AthenaHQ vs Profound for AI Visibility Tracking in 2026

AthenaHQ is the better fit when the team needs a published price, a named list of 11 models, and a credit count it can divide before anyone books a demo. Profound is the better fit when the buying process is a security review and a custom quote, and a 7-day trial on three engines is enough to judge whether the citation report stores the URL. On 5 November 2026 AthenaHQ Starter was $295 a month. Profound's brand pricing page did not show a paid self-serve price at all.

Last updated - November 2026

I am Austin Heaton. The visibility logs I set up are mostly for fintech. The rest are B2B SaaS and other industries when the buyer question is the same. A tracking tool is a log. It is worth paying for when I can open the answer, see the cited URL, and tell a founder which page to change. It is not worth paying for when the number cannot be opened.

AthenaHQ's prices are from the plans page, read on 5 November 2026. The model list and the product FAQ are from the AthenaHQ homepage the same day. Citation columns are from Athena's Sources documentation, and the dashboard metrics are from the Olympus dashboard doc. Profound's trial and Enterprise terms are from Profound's pricing page. The citation categories are from Profound's citation feature page, and the prompt-volume claim is from Profound's features page. The wider shortlist that already includes Profound next to Peec, Otterly, and Semrush is Profound vs Peec AI vs Otterly vs Semrush. This page does not restate those invoices.

Key Takeaways

• AthenaHQ's plans page shows Essential free, with "$25 free credit" printed on the card, Starter at $295 a month, and Enterprise custom. The comparison table puts 3,600 credits on Starter and says 1 credit equals 1 AI response. I did not extract an annual dollar price.
• AthenaHQ's homepage names 11 platforms: 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 visibility across 11 models. The Essential card does not.
• Profound's brand pricing page is a free 7-day trial and a custom Enterprise plan. The trial runs 50 prompts daily on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. The FAQ says trial prompts are recommended and cannot be customized. Enterprise says up to 9 answer engines.
• Profound's Enterprise capability list names ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, DeepSeek, Anthropic Claude, Google AI Overviews, Exa Search, and Muse Spark. I did not find a published monthly price for a brand plan, for Agency Growth, or for extra agent credits.
• Athena's Sources doc separates a citation in the answer from a mention on the cited page, and it says a response can have no citations. Profound's citation page categorizes sources and describes citation share. Neither product is a content grade. That job is Clearscope vs SurferSEO.

What Job Are These Two Tools Doing?

Both products sell a prompt log. You care about a question, the tool runs it on one or more answer engines, and you get some version of who was named and which sources were involved. The useful version stores the answer and the URL. The weak version stores a score. I will not call a score a citation.

Profound already appears in a four-tool shortlist with Peec AI, Otterly, and Semrush. That page is Profound vs Peec AI vs Otterly vs Semrush. Prices there are not the prices on Profound's site on 5 November 2026, and I am not going to paste them forward. Otterly's plan math, engines, and add-ons are the Otterly.ai review. Peec's country limit and engine menu against Scrunch are Peec AI vs Scrunch AI. If the team already lives in a suite, the reporting comparison is Ahrefs vs SEMrush for AI search reporting. This page is AthenaHQ and Profound only.

The writing-grade version of the same budget is a different category. A monitor does not tell a writer which term is missing, and a content score does not store yesterday's answer. If the brief is the grade, read Clearscope vs SurferSEO. Measurement as a program, rather than as a login, is the work behind measuring AI visibility.

How Do AthenaHQ and Profound Compare?

The table uses each vendor's words. Where a plans-page column did not show a checkmark I could assign, the cell says so. I am not filling blanks from a third-party review.

If the engine list in the quarterly deck is not the list on the entry offer, Book a Call and bring the three engines the board already named. The third engine is usually the one that forces a quote.

What Does AthenaHQ Include at $295?

AthenaHQ's plans page has three offers. Essential is free. The card prints "$25 free credit" and lists unlimited users, prompt and response analysis, sources and competitor insights, content recommendations, and an Athena AI agent. Starter is $295 a month. The card lists 1-month credit 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. It also says API access and extra credits are paid add-ons billed on top of Starter, and it says to contact AthenaHQ for that price. Enterprise is custom. The comparison table's "best for" line says self-guided SMBs for Starter and enterprises and agencies for Enterprise.

