AthenaHQ Review November 2026: From an AEO Consultant

AthenaHQ is the visibility platform I would open when the team needs a published monthly price, a homepage list of 11 named models, and a credit count it can divide before anyone books a demo. It is a weak first buy when the missing piece is a second country, the Athena Citation Engine, Oracle, SSO, or a flat prompt allowance with no credit math. On 12 November 2026 the plans page still showed Essential as free, Starter at $295 a month, and Enterprise as custom. The annual toggle is labeled 17% off. I did not extract an annual dollar.

Last updated - November 2026

I am Austin Heaton, an AEO consultant. The visibility logs I set up are mostly for fintech. The rest are B2B SaaS and a few other industries when the buyer question is the same. A dashboard is useful when I can open one stored answer, see whether the brand was named, see whether a URL was cited, and tell a writer which page to change. A share-of-voice tile without that row is not a plan. A credit balance without a cadence is not a budget.

Prices, the Starter and Enterprise comparison, and the tooltips under the credit lines are from AthenaHQ's plans page, read on 12 November 2026. I read the image alt text on that comparison (the icons are labeled "has" or "none"). The 11 model names and the enterprise FAQ are from the AthenaHQ homepage the same day. Citation columns are from the Sources documentation. The response row, including the split between a mention, a source, a citation, and an attributed citation, is from the Responses guide. Oracle's scan rules are from the Oracle guide. Billing controls are from Billing Settings. The onboarding model toggles are from Add Website. The docs index, which is how I know Olympus is the aggregate dashboard, is docs.athenahq.ai/llms.txt. I did not create an account. I did not run a prompt. I did not export a CSV.

The side-by-side versions already on this site are not being rewritten here. AthenaHQ beside Profound, including the 5 November read of this same plans page, is AthenaHQ vs Profound. I am not pasting that page's cells forward as a second invoice. Profound's own trial, which still does not print a paid self-serve brand price, is the Profound review. If the quote is the problem, the shortlist is Profound alternatives. A published daily log with a different meter is the Otterly.ai review, and the 12 November head-to-head of that log against Peec is Otterly.ai vs Peec AI. Peec's country cap and model menu against Scrunch, read on 4 November, are Peec AI vs Scrunch AI. The leave-Peec shortlist is Peec AI alternatives. Where a cell below is AthenaHQ's marketing sentence rather than a cap I could count, I say so.

Key Takeaways

• On 12 November 2026 AthenaHQ's plans page showed Essential as free, with "$25 free credit" on the card and a tooltip that says "Includes 300 credits." Starter was $295 a month. The Starter card prints "$300/month free credit," and the tooltip on that line says "3,600 credits." The comparison row says 3,600 credits a month and "1 credit = 1 AI response." Enterprise credits are custom, with the same one-credit definition. The annual control is labeled "17% off." I did not extract an annual dollar. API access and extra credits on Starter are paid add-ons, and the page says to make contact for that price.
• The homepage lists 11 platforms: ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, and Mistral, plus a line that additional models are available on request. The Starter card says "Visibility across 11 models" and does not repeat the 11 names. The comparison's monitoring row names eight (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok) and then says "and more." Both columns of that row are marked included. The Essential card does not name a model.
• The Responses guide separates four yes-or-no fields: whether the brand was mentioned, whether the response provided sources, whether it cited anything, and whether it cited the content you are tracking. Sponsored ChatGPT placements are reported separately and do not count as organic mentions or citations. CSV export of responses is limited to paid plans. I did not open a stored answer, so I am citing the guide, not a row I downloaded.
• The comparison table is Starter against Enterprise. It is not an Essential column. Multiple Countries, the Athena Citation Engine, the advanced content optimization agent, and a certified specialist are "none" on Starter and "has" on Enterprise. Multi-language and multi-region support reads "Single" on Starter and "Multiple" on Enterprise. Persona targeting, the recommendation engine, configurable multi-views, a tailored instance, the executive BI dashboard, Slack, SAML SSO, audit logs, and a 2-hour SLA are the same split. Unlimited seats are on both.
• Oracle, in the product guide, scans the latest completed prompt run against verified Knowledge Base facts. A scan needs Oracle access, a website admin, at least 25 verified facts, and one completed prompt run. Acknowledging a finding does not change the model. The Enterprise card is where "Oracle discrepancy detection" and "Knowledge Base and claim review" are listed. They are not on the Starter card. No plan on this page guarantees a citation.

