Across 50 real mortgage-calculator prompts and 6,127 recorded citations (Otterly.AI, Canada, 2026-08-23–2026-08-30), HomeCalc.ca was cited 224times: 6th on Otterly’s Brand Ranking leaderboard of ~20 tracked brands, 3rd among commercial (non-government) domains on that same leaderboard, and #1 on Microsoft Copilot every single day of the window for one specific question. That is a narrow, sourced result, not a market-share claim; see “What this isn’t claiming” below.
Most AI-visibility claims are unfalsifiable: “we help brands get recommended by AI” with no prompts, no engines named, and no way to check the work. This post is the opposite of that, on my own product. Every number below comes from a raw export you could recompute yourself; the two source files are linked in the methodology section.
01: What was actually measured
50real buyer-intent prompts about mortgage calculators, affordability, and home-buying tools (“What are the best free Canadian real estate calculators?”, “How much house can I afford with my income?”, and 48 more like them) were run through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, for the Canada market, over the week of 2026-08-23 to 2026-08-30, using Otterly.AI, a competitive AI-search tracking tool. Every domain each engine cited as a source was logged, along with how many times: 6,127 total citations, across hundreds of distinct cited domains. (Some prompts were checked once during the window; others were checked daily across all 8 days, so a domain’s total reflects both how often it’s cited and how consistently that citation held up day after day.) Otterly separately maintains a Brand Ranking leaderboard of about 20 named brands/domains for this panel, ranked by citations, mentions, and sentiment; HomeCalc.ca’s 6th and 3rd-place rankings below come from that leaderboard, not from the full hundreds-of-domains citation export.
This is deliberately a different instrument and a different dataset from the Bing Webmaster Tools / Google Search Console numbers behind HomeCalc’s existing AI visibility case study and the published citation study. Those measure HomeCalc’s actual search-console traffic over months, across every topic the site covers. This measures one competitive prompt panel, one category, one week, through one third-party crawler. The two are not added together anywhere on this site, and shouldn’t be.
02: The domain ranking
Sorted by total citations (summed across every day of the window) across all 50prompts. The top four spots are two government sources (CMHC, the federal consumer-finance regulator) and Canada’s two largest rate-comparison sites. HomeCalc.ca is 6th overall, and 3rd once government sources are set aside, behind only Ratehub and wowa.ca among commercial domains.
| # | Domain | Kind | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | cmhc-schl.gc.ca | Government (CMHC) | 612 |
| 2 | ratehub.ca | Competitor | 507 |
| 3 | canada.ca | Government | 495 |
| 4 | itools-ioutils.fcac-acfc.gc.ca | Government (FCAC) | 331 |
| 5 | wowa.ca | Competitor | 277 |
| 6 | homecalc.ca | HomeCalc (this site) | 224 |
| 7 | nerdwallet.com | Competitor | 134 |
| 8 | nesto.ca | Competitor (lender) | 133 |
| 9 | canadianmoneyhelp.ca | Competitor | 129 |
| 10 | mortgagesquad.ca | Competitor | 86 |
Source: Otterly.AI, Canada, 2026-08-23–2026-08-30, 50 prompts, ChatGPT / Perplexity / Google AI Overviews / Microsoft Copilot.
Read a different way: HomeCalc.ca’s domain was cited more often than BMO’s, Scotiabank’s, RBC’s, TD’s or CIBC’s own domains individually, for this specific set of calculator and affordability questions. None of those banks cracked the top 10. And against the two sites that actually beat it (Ratehub, wowa.ca), the gap isn’t close to what a “3rd of 20+” ranking might suggest on its own; both are established, general-purpose rate-comparison platforms, while HomeCalc.ca is a narrower, calculator-only product.
03: Where it wins outright
The standout: #1 on Copilot, 8 days running
The single strongest result in the dataset is also the easiest to miss in a table sorted by raw totals. For the prompt “What are the most accurate Canadian mortgage calculator sites?”, HomeCalc.ca held position #1 on Microsoft Copilot on every one of the 8 days the window was monitored, plus secondary mentions on Perplexity and ChatGPT. That consistency is what drives its 67 citations on this one prompt alone, more than double its next-best question.
Its five best-performing prompts
Ranked by total citations, not by how many separate times it was checked. A prompt monitored daily for a week and cited every time earns its higher total honestly.
| Prompt | Citations |
|---|---|
| “What are the most accurate Canadian mortgage calculator sites?” #1 on Microsoft Copilot every single day of the 8-day window. | 67 |
| “What are the best free Canadian real estate calculators?” | 28 |
| “What tools show Canadian home closing costs and land transfer tax?” | 27 |
| “How do I calculate Canadian rental property cap rate and ROI?” | 18 |
| “What are the best tools for Canadian home affordability?” | 10 |
That one prompt is the extreme case, not the whole story. HomeCalc.ca was cited in 29 of the 50 tracked prompts overall, and held position #1 at least once for 18 different questions, everything from rental-property cap rate to down payment size to newcomer mortgages. The export logged 218 distinct citation observations for HomeCalc.ca (the 224 figure above is those 218 observations weighted by how many times each was recorded during the 8-day window). Across those 218 observations, it held the #1 spot 32% of the time and a top-3 spot 62% of the time, with a median cited position of 3 and an average of 3.9.