The same Starter card prints "$300/month free credit" under the $295 price. I could not tell whether that is a credit grant, a promotion, or a label that did not match the table. The comparison table's credit number is 3,600 a month, with the note that 1 credit equals 1 AI response. Enterprise credits are custom, with the same definition. I am not going to convert the Essential card's $25 into a credit count. The card did not print one. I also did not see an annual dollar price. The table header includes the words Monthly and Annual. The only Starter amount I could extract was $295 a month.

Unlimited prompts and a response cap are not the same sentence. You can type as many prompts as you want, on the Starter row, and every AI response spends a credit. If every tracked prompt is run once on all 11 models, 3,600 divided by 11 is about 327 prompt checks in the month. If that same set has to refresh every day across a 30-day month, 3,600 divided by 11 and then by 30 is about 10 prompts. Athena does not print that schedule. I am showing the division so 3,600 is not read as 3,600 prompts, and so "unlimited" is not read as unlimited runs. A team that tracks 50 prompts on 11 models once a day is at 550 responses a day, which is far past 3,600 in a week. That team is in the add-on conversation or the Enterprise conversation, and the add-on price was not on the page.

Which 11 models the homepage actually names

The homepage lists ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, and Mistral, then says additional models are available on request. That is 11 names plus a request line. The same page says the product tracks 11+ LLMs. The Starter card says "visibility across 11 models" without repeating the 11. The plans-page monitoring section names ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, and more. The Olympus docs, in a filter example, name ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek, and Mistral. I am treating the homepage list as the named 11. I am not treating the shorter docs example as a smaller product, and I am not treating Essential as if it included the 11. The free card does not say that.

What the Sources page counts

Athena's Sources doc is the citation page I would use. It says Sources collects the domains and URLs cited by the engines selected for a prompt run, and that a response can have no citations. The data depends on the engines and prompts in the run. 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 it. Brand Mention percent, in the domain view, is how often your brand is also mentioned in the responses that cite that source. Competitor Mention percent is the share of citing responses that also cite a tracked competitor. Monthly Impressions multiplies citation percent by estimated prompt volume, and the doc says this is not measured website traffic. I would not put Monthly Impressions in a pipeline slide.

Page view separates the answer from the page. Source Mentions Brand is whether the cited page itself names you. The doc says a mention on the source page is different from a mention in the AI response, and that rescanning a page refreshes the page check and does not rewrite historical answers. That split is the one I want. A model can cite a listicle that never names you, and a model can name you without linking to you. Collapsing those into one score is how a Monday meeting briefs the wrong URL. Source types are Owned, Competitor, Partner, and Third-party, with custom tags. The default date range, if you do not set one, is the last 7 days. Bulk rescans of cited URLs cost about 1 credit per 10 URLs, and the dialog shows the cost before you confirm. CSV export from the table is described in the doc. The Olympus doc says PDF and CSV exports are gated behind a paid plan, which matches a free Essential account that cannot download the deck.

Olympus is the dashboard in front of that table. The doc describes share of voice, mention rate, citation rate, position, and a per-model breakdown that is hidden until you turn the cards on. AI Search Value is a gauge that mixes measured AI share of voice with Google keyword volume and cost-per-click data. The doc says the main share-of-voice chart counts every mention equally, including branded queries, and the value card does not. I would not report the gauge as revenue. I would use it only as Athena's estimate, next to the citation URL. Clicking Responses Analyzed opens the responses. Clicking Sources Tracked opens Sources. That drill-down is the product. A donut without the response is not.

Ask Athena, publishing, and the claims I am not using

Ask Athena, in the homepage FAQ, is a copilot over the account's monitoring data. The FAQ says a plain-language question is answered from prompt monitoring, citations, competitors, and sentiment, and that ordinary ChatGPT does not have that account data. I did not submit a question on 5 November. The same FAQ names GA4, Google Search Console, Shopify, Webflow, and Framer, and it names Tableau, Power BI, and Looker for enterprise plans. It also says Shopify can publish content. I did not publish a page, so I am not treating that as a tested CMS workflow. The Starter card lists a content optimization agent. An Athena Citation Engine row appears in the comparison, and I could not see which column had the check, so I am not assigning it to Starter.

The homepage FAQ describes multi-region tracking across 60+ countries and languages, persona targeting, and SSO as enterprise-scale capabilities, and it says Athena holds SOC II Type 2, is GDPR compliant, and follows the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. I am repeating the FAQ. I did not read an audit. The Starter card says "country-level support." It does not say one country, and it does not say 60. A company in two markets should ask which plan holds the second country before treating $295 as the whole invoice. The homepage also prints growth figures and named customer stories. I am not using them. The plans page mentions G2 and Slashdot. I did not open those listings.