What Is AthenaHQ in November 2026?

AthenaHQ sells a monitor, a citation table, a writing and action layer, and an agent it calls Ask Athena. The homepage frames the product as "see, act, and win" on AI search. The plans page is narrower than that story, and the plans page is the invoice. Essential is the free card. Starter is the only published monthly price. Enterprise is the column where the comparison icons turn on for the features a security review usually asks about.

The homepage FAQ says AthenaHQ monitors AI platforms, and the platform list under "today's top AI platforms" is the 11 names above. A separate block on the same page says "11+ LLMs" in the command-center and toolkit copy. I am not adding a twelfth name to make "11+" into a contents list. The request line is the twelfth sentence: additional models are available on request. A request is not a checkbox on Starter. If a buyer needs a model that is not in the 11, the honest status is the request, not the card.

Ask Athena, in that same FAQ, is described as an agent you can question in plain language about the account's own prompt, citation, and competitor data. The FAQ contrasts it with ChatGPT by saying ChatGPT does not have the account's visibility data. I did not type a question into it. I am not reviewing the quality of an answer I did not see. The useful claim, if it holds inside the product, is that the agent is pointed at stored runs rather than at the open web. A stored run is still only as good as the prompt list and the models that ran. Ask Athena does not replace the row.

The homepage also prints a Gartner line, "50% of traditional search traffic will be replaced with generative AI by 2028," and the AEO answer in the FAQ says Gartner predicts traditional search volume will drop 25% by 2026. I did not open the Gartner report on 12 November. A prediction on a vendor homepage is not a forecast for a client's category. The same page prints customer outcome lines: a 6x share-of-voice lift, a move from 2.0% to 12.6% in 60 days, a 38% month-over-month lead increase, a 50% increase in AI-influenced demos, a 1,561% ROI, an 11x growth in AI Overview impressions, and several other multiples. I am not using them. The page does not show the prompt set, the date range, or the baseline next to those tiles in a way I could recompute. A case-study tile is AthenaHQ's claim about a customer. It is not a result I measured.

The plans page also prints badges: a G2 "High Performer" for Spring 2026 in Answer Engine Optimization, and a Slashdot "Most Loved Software" line at 4.9 out of 5. I did not open G2 or Slashdot and recount the reviews. A badge on a pricing page is a badge on a pricing page. It does not tell you whether the cited URL is stored.

How Do the Plans Compare?

The table is the plans page as I could read it on 12 November 2026. Essential is the free card. It does not have a column in the comparison table I parsed, so Essential cells below are the card and its tooltip, not a checkmark I could not see. Starter and Enterprise checkmarks are the alt text on the comparison icons: "has" or "none." Where the cell was words rather than an icon, I quote the words. I did not log in to see whether a "has" on sentiment means the same chart on both plans.

If the 11 names are not the engines a buyer actually uses, Book a Call and bring the one engine the board already asked about. The engine decides whether Starter is even the column, before anyone divides 3,600.

What the Credits Actually Meter

The only definition I will put on a slide is the one the comparison tooltip prints: 1 credit equals 1 AI response. The Sources guide adds a second, smaller meter for a different job. A bulk rescan of cited URLs costs about 1 credit per 10 URLs, up to 10,000 URLs in a run, and the dialog shows the cost before you confirm. A prompt run and a page rescan are not the same object. I would not add them together and call the sum "answers."

