Quick verdict: A genuinely interesting feature (monthly AI prompt volume estimates) locked behind a trial experience that’s stingier than the other two tools — no dashboard access at all until you pay, and a topic-matching mismatch during setup that produced a result not actually relevant to the brand being tested.

What it actually is? LLMrefs is another AI-visibility tracker, structured around picking “topics” rather than starting from a free-text prompt list the way Otterly and HubSpot do.

Pricing: confirmed from the account itself: one plan, $79/month, with a 7-day free trial. Correcting earlier research again here — this was assumed free based on one outside source; hands-on testing shows it’s paid-only with a short trial, same pattern as the other two.

Setting it up: Setup asks you to pick from suggested topics, then auto-generates 10 prompts per topic — similar in spirit to HubSpot’s and Otterly’s auto-prompt features. One real, worth-flagging issue found here: testing otterly.ai, the tool suggested topics like “AI Writing Assistant,” “Meeting Transcription Software,” and “Voice To Text App” — none of which actually match what Otterly.ai does (AI-visibility tracking). Unlike HubSpot and Otterly, which both correctly identified GEO/AI-visibility as the relevant competitive category during their own onboarding, LLMrefs’ topic suggestions here were off-target. This matters beyond just being an inconvenience — the mismatch directly affected the results.

Also different from both other tools no competitor list was shown or auto-detected during the free trial setup.

What the result actually showed: Because the tracked topics didn’t match Otterly’s real category, the output reflects that mismatch: the report showed Otterly ranking 15th in the United States with a 0% share of voice, against a leaderboard topped by Jasper.ai and Writesonic (both 100% share of voice) — these are genuinely the leaders in AI writing assistants, a category Otterly doesn’t compete in at all. This is a useful, honest data point for the review: it’s not that Otterly performed badly, it’s that the tool was pointed at the wrong category entirely — worth testing again with manually corrected topics before drawing any real conclusion about LLMrefs’ accuracy.

The bigger free-tier limitation: unlike HubSpot and Otterly, which both gave a real dashboard during their trial, LLMrefs shows only a locked preview — the ranking and share-of-voice table is visibly blurred past the top few rows, with “click to unlock 14 brands” gating the rest behind payment. No dashboard, citations view, or ongoing tracking is accessible without paying.

What’s genuinely different and worth noting: The one standout feature not seen in either other tool: LLMrefs shows monthly AI prompt volume estimates — how many AI conversations across all chatbots include a given topic each month (in this test: “voice to text app” at 2.4K/month, “AI writing assistant” at 800/month, “meeting transcription software” at 100/month). This is a genuinely useful, unique data point for prioritization — it tells you which topics are worth targeting based on actual search-like demand inside AI chats, something neither HubSpot’s nor Otterly’s tested tiers surfaced.

Speed: Roughly 10 minutes to a result, similar to the other two, though not measured with an exact stopwatch.

Honest take: What’s genuinely good: the AI prompt volume estimate feature is a real, distinctive piece of data no other tool tested has shown — worth calling out clearly in the review even though the rest of the trial experience was thin.

What to weigh: the free trial is the most restrictive of the three — no real dashboard access, and the topic-matching during setup produced an inaccurate result for the brand tested here. At $79/month with no ability to see whether the paid product fixes the topic-matching issue, this is a harder tool to recommend confidently to a budget-conscious reader without further testing on the paid tier.