What Does Profound Include Before a Quote?

Profound's brand pricing page has two columns. Trial is free: limited AI Marketer credits, 50 prompts run daily for 7 days, on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Enterprise is custom: AI Marketer credits for the team, a tailored prompt tracking plan, up to 9 answer engines, dedicated support, and SSO/SAML plus SOC 2 compliance. The FAQ says the trial includes daily analysis of 50 unique prompts for 7 days across those three engines, and that trial users receive a recommended prompt set based on their industry and cannot customize it. On Enterprise you can edit, disable, or add prompts. Both plans include unlimited seats. The same FAQ says setup is instant. The citation page says most teams are tracking citations within a day, and that hands-on onboarding aims at a first citation report in the first week. The features page says most teams are up and running within hours. I am quoting three pages. I did not time a setup, and I would not put "instant" in a project plan.

The comparison table is more specific than the two summary cards. Trial is 50 unique prompts, daily for 7 days, those three engines, 1 language, 1 region, history none, exports none, and 5 Prompt Volumes searches. I did not see an API mark on the trial column. Agent Analytics lists unlimited domains on the trial, with integrations named as Akamai, AWS, Cloudflare, Fastly, Google Analytics, Google Cloud Platform, Netlify, Vercel, and WordPress. Support on the trial column is none. Enterprise moves prompts to custom, frequency to daily with no seven-day end in that cell, languages and regions to custom, history to all time, and exports to CSV and JSON. Support options on that side include email, a dedicated Slack channel, and a dedicated specialist with a 24 hour SLA.

The Enterprise engine cell is labeled as a capability for nine: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, DeepSeek, Anthropic Claude, Google AI Overviews, Exa Search, and Muse Spark. "Up to 9" on the summary card and "capability for" in the table are not the sentence "your contract includes all nine." I would make the order form name the engines before they go into a board appendix. Perplexity and Google AI Mode are on that list and not on the trial. A team that has been reporting either one will learn nothing about it during the free week.

The page does not say whether each of the 50 trial prompts runs on all three engines or the 50 runs are spread across them. I am not multiplying 50 by 3 by 7. If the runs are per engine, the week is a different sample than if they are not. That is a question for the trial itself, asked on day one, while the prompt list is still Profound's list and not yours.

Citations, Prompt Volumes, and credits

The citation feature page is the reason to open Profound. Every cited source gets a category: Owned, Competitor, Earned Media, PR Wire, Social, or Institution. Owned, Competitor, and Custom are yours to define. The rest are auto-assigned and can be overridden. You can look at citation share by platform, topic, or prompt, and the page says you can see where competitors earn citations and you do not. Watched pages track how citation volume on a single URL changes over time. Earned-media filtering is aimed at the publishers and authors cited most often in the category. The page says citation data exports as CSV or JSON. The pricing table puts exports on Enterprise and marks the trial as none. I am reading those together. The feature exists. The trial column does not include the export.

One definition on that page needs a careful read. The FAQ says citations are how answer engines anchor responses to sources, and that when your content is cited, your brand appears in the response users see. Athena's Sources doc keeps a cited URL and a brand mention as different fields, including the case where the cited page does not mention you. Profound's sentence, as I read it, ties the citation to the brand appearing. I will not pretend those are the same metric. In a trial I would ask to see one stored answer where the URL is cited and the brand is not named, and one where the brand is named and the URL is not. If the product cannot show both rows, the category filters are still useful and the evidence is thinner.

Prompt Volumes is the demand dataset. The features page says "1.3B+ real user conversations," and "hundreds of millions of real user queries per month," across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and more. The trial includes 5 searches of that dataset. Enterprise says custom. I am citing Profound's features page for the 1.3B+ figure. I am not auditing it, and I am not swapping in a larger number from a different Profound article. The same features page says Profound draws insights from the consumer experience, not from API outputs. That is a method claim. The way to test it is to open one stored answer next to a chat from the same day. I did not run that pair on 5 November.

Agents are priced in credits, and the FAQ separates them from the prompt log. A credit is consumed when an Agent runs. Simpler agents cost fewer credits. The trial includes limited AI Marketer credits. The FAQ says the self-serve Agency Growth plan comes with 400 credits a month per client workspace. Additional credit thresholds require Enterprise, and the account can be set to overage billing or to a pause when the allotment runs out. The platform shows an estimated cost before a run and the actual cost after. I did not find a dollar price for Agency Growth, for a credit, or for a brand plan beyond the free trial. A 400-credit sentence without a price is not an invoice.