Starter's 3,600 is a monthly pool on the comparison row, with 1-month rollover on the card. The billing guide describes a shared organization pool, website-level balances, a daily usage chart, and a credit log whose actions include a prompt run and a rescan. It also describes buying more credits as a monthly package or a one-time purchase, applied to one website or the whole organization, and locking credits into a website so a shared pool cannot be drained by another site. I did not open that screen. The plans page already says extra credits are a paid add-on and tells you to make contact. The billing guide tells you the control exists. Neither page printed a per-credit dollar on 12 November. I will not invent one.

What the plans page does not print is the cadence. It does not say that every prompt runs every day. It does not say that a prompt hits all 11 models. It does not say that a model you toggle off still consumes a credit. If you assume a daily run and one credit per model, 3,600 credits is a small set once 11 models are all on. That sentence is my assumption, not AthenaHQ's claim, and I am not going to brief a client with an assumed prompt count. The number I will brief is 3,600 responses, and then I will ask, in writing, how many models a scheduled prompt touches and what the screen does when the pool hits zero.

Essential's tooltip says 300 credits against $25 of free credit. The card does not say the 300 refresh every month, and it does not mention rollover. Starter is the plan that says "per month" and "1-month credit rollover." I would not tell a founder that the free card is a quiet 300-a-month subscription. I would tell them the tooltip says 300 credits, and that I did not see the reset sentence on that card. Three hundred responses is enough to learn whether a stored answer contains the URL. It is not enough to cover a category across 11 models on a daily schedule, under the assumption I just refused to treat as a vendor promise.

Unlimited topics and unlimited prompts, which are on the Starter card, sit next to a finite credit pool. That combination is easy to misread in a procurement email. You can create more prompts than you can run. The cap that stops the week is the credit balance, not the prompt field. The comparison even has a row called "Unlimited Prompt Volume Estimation & Analysis," and the cell under it is an example, "XX,XXX searches," not a measured volume. I am not filling in the X's. Prompt volume estimation is a feature name. It is not a number of searches AthenaHQ guaranteed you.

The billing guide also says a plan can show Trialing, Active, or Past due, and that a website with no subscription displays a line that it is not currently on a plan. I did not see a day count for a Starter trial on the plans page. Essential is the free offer I could read. I would not tell a team there is a 14-day Starter trial, because I did not find that sentence. If the signup screen asks for a card, read the screen. I did not click it.

Which Models You Can Name on Starter

The model list is the decision, and AthenaHQ prints it in more than one place. The homepage list is 11 names, in this order: ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, Mistral. The Add Website guide describes schedule toggles for the same 11, in a different order: ChatGPT, AI Overview, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Mode, Grok, Claude, DeepSeek, Meta AI, and Mistral. I am treating those as the same 11. AI Overviews and AI Overview are the same product name written two ways, the way AI Mode is written once. I am not splitting them into two engines because the docs used the singular.

The comparison row is shorter. It says visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, and more, and it marks that row included on Starter and on Enterprise. DeepSeek, Meta AI, and Mistral are in the homepage list and in the onboarding toggles. They are not spelled out in that comparison sentence. "And more" is not a contents list. The Starter card's "11 models" is the sentence I would use if someone asks whether those three are on the paid card. I would still ask the order form to repeat the 11, because a homepage and a pricing row that do not match word for word are how a quarterly deck ends up naming a model the workspace cannot run.

Essential remains the hole. The free card lists prompt and response analysis. It does not say "5 models," and it does not say "11 models." I have seen third-party reviews assign the free tier a five-model subset. I am not repeating that subset. It was not on the plans page I downloaded. If the free workspace only runs some of the 11, the product should say which ones. Until it does, I will not brief Essential as ChatGPT plus four friends.

Perplexity being on the homepage list is the practical difference between this card and a trial that only names three engines. Profound's trial, on the pricing page I used for the November Profound review, names ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, and it does not let you edit the prompts. AthenaHQ Starter names Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Grok, and the rest of the 11, on prompts the card says are unlimited, inside a credit pool. Those are different products. A team that needs Perplexity on a page with a dollar does not need to wait for Profound's Enterprise list. A team that needs a second country does not get it from Starter's "Single" cell, and Profound's trial is one region as well. The country problem is not solved by switching logos.