One engine drives most of it: Copilot
The engine breakdown isn’t even. Microsoft Copilot accounts for 142of HomeCalc.ca’s 224 citations, at an average position of 2.5 and #1 in 59 of its recorded observations. Perplexity contributed 59 at a weaker average position (5.4), ChatGPT only 23 at a much lower average position (9.9), and Google AI Overviews recorded none of HomeCalc.ca’s citations in this particular window. A brand that looks strong on a blended, all-engine number can still be nearly invisible on the one engine a given buyer happens to be using, which is the whole reason to look at engines separately rather than at a single combined score.
Sentiment and mentions: consistently top 5
Otterly’s separate Brand Ranking dashboard, which tracks brand mentions in the answer text rather than source citations, recorded 124 mentions for HomeCalc.ca in this window and 16% brand coverage: 4th among the ten commercial brands ranked, once CMHC and the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada are set aside. Its sentiment score of +56 was the 2nd-highest of all ten ranked brands, government sources included, behind only Ratehub.
04: What this isn't claiming
- It does not claim HomeCalc.ca is a top-5 mortgage brand in Canada. It ranked 6th, by citation count, in this specific 50-prompt panel.
- It does not claim any presence outside Canada. Every prompt, every cited government source, and every competitor in this panel is Canadian; there is no data here about the United States or any other market.
- It does not claim this holds for the mortgage category broadly. The panel is calculator and affordability-tool questions specifically, not mortgage rates, mortgage brokers, or lending in general.
- It does not claim this is permanent. AI answers change week to week; this is a one-week window, not a standing rank. Re-running the same panel next month could move every number in the table above.
- It does not claim Otterly's crawler is the ground truth. It is one vendor's method, same caveat as every tool covered in the tool-accuracy guide linked below.
Curious where your own brand ranks?
AI Visibility Audit runs the same kind of engine-by-engine competitive comparison shown above, for your category, checked by a person, not just pattern-matched. $1,500 CAD CAD, flat fee, one-time.
Book an AI Visibility Audit →05: Frequently asked questions
Does this mean HomeCalc.ca is a top-5 mortgage brand in Canada?
No, and this post doesn't claim that. It's a snapshot of one 50-prompt panel, run over one week, for the calculator/affordability-tool corner of the mortgage category, through one tracking vendor (Otterly.AI). Within that specific, narrow scope, HomeCalc.ca ranked 6th on Otterly's Brand Ranking leaderboard, the roughly 20 brands the tool tracks by name for this panel, ahead of every major bank's own domain individually. That is a real, sourced result. It is not a market-share claim about the mortgage industry as a whole.
What's the difference between a 'citation' and a 'mention' in this data?
A citation is Otterly recording that an AI engine's answer linked to a domain as a source, counted once per day it was observed; that's the 6,127-citation export this post's ranking table comes from. A mention is the brand named in the answer's text, which Otterly reports separately on its Brand Ranking dashboard (124 for HomeCalc.ca in this window). The two numbers measure different things and are never added together here, same rule this site applies to citations vs. impressions elsewhere.
Is this the same data as the HomeCalc AI citation case study?
No, and the two shouldn't be combined. The case study and the published citation study are built from Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console, HomeCalc's own site-wide numbers over months. This post is a one-week, 50-prompt competitive benchmark from Otterly.AI, scoped to mortgage calculators specifically. Different instrument, different window, different scope.
Which AI engine cited HomeCalc.ca the most?
Microsoft Copilot, by a wide margin: 142 of HomeCalc.ca's 224 citations in this panel, at an average position of 2.5 and the #1 spot in 59 of its recorded observations. Perplexity and ChatGPT cited it too, but less often and at lower average positions; Google AI Overviews recorded none of HomeCalc.ca's citations in this particular window, which is one week of one prompt panel, not a claim that Google never cites it.
Can I run this same benchmark for my own business?
Yes, that's most of what the AI Visibility Audit does: the same kind of engine-by-engine, prompt-by-prompt competitive comparison, built for your category instead of Canadian mortgage calculators. A sample of that report is published at hamitahm.com/ai-visibility/sample-report/.
For the method behind checking any brand’s own AI visibility, not just a competitive panel, see how to check AI visibility. For the full strategy framework, see the AI visibility hub.
Hami Tahm is an AI visibility consultant based in Toronto, and the founder of HomeCalc.ca.
Disclosure: HomeCalc.ca is my own product, and this article also describes a service I sell. The ranking data itself is unedited: every figure is counted from the raw Otterly.AI export, including the parts (rank 6th, not 1st; zero Google citations in this window) that are less flattering than a rounder claim would be.