Why switch from Otterly.AI
Otterly.AI is a good thermometer and a cheap one. Thermometers do not treat the patient. This guide is the sequence for moving from confirmed diagnosis to actual remediation without losing the measurement continuity you have built.
Arise GEO vs Otterly.AI
Side-by-side table on scope, model, pricing shape and guarantees — including where Otterly.AI is the better buy. Read the comparison →
If you have only been monitoring for a few weeks, keep going. One full quarter of data makes the case for or against investment far better than a snapshot, and it costs almost nothing.
Signals it is time to move
- →Three or more months of near-zero citations on commercial queries.
- →Competitors dominate answers you should own on product expertise.
- →You have no idea whether AI crawlers can even reach your pages.
- →The site is JavaScript-heavy and has never been render-tested.
The migration, step by step
Roughly six weeks end to end. Steps run in order; the change freeze overlaps the handover deliberately.
- Step 01You · Day 1–2
Export the probe history and the query set
Your tracked prompt list is the asset, not the subscription. Export every tracked query, the engines each was run against, the citation and mention history, competitor share-of-voice, and any sentiment scoring. Keep it as CSV — this becomes the continuity baseline so the switch does not reset your trend line to zero.
- Step 02Us + you · Week 1
Audit the query set for commercial relevance
Most AI-visibility subscriptions end up tracking 30 to 50 vanity prompts containing the brand name. Cut those. Rebuild the set around 100 to 300 unbranded buying questions a real prospect would type — comparison, 'best X for Y', pricing, integration and problem-first phrasings. Fewer than 100 and normal model variance swamps the signal.
- Step 03Us · Week 1–3
Establish why you are not being cited
A monitoring tool tells you the citation rate; it cannot tell you the cause. We check the three usual ones: the target pages are not retrievable or not indexed, the brand entity is ambiguous to the models, or the content carries no extractable answer passages. The remediation is completely different in each case.
- Step 04Us · Week 2–4
Fix technical eligibility before touching content
Confirm AI crawlers are not blocked in robots.txt or by the WAF and bot-management rules, that key pages render server-side or are prerendered, that canonicals are self-referencing, and that response times are sane for a fetch-and-summarise agent. Publishing into an unretrievable site produces a flat line.
- Step 05Us · Week 3–5
Anchor the entity graph
One canonical Organization node with a stable @id, sameAs pointing to the profiles you actually control, a named Person entity with knowsAbout for author-level pages, and Product or Service nodes referencing the Organization node rather than repeating it. Ambiguous identity is the most common reason a model summarises you without naming you.
- Step 06Us · Week 3–8
Ship atomic answer blocks on pages already indexed
For each high-value query, a 40 to 60 word self-contained answer directly beneath a question heading, on a page that already ranks and is topically relevant. This is consistently the fastest lever on citation share — movement usually shows within 30 to 60 days on long-tail and comparison queries.
- Step 07Us · Ongoing, from week 4
Re-probe against the imported baseline
Run the same query set, on the same engines, at the same cadence, several times per cycle to control for model output variance. Because you imported the history in step one, the comparison is genuinely like-for-like rather than a fresh start that flatters the new vendor.
What to keep, not bin
Risks and how we contain them
| Risk | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| The AI visibility trend line resets and you lose the comparison | Import the exported probe history as the baseline so the new measurement continues the same series. |
| Query set changes make before/after meaningless | Keep the original tracked queries running unchanged alongside the expanded set for one full cycle, then retire the vanity prompts. |
| Expecting citation movement in two weeks | Long-tail and comparison queries typically move in 30 to 60 days; head terms take one to two quarters. Anything faster is usually model variance rather than progress. |
Frequently asked
Are AI crawlers blocked on my site?+
It is worth checking properly, because it is common and invisible from the front end. GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended are frequently blocked by an inherited robots.txt line, a WAF rule or a bot-management default that nobody remembers enabling. That is step one of the audit.
What is the cheapest thing I can do this week?+
Three things, in order: unblock legitimate AI crawlers, add a self-contained 40-to-60-word answer beneath the main question heading on your top ten commercial pages, and make sure your Organization schema has a stable @id with accurate sameAs links.
Do I need an agency for this at all?+
Not if you have a developer and someone who understands schema and can hold the plan for a quarter. Plenty of teams execute this themselves. We are the answer when nobody in-house owns it or the site is complex enough that the diagnosis is the hard part.