I also did not find a model version. The Responses guide says the Model column names the AI model, with examples, and it does not say which ChatGPT model, whether browsing is on, or whether a Gemini answer is the consumer app. Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode are separate names, which is the right way to print them. If a report is going to a board, I want the vendor's own sentence on model version in the order form. I do not have that sentence from the pages I opened.

Mentions, Citations, and the Response Row

The Responses guide is the page I would make a new user open before the dashboard. It describes one row per stored answer. The columns include the date and time, the model, a yes or no for whether the brand was mentioned, the competitors mentioned, a yes or no for whether the response provided sources, a yes or no for whether it cited anything, and a yes or no for whether it cited the content you are tracking. That last field is called an attributed citation. Market position is a numeric rank. Sentiment is positive, neutral, negative, or not analyzed. Prompt type is branded or non-branded. There is a prompt variation field, which means a run can be the base prompt or an expansion. Country and location are columns, and the guide says location is only available for accounts with the location offering.

Those yes-or-no fields are the report. A mention of the brand, a response that has sources, a response that cites something, and a response that cites your URL are four different facts. I have watched teams add the first and the fourth together and call the sum "visibility." The guide gives you the columns to keep them apart. I would label a chart with the column name and the date, the same way I would on any other log. Share of voice, which the docs index lists on Olympus alongside mentions, citations, position, and business value, is a different chart. I did not recompute a share-of-voice formula from the Olympus guide on 12 November. I will not invent the denominator.

The guide also says sponsored ChatGPT placements are reported separately and do not count as organic mentions or citations. If an advertiser also appears in the answer text or in organic sources, only the organic occurrence counts toward organic metrics. That is the right split. A paid placement inside ChatGPT is not a citation you earned with a page. The docs index lists an Ads guide for sponsored placements across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Google Search or AI Overview responses. I did not walk that guide line by line. I am using the Responses page's rule, which I did read: sponsored placements are not organic mentions.

Export is where the free plan ends. The Responses guide says CSV export is only available on paid subscription plans, and that a free plan's export button opens an upgrade prompt instead of a file. The dialog, on a paid plan, offers quick amounts such as 1,000 or 5,000 and an export-all option. The Starter card lists data export to CSV, which matches a paid plan. I did not download a file, so I cannot tell you whether the CSV contains the full answer text or only the columns you had turned on. The guide says you can show, hide, and reorder columns, and that several columns are hidden by default, including market position, attributed citation, and cited. A default export that hides the attributed-citation column would be a worse file than the screen. I would ask for one sample CSV before I promised a writer the URL would be in the sheet.

The drawer, according to the guide, shows the full text, the sources, the competitors, and the attributes. That is the object I actually want from a visibility tool. I did not open one. I am not going to describe the tone of an answer I did not read. The existence of the drawer is the reason Starter can be a measurement system and not only a score. It is also the reason Essential is a limited look: if the export is paid-only, a free login can still be worth a week of reading on screen, and it is not a file you can hand to someone who does not have the login.

Sources, and What Citation Percent Is Not

Sources is the other page, and the Sources doc is more careful than a logo wall. It says the page answers which websites the engines read when they write about the market. Citations are collected from the engines selected for a prompt run, grouped by domain and by URL. A response can have no citations. The data depends on the engines and the prompts in the run. The doc says Athena does not infer citations from keyword rankings or from website traffic.

The columns I would keep are these. Citation percent is the share of AI responses, under the current filters, that include at least one citation to that domain or URL. Responses influenced is the count of distinct responses that cited the source. Brand mention percent, in the domain view, is how often your brand is also mentioned in responses that cite the source. Competitor mention percent is the share of citing responses that also cite a tracked competitor. The type tags are Owned, Competitor, Partner, and Third-party, and you can add custom tags. Monthly impressions are an estimate: citation percentage multiplied by estimated prompt volume. The doc says this is not measured website traffic. I would not put that column in a board packet next to a GA4 session count and call them the same thing.

