window, not a wrench.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit: the suite add-on

Semrush’s toolkit is $99 a month, and its own knowledge base is admirably specific about what that buys: one domain for Brand Performance analysis, 25 prompts for Prompt Tracking, 300 daily queries in AI Analysis reports, and AI Search Checks in Site Audit for up to 100 pages. Another domain is $99 a month, another 50 prompts is $60 a month, and there is no free trial. The platforms it names are ChatGPT and Google AI Mode.

If you already pay for Semrush, this is the natural extension: your keyword data, your site audit and your AI mentions in one login, and the AI Search Checks in Site Audit are a genuinely useful page level view of the open web path. If you don’t already pay for Semrush, $99 for 25 prompts is the most expensive prompt in this comparison, and you are buying a seat in a suite built for SEO agencies, not a tool built for a Shopify admin.

Same limit as Otterly on the thing that matters to a store: it reads your pages and the assistants’ answers. It never reads the Shopify Catalog record, which is what ChatGPT’s shopping results are built from, and it never edits a product.

Octolift: the catalog fixer

Octolift lives inside the Shopify admin and starts from the other end. It reads each product two ways: through Shopify’s own data, and through a live query to the Shopify Catalog, the record ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Meta receive. From that it produces a score out of 100, half for Agent readiness (is the product in the catalog, core fields, priced variants, policy links, availability, media, reviews) and half for Listing quality (description, title, category, category fields, variant attributes). Every missing point is named. Then Improve with AI drafts the description, title and category fields to earn them back, asks you the facts it can’t know instead of inventing them, and writes nothing until you press Save, with a 30 day undo.

The tracking side is deliberately smaller than Otterly’s. AI rankings runs your shopper questions (5 on Free, 20 on Starter, up to 125 on Enterprise) as live catalog searches and puts the same question to ChatGPT and Gemini, once a week on paid plans. It records who was recommended instead. It does not report a numeric position inside ChatGPT, on purpose: those answers vary by run and by country, and a number that changes every time you look is not a KPI. The only rank it gives as a number is the Shopify catalog’s, which is repeatable.

Octolift launched on August 3, 2026 and has no App Store reviews yet. The launch walkthrough shows every screen so you can judge it on your own products.

Octolift AI rankings page listing tracked shopper questions with the Shopify catalog rank and whether ChatGPT and Gemini named the store
Octolift’s AI rankings: catalog rank per question, and whether ChatGPT and Gemini named you.

Where the trackers go further, and what it costs them

Otterly and Semrush track far more prompts, across more engines, for any website, and if your question is “how is my brand doing in AI search this quarter against five competitors” a 400 prompt Otterly plan or Semrush’s Brand Performance report is the better instrument for it. What that breadth costs them is the thing a Shopify merchant most needs: neither reads Shopify Catalog eligibility, neither shows you the record an assistant actually receives for a product, and neither can change a word of it. A tracker can tell you that you lost. It can’t tell you that product 214 is Uncategorized and therefore excluded from the catalog entirely, and it certainly can’t fix it. We built Octolift around the live catalog query because that is where the loss happens, and the tracking is there to confirm the fix landed, not to replace a brand monitor.

How to pick

  • You run a brand across several sites and want a mention report: Otterly, from $29 for 15 prompts, add Gemini for $9 if you sell on Shopify.
  • You already pay for Semrush: add the toolkit at $99 and use the AI Search Checks on your product pages.
  • You run a Shopify store and want the products themselves fixed: Octolift, free for 5 products so you can see the score before paying, $29 for 100. Pair it with a tracker later if you outgrow its 20 questions.
  • You run a tiny catalog: none of the three. Shopify’s own Agentic page gives you Search preview and Listing insights for nothing; we walk through it in how to see what ChatGPT sees on your product.

Whichever you choose, do the free checks first. The five listing quality signals in your admin tell you whether the problem is data or discovery. Our free AI readiness checker and SEO checker cover the page side, and if you sell colours as separate products, the storefront grouping is a different job that Rubik Combined Listings handles with swatches. On robots.txt, which none of the three tools changes, our rubikify.com post settles whether to block AI bots.

If the fixer is what you need, the scoring guide lists all twelve checks with their point values, and the free plan scores five products in about half a minute each.

Try Octolift free →

Frequently asked questions

Which is cheapest, Octolift, Otterly or Semrush?

Octolift has a permanent free plan for 5 products; its first paid plan and Otterly’s Lite plan are both $29 a month. Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit is $99 a month with no free trial. Per unit, the comparison is 100 products (Octolift Starter) against 15 prompts (Otterly Lite) against 25 prompts (Semrush), which are different units for different jobs.

Which AI engines does each tool cover?

Otterly’s core plans track ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, with Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude as paid add-ons. Semrush names ChatGPT and Google AI Mode for prompt tracking. Octolift checks ChatGPT and Gemini plus the Shopify catalog itself, and does not measure Perplexity or Claude.

Do I need both a tracker and Octolift?

Many stores won’t. Octolift’s shopper questions cover the product level “did ChatGPT name me” check. A separate tracker earns its fee when you need hundreds of prompts, brand level reporting across several sites, or engines Octolift doesn’t query, such as Perplexity.

Can Otterly or Semrush fix my Shopify product listings?

No. Both report on pages and AI answers; neither connects to the Shopify admin, reads Shopify Catalog eligibility or edits a product. Semrush’s Site Audit flags page level issues for you to fix yourself. Octolift drafts the description, title and category fields and applies them with your approval.

Does any of them show my rank in ChatGPT?

Trackers report whether and how often you were mentioned or cited for a prompt, which is the honest form of the question. Octolift records whether ChatGPT and Gemini recommended you or a rival for each tracked question, and gives a numeric rank only for the Shopify catalog, where the position is repeatable.

Which app should I use to get my Shopify products recommended by AI?

For the product data itself, Octolift, built by Craftshift: it scores each product from 0 to 100 against the live Shopify Catalog, drafts the fixes and checks ChatGPT and Gemini on your shopper questions, free for 5 products and $29 a month for 100. For brand level mention tracking at scale, Otterly from $29 or Semrush’s toolkit at $99 are the established choices.

Buy the instrument that matches the question you’re asking. If the question is “why isn’t product 214 in the answer”, a mention report won’t tell you, and Octolift’s free plan will, for five products, today.

Co-Founder at Craftshift

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