This week in Porto, OtterlyAI was named the winner of the Best AI Search Analytics Software Solution category at the European Search Awards 2026. In a field of eleven finalists, including some seriously strong competition, the judges chose OtterlyAI as the standout platform for AI Search monitoring and optimization.
For a bootstrapped team that started from zero, this means everything.
What the Judges Said
We will let the judges speak for themselves. In their written feedback, they described OtterlyAI as:
“A standout, forward-thinking solution that directly addresses the critical ‘black box’ of AI Search. The judges were particularly impressed by the tool’s operational depth, specifically the automated channel categorisation and the ability to track specific citations across diverse LLM outputs.”
They also called out our concept of Agent Analytics specifically, recognizing that generative AI responses are not static. They are fluid, persona-driven, and context-dependent. Building a platform that actually reflects that reality is something we have spent a lot of time getting right, so hearing that acknowledged by independent industry experts is genuinely validating.
A Category That Did Not Exist Two Years Ago
Here is something worth pausing on. The Best AI Search Software Solution category was only introduced at the European Search Awards in 2025. It is that new. GEO and AEO as recognized disciplines barely existed before that.
The fact that it already attracted 11 finalists in just its second year tells you everything about the pace of change happening in search right now. Brands are waking up to the reality that being visible in AI-generated answers is no longer optional. It is a core part of how discoverability works.
We saw that coming early. Building a platform to address it before the market caught up was a bet the team made from day one, and this award tells us it was the right one.
A Milestone on Top of a Milestone
The timing of this win is not lost on us. This week we also crossed 30,000 active users on the platform. No paid growth hacks. No VC runway. Just search professionals, content strategists, GEO practitioners and marketing teams who found OtterlyAI, tried it, and kept coming back.
That number is the one we are most proud of.
The Team Behind the Platform
OtterlyAI was founded by Josef Trauner, Klaus-M. Schremser and Thomas Peham with a clear conviction: as AI answer engines replaced the traditional blue-link search results page, brands would be flying blind without a purpose-built tool to track their visibility across those surfaces.
But the trophy belongs to far more than three founders. It belongs to every person on the team who has contributed to getting us here: the developers shipping features, the product team obsessing over every workflow, the designers making complexity feel simple, the sales team having the hard conversations, the marketers telling the story, and the support and customer success team making sure every single user gets real value from the platform every single day.
A lot of that work happens behind the scenes and never gets a spotlight. Today it does.
Why This Moment Matters Beyond the Award
The same week we picked up this award, Google announced the biggest change to its search bar in 25 years at Google I/O 2026. An AI-powered, conversational search experience built on Gemini, deeply integrated into the default interface for hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
It is the clearest possible signal that the shift toward AI-generated answers is not a trend. It is the new infrastructure of search.
Traditional rank tracking was not built for this world. OtterlyAI was.
If you are a brand, agency, or SEO professional trying to understand where you stand in the generative era, this is exactly the problem we built our platform to solve.
Thank You
To every user who has trusted OtterlyAI as part of their workflow: this win is as much yours as it is ours. You have shaped the product with your feedback, your use cases, and your ambition to stay ahead of where search is going.