Page view adds a second layer that is easy to mix up with the first. Source Mentions Brand means the cited page itself mentions the brand. That is not the same as the AI response mentioning the brand. The doc says a rescan refreshes the page check and does not rewrite historical AI responses. Bulk rescan is the credit job I mentioned: about 1 credit per 10 URLs, with the cost shown first. A page-level category overrides the domain category for that page. Filters include date, model, prompt, competitor, persona, location, tags, and source type. If you do not set a date, Sources defaults to the last 7 days. I would rather set the date than inherit a week I did not choose.

The doc's own workflows are the ones I agree with. Sort by citation percent and see which third-party domains the engines already trust. Sort by competitor mention percent and look for rows where your brand mention percent is low. Filter to Owned, switch to page view, and sort by responses influenced: those are your pages the engines are actually citing. The social tab narrows to platforms such as YouTube, Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Quora, and Substack. None of that is a link-building guarantee. It is a list of URLs that appeared in stored answers. A URL in that list is a place to read, not a placement you have bought.

Export on Sources is a download of 1,000 rows, 5,000 rows, all rows, or a custom count. The guide I read does not say this download is paid-only, unlike the Responses export. I am not going to assume the Sources file is included on Essential just because the Responses page is the one that states the paid gate. I would click it on the plan you actually have. I did not click it.

Actions, Oracle, and the Citation Engine

Starter's card is not only a log. It lists on-page and off-page actions, a content optimization agent, and self-learning content improvement. The comparison marks, on Starter, brand-voice enforcement, on-page and off-page actions, a smart robots.txt and llms.txt control, citation intelligence, and a base content optimization agent. The advanced content optimization agent is "none" on Starter and "has" on Enterprise. I did not run either agent. I cannot tell you what "advanced" adds, or what "self-learning" changes on a second pass. I can tell you the pricing table thinks they are different rows. A demo that spends the hour in the advanced agent is not a demo of the $295 card unless the recap email says the agent you watched is the base one.

The Citation Engine is the row people will hear in a sales call, and the comparison is plain about it. Athena Citation Engine (ACE) is marked new, "none" on Starter, and "has" on Enterprise. It appears twice, under the plan essentials and again under Action, with the same split. I am not going to describe ACE's internals. The docs index I opened does not give ACE its own page title in the section I used. The plans page is the gate. If the reason you want AthenaHQ is ACE, Starter is the wrong card. Enterprise is the conversation, and Enterprise does not have a public price.

Oracle is the fact check, and the Oracle guide is specific. It compares what models said in the latest completed prompt run with verified Knowledge Base facts. It groups confirmed inaccuracies, possible problems in the Knowledge Base itself, and disagreements between models. You need Oracle access, at least 25 verified facts, a completed prompt run, and website admin rights. One scan runs at a time. You do not pick a date range. The scan uses the latest completed run. Acknowledging or ignoring a finding changes the review status. It does not edit the fact, publish a page, or change what the model says. The guide says to edit the fact in the Knowledge Base and run again. Older remediation drafts, if you have them, live under Content, and the current review flow does not automatically create a draft.

That is a useful product if it is on the plan you bought. The Enterprise card lists "Oracle discrepancy detection" and "Knowledge Base and claim review." The Starter card does not. The comparison table I parsed does not have an Oracle row at all. I am using the Enterprise card as the inclusion and the absence on Starter as the non-inclusion. I would not promise a fee-page fact check on a Starter login. If a model invents a price, the tool that catches it has to be in the order form. A screenshot in a sales deck is not the plan.