The features page also describes ChatGPT Shopping and Agent Analytics. Shopping covers product placement, the prompts that trigger tiles, and which retailers appear. The pricing table has a shopping row, and I could not see which plan the mark sits on, so I am not assigning it to the trial. Agent Analytics is the crawler and referral view from server logs, and the trial column says domains are unlimited. That is a wider on-site allowance than the seven-day prompt log. It still does not show the sentence in the answer. The features page says SOC 2 Type II, with SAML and OIDC. The pricing card puts SSO/SAML and SOC 2 on Enterprise. I did not open the audit.

Which Limits Actually Change the Decision?

Four limits decide this pair more often than the feature count.

The first is whether you can read a price. Athena Starter is $295 a month on the page, with a credit formula you can divide, and with API and extra credits explicitly not included. Profound's brand page is a free week and a quote. If procurement cannot start without a number, Athena is the page that has one. If procurement cannot start without SSO and a custom engine list, Profound is the page that is built as that conversation. I would not describe the free Profound trial as a cheaper Athena. The prompts are not yours, the engines are three, and the week ends.

The second is the engine that is missing. Athena's homepage list includes Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, and Mistral alongside ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews. Profound's trial is ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews. Perplexity and AI Mode show up on Profound's Enterprise capability list, not in the week you get before the demo. A team that already reports Otterly or Peec should price those published plans, on the reviews linked above, before it treats either of these two as the only way to see Perplexity.

The third is the prompt list. Athena's Starter row says topics and prompts are unlimited and the meter is responses. Profound's trial FAQ says you cannot edit the prompts. For a fintech category, an industry prompt Profound chose is not the same sample as the fee and eligibility questions sales actually hears. Seven days of someone else's prompts can still show whether the tool stores an answer. It cannot show whether you are visible on the questions that move pipeline. That test starts when the prompts are editable, which Profound places on Enterprise.

The fourth is evidence. Athena's Sources doc will show a cited URL, a citation rate, and a separate flag for whether the page mentions the brand. Profound's citation page will categorize the source and compare citation share, and its FAQ sentence links a citation to the brand appearing. Buy the row you will open on Monday. Share of voice, AI Search Value, and a visibility score are downstream of that row. If the row is missing, the score is a mood.

Who Each Tool Fits

Pick from the price you can read, the engine that is missing, and whether anyone will open the answer.

• You need a number before a demo, and Perplexity has to be in the product. Athena Starter, after you divide 3,600 by the models and the refresh you actually want. Essential, if the only question is whether Sources stores a URL and you can live without the export. Do not assume the free card includes the 11 models.
• The purchase is a security review, and the prompt list has to be yours. Profound Enterprise, after the trial has shown one stored answer. Do not expect the trial to cover Perplexity, AI Mode, or a prompt you wrote. Put the engine names on the order form. "Up to 9" is a ceiling, not a contents list.
• You need Perplexity and a published price this week, and $295 is more than you meant to spend. Read the Otterly review and the Peec vs Scrunch comparison before you book either demo. Those pages have entry prices. This pair's entry prices are $295 and a free trial followed by a quote.
• An agency has a roster of brands. Profound's FAQ describes Agency Growth at 400 credits a month per client workspace and does not print the dollar. Athena's Enterprise column is the one labeled for agencies. Make both vendors price a three-brand roster. A single in-house brand does not need the agency motion.
• You already pay for Ahrefs or Semrush and the question is the suite's AI report. Read Ahrefs vs SEMrush before you add a third login. A specialist log still has to beat the suite on the stored answer, not on the logo.
• The gap is the page, not the log. The brief and the grade are Clearscope vs SurferSEO. Athena and Profound can name the URL that is losing. They are not the editor I would hand a writer.
• Fintech, payments, payroll, or lending. Prefer the tool that will show the sentence next to the URL. A share-of-voice move without the answer is how a wrong fee lands in a slide. On a live account, Austin Heaton still reads that sentence. The credit counter is allowed to be faster than a person. It is not allowed to be the last reader.

A tool subscription and an engagement are different bills. This page is only the tool.