The homepage FAQ's instructions for getting recommended by ChatGPT are the ordinary ones: allow OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, and ChatGPT-User, write pages that answer the questions, use schema, keep facts consistent, and earn mentions on other sites. AthenaHQ did not invent that list, and the product does not do it for you by existing. The crawler-control row on Starter, the robots.txt and llms.txt control, is the part of that work the product says it will touch. I did not edit a robots file through it. Allowing a crawler and being the URL the model repeats are still separate jobs. No row on the plans page says otherwise.

Security, Seats, and the Quote

Unlimited seats on Starter and Enterprise mean the security review is not about how many logins you need. It is about SSO, the audit log, and where the prompt data lives. The comparison marks Google and Microsoft OAuth on Starter. SAML SSO, named as Okta, Ping, and more, is "none" on Starter and "has" on Enterprise. Audit logs, a dedicated Slack channel, a 2-hour SLA, and white-glove setup are the same split. The Enterprise card says SAML and OIDC, and an organization activity audit log. The homepage FAQ says the company holds SOC II Type 2 certification, is GDPR compliant for EU and UK processing, and has implemented the NIST Cybersecurity Framework at Tier 3 under CSF 2.0. I am quoting the FAQ. I did not download a SOC report on 12 November. A page that says the audit exists is not the PDF. If procurement cannot start without the PDF, ask for it. Do not start that review on Essential and hope the file arrives with the free credits.

There is still no public Enterprise price. The moment the second country, ACE, Oracle, the BI tools, or SAML matters, you are in a sales process. That is a reasonable process when the company is already doing a security review and the order form will name the models and the credit pool. It is a bad process when the team wanted to compare three tools on a spreadsheet this afternoon. Starter exists so that second case has a number. The add-on hole is real: API access and extra credits are "make contact," so a Starter budget that assumes the API is inside $295 is wrong. The card says the add-ons are billed on top.

The homepage FAQ says AthenaHQ serves enterprise teams with persona targeting, multi-region tracking across 60+ countries and languages, prompt volume forecasting with dollar-value estimates, and custom executive dashboards. Persona targeting and the BI dashboard are "none" on Starter in the comparison, which matches the FAQ's enterprise framing. The 60+ figure is the FAQ's enterprise sentence. I would not tell a two-country brand that Starter includes 60 countries because the FAQ used that number. The comparison cell says Single. Capable, on Enterprise, and included, on Starter, are different rows.

Where AthenaHQ Is Strong, and Where It Is Not

The strong case is specific. There is a published monthly price. Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, and Mistral are named on the homepage, not hidden behind a "contact us" for the model list itself. The credit definition is one sentence long, which is better than a credit that means "it depends" with no definition at all. The Responses guide separates a mention from a source, a citation, and an attributed citation, and it keeps sponsored placements out of the organic count. Sources will show the domain, the URL, and a type tag, and it will tell you the impression column is an estimate. CSV export is on the Starter card. Seats are unlimited, so a five-person team is not paying per login on the card. OAuth is on Starter. The base action layer, including the robots.txt and llms.txt control, is marked on Starter rather than held entirely for the quote. Essential exists, with a stated credit tooltip, so a team can look at a stored answer before it argues about Enterprise.

The weak case is just as specific. You can create unlimited prompts and still run out of credits, and the page will not tell you how many prompts 3,600 buys. Essential's model list is not printed. The comparison row and the homepage do not name the same 11 in the same sentence. Multiple countries, ACE, Oracle, the Knowledge Base, the advanced agent, persona targeting, and SAML are a quote. API and extra credits are a second quote on top of Starter. There is no annual dollar next to the 17% label. There is no model version. The homepage multiples are not a forecast. A value card on a dashboard, if the workspace shows one, is not revenue. I did not find a shopping row on the plans table. The docs index lists a Shopping Insights guide for ChatGPT, AI Mode, and Gemini carousels. I did not walk it, and I will not tell a merchant that product tiles are included on Starter.

On a fintech shortlist, Austin Heaton still asks for one stored answer before the invoice is approved. The answer has to show the brand, the URL, and the engine. A presence score without that row can wait. If the stored answer is wrong about a fee or a license, the next step is a person, not another dashboard. Pricing for that kind of engagement depends on scope. The measurement stack I use around a log is how I measure AEO results.

Who AthenaHQ Fits

• You need a published price and Perplexity, Claude, or Grok named before a demo. Starter is the card that says 11 models, and the homepage list includes those names. Read the credit pool before you promise a daily run of every model. Do not brief Essential as that list. The Essential card does not say it.
• You need the URL, not a score. The Responses guide is the reason to take the paid plan seriously: mentioned, sources, cited, and attributed citation are separate columns, and the drawer is supposed to hold the full text. Ask for one CSV before you promise the file to a writer. The export gate is a paid plan.
• You need a second country, ACE, or Oracle. Do not buy Starter for those. The comparison says none, and the Enterprise card is where Oracle and the Citation Engine are named. Take the quote only when the order form repeats the models, the credit pool, the countries, and whether ACE and SSO are included. There is no public Enterprise price.
• You need a flat prompt count instead of a credit you have to divide. AthenaHQ will not give you that on the page I read. A daily log that prices prompts, including the November packaging change at Otterly and the prompt cards at Peec, is Otterly.ai vs Peec AI. I am not rebuilding their invoices in this review.
• The buying process is a security review and a custom engine list. That is a different quote. Profound's trial and the missing self-serve price are the Profound review. AthenaHQ Starter is the path that avoids the quote. AthenaHQ Enterprise is the path that re-enters it.
• You needed pages, not a log. Starter includes a base content agent and on-page actions, and a person still has to read anything that states a fee. The advanced agent is Enterprise. A content score with a published document cap is a different budget. Use AthenaHQ, if you use it, to see whether the new URL was cited. Do not ask the credit pool to be the editorial calendar.

Verdict

I would open AthenaHQ Starter when the job is a stored answer across a named set of models that includes Perplexity, on prompts the team wrote, at a price I can put on a spreadsheet this week, and when one country is enough. I would use the 3,600-credit line as a response cap, not as a prompt cap, until AthenaHQ writes down how many models one scheduled prompt consumes. I would not describe Essential as the 11-model product. I would not let a homepage multiple into a forecast.

I would take the Enterprise conversation when the missing piece is a second country, the Citation Engine, Oracle, the Knowledge Base, SAML, or the BI dashboard, and when someone will paste the model names and the credit pool into the order form. "11 models" is already a list of 11 on the homepage. The quote should repeat the 11, or it should say which ones were removed, and it should say what "and more" means on the comparison row. I would not buy Enterprise because a FAQ says the company has a SOC II Type 2 report. That report belongs in the email, as a file.

I would not run AthenaHQ next to three other logs "to be safe." I would run the one whose base models match the prompts, then keep the stored answer. AthenaHQ is the right published card when the engine list is the reason to buy and the team will do the credit arithmetic on purpose. It is the wrong card when the team needed ACE, a second country, or a prompt price that does not move when you tick an eleventh model. No plan on this page guarantees a citation.

What I Could Not Confirm

• Which models Essential actually runs. The card does not say. I am not using a third-party five-model list.
• How many prompts 3,600 credits represent. The page says 1 credit equals 1 AI response. It does not say how many responses one prompt generates in a day.
• Whether Essential's 300 credits reset monthly. The tooltip says 300. The rollover sentence is on Starter.
• An annual dollar for Starter. The toggle says 17% off. The price I could read, with the monthly control active in the HTML, was $295 a month.
• A dollar price for the API add-on or for extra credits. The page says to make contact.
• Whether "Single" means one country, one language, or one region. The cell says Single. The Starter card says country-level support. I am not expanding it further.
• A model version, or whether browsing is on, for any of the 11 names.
• The columns inside a CSV. The Responses guide describes the table. It does not list the export's headers. I did not download one.
• Whether the Sources CSV is included on Essential. The paid-only sentence I read is on the Responses export.
• What the Athena Citation Engine does, beyond the gate. The comparison says it is not on Starter. The guide index I used does not give it a procedure I am willing to summarize as a feature list.
• Whether Shopping Insights, pitch reports, or Site Health are on Starter. The docs index lists them. The plans table I parsed does not.
• The SOC report, the NIST assessment, and any customer result on the homepage, including the Gartner lines. They are AthenaHQ's citations. I did not recompute them.
• A stored answer from inside the product. I read the public pages. I did not create an account.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does AthenaHQ Starter include?