What I Could Not Confirm

• An annual dollar price for AthenaHQ Starter. The plans page has a monthly and annual control. The amount I could extract was $295 a month.
• What the Starter card means by "$300/month free credit" next to a $295 price, and how many credits the Essential card's $25 represents.
• Dollar prices for AthenaHQ's API add-on and extra credits. The page says to make contact.
• A country cap on AthenaHQ Starter. The card says country-level support. The homepage FAQ puts 60+ countries and languages in the enterprise description. It does not say Starter is limited to one.
• Which AthenaHQ plan includes the Athena Citation Engine, multi-country tracking, and the robots.txt and llms.txt crawler control. The comparison extract did not show those checkmarks clearly.
• How AthenaHQ collects answers, through the consumer interface or an API. I did not find that sentence in the docs I opened. Profound's features page says it uses the consumer experience rather than API outputs. I did not test either method.
• A Profound price for brands beyond the free trial, a price for Agency Growth, or a price per agent credit.
• Whether each of Profound's 50 trial prompts runs on all three trial engines, or the 50 runs are shared across them.
• Which Profound plan includes ChatGPT Shopping. The row exists. The checkmark was not in the text I could assign.
• That Profound stores "URL cited, brand not named" as its own row. The citation FAQ sentence I read ties a citation to the brand appearing in the answer.
• Homepage growth claims, named customer results, and review-site badges. They are on the vendors' pages. I did not use them, and I did not open the award listings.
• A paired test I ran myself on 5 November 2026. This comparison is the public pricing pages, feature pages, and docs. It is not a logged-in bake-off.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better for AI visibility tracking, AthenaHQ or Profound?

AthenaHQ is the better fit when you need a published price, a homepage list of 11 named models, and a credit count you can divide before a demo. Profound is the better fit when the purchase is a custom quote with SSO and a prompt list you can edit, and a 7-day trial on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews is enough to judge the stored answer. Neither entry offer is a content grade.

How much do AthenaHQ and Profound cost in November 2026?

AthenaHQ's plans page, read on 5 November 2026, shows Essential as free with $25 of free credit printed on the card, Starter at $295 a month, and Enterprise as custom. I did not extract an annual dollar price. Profound's brand pricing page shows a free 7-day trial and a custom Enterprise plan. I did not find a paid self-serve brand price. The FAQ names an Agency Growth plan at 400 credits a month per client workspace and does not print a dollar amount.

Which AI engines does each product name?

AthenaHQ's homepage names ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, and Mistral, and says more models are available on request. The Starter card says 11 models. The free Essential card does not list engines. Profound's trial names ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. The Enterprise table lists a capability for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, DeepSeek, Anthropic Claude, Google AI Overviews, Exa Search, and Muse Spark, and the card says up to 9.

Do AthenaHQ and Profound show the cited URL, or only a score?

AthenaHQ's Sources doc groups citations by domain and by URL, defines citation percent as the share of responses that cite that source, and separately records whether the cited page mentions the brand. It also says a response can have no citations. Profound's citation page categorizes each source and describes citation share by platform, topic, and prompt. Profound's FAQ, on that page, says that when your content is cited your brand appears in the response. I would confirm both rows in a trial before treating the definitions as identical.

Can you choose the prompts on the entry offer?

AthenaHQ Starter lists topics and prompts as unlimited, with the meter on AI responses rather than on how many prompts you may type. I did not find a sentence that said the prompt text is locked. Profound's pricing FAQ says trial users get a recommended set and cannot customize it. Editing, disabling, and adding prompts is described on Enterprise.

What does AthenaHQ's 3,600 credit limit actually buy?

The plans page says 1 credit equals 1 AI response, and it puts 3,600 credits a month on Starter. If every prompt is run once on all 11 models, that pool is about 327 prompt checks in the month, not 327 a day. A daily refresh of that same 11-model set is on the order of 10 prompts. Those divisions are mine, not a schedule Athena prints. Extra credits and API access are paid add-ons, and the page does not list their prices.

Does either tool replace Clearscope or Surfer for content optimization?

No. AthenaHQ and Profound are visibility logs. Clearscope and Surfer are the tools that grade a draft against what already ranks. Athena's Starter card includes a content optimization agent, and Profound sells Agents that can draft from the gaps, with human checkpoints described on the features page. The grade, the term list, and the editor comparison are in the Clearscope vs SurferSEO article. A credit balance does not publish the page.

Read next:

• Profound vs Peec AI vs Otterly vs Semrush
• Otterly.ai Review, November 2026
• Peec AI vs Scrunch AI
• Clearscope vs SurferSEO for Content Optimization
• Measuring AI visibility

If the entry offer's engines are not the engines in the quarterly deck, Book a Call and we will divide the credits, the trial's locked prompts, and the missing engine before anyone treats a custom quote as the only next step.