On the plans page I opened on 12 November 2026, Starter is the published monthly plan. The card lists a credit pool with one month of rollover, visibility across 11 models, unlimited topics and prompts, unlimited competitors, country-level support, integrations, CSV export, on-page and off-page actions, a content optimization agent, and self-learning content improvement. The comparison marks API access and extra credits as paid add-ons. It marks the Citation Engine, multiple countries, and the advanced content agent as not included. Enterprise is custom. Essential is the free card, and it does not name the 11 models.

Does AthenaHQ publish an annual price?

The plans page labels the annual control as a percentage off. I did not extract an annual dollar amount from the page I downloaded. The monthly price is what the active monthly view showed. I would not budget an annual invoice from the percentage label alone. If a comparison somewhere else prints an annual AthenaHQ figure, I would not use it until AthenaHQ's own page shows the dollar.

Which AI models can I name before a quote?

The homepage lists ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, and Mistral, and says more are available on request. The Starter card says 11 models and does not repeat the names. The comparison row names eight of them and then says "and more," on both Starter and Enterprise. The Essential card does not name a model. I would ask the order form to repeat the 11 before I put all 11 in a deck.

How do AthenaHQ credits work?

The comparison tooltip says 1 credit equals 1 AI response. Starter's comparison row gives a monthly credit count, and the card includes one month of rollover. Essential's tooltip gives a smaller credit count and does not mention rollover. The page does not say how many models one scheduled prompt runs, so I will not convert the pool into a prompt allowance. Extra credits are a paid add-on on Starter, with no public rate on the page I read. A bulk rescan of cited URLs is a different, smaller charge described in the Sources guide.

Does Starter include the Citation Engine or Oracle?

No, on the pages I read. The comparison marks the Athena Citation Engine as not included on Starter and included on Enterprise. The Enterprise card names Oracle discrepancy detection and Knowledge Base and claim review. The Starter card does not. The Oracle guide says a scan needs access, an admin, at least 25 verified facts, and a completed prompt run, and that acknowledging a finding does not change what the model says. I would not buy Starter for that scan.

Does AthenaHQ separate a mention from a citation?

Yes, in the Responses guide. A row can say whether the brand was mentioned, whether the response provided sources, whether it cited anything, and whether it cited the content you track. Those are separate yes-or-no fields. Sponsored ChatGPT placements are reported apart from organic mentions and citations. The Sources guide then groups cited domains and URLs, and it says citation share is not website traffic. I did not export a row, so this is the guide, not a file I opened.

Who should skip AthenaHQ?

Skip Starter when you need a second country, the Citation Engine, Oracle, SAML SSO, or a prompt price that does not depend on how many models you tick. Use a tool whose card already states a prompt cap and the country count. Skip Essential when you needed a named model list and a CSV. Take Enterprise only when the order form repeats the models, the credits, the countries, and whether the Citation Engine and SSO are in the quote. No plan on this page guarantees a citation. If you want the prompt set designed around the questions buyers ask, pricing depends on scope.

Read next:

• AthenaHQ vs Profound for AI Visibility Tracking
• Profound Review, November 2026
• Profound Alternatives for AI Visibility Tracking
• Otterly.ai vs Peec AI
• Otterly.ai Review, November 2026
• Peec AI vs Scrunch AI
• Peec AI Alternatives

If the 11 models, the credit pool, and the Enterprise rows are three different purchases, Book a Call and we will put one buyer prompt on the only card that can track it.