TL;DR: AthenaHQ is the agency-shaped product in this category: multiple brands, client-ready reporting, daily refresh, from about $295/mo. Teams leave it for two reasons — it is priced for a portfolio and you have one brand, or it reports without doing the work. Below, seven alternatives and which job each is actually for.
AthenaHQ pricing and capabilities at a glance
AthenaHQ tracks brand presence across five engines with a daily refresh, built around managing several brands at once and producing reporting a client will accept. From around $295/mo as checked in September 2026.
What AthenaHQ does well
Multi-brand is native rather than bolted on. Most products in this category are built for one brand and make the second one awkward; AthenaHQ assumes a portfolio from the start.
Client-ready output. The reporting is designed to be sent to somebody who is paying for it, which is a different design goal from an internal dashboard and a harder one.
Daily refresh at a price that stays sane across several brands.
Why teams consider an alternative
The price per brand only works at scale. At one brand it is the most expensive self-serve product here by a wide margin, and the features you are paying for are the ones you are not using.
It reports more than it acts. There is some content capability, but the gap between knowing you are losing a question and having done something about it is still yours to cross.
The field
| Tool | Best for | Engines | Entry price | Acts on findings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Peak Answer | measurement plus the work it implies | 6 | $49/mo | Content, placements, social, technical |
| Profound | enterprise reporting | 5+ | Quoted | No |
| Peec AI | daily single-brand tracking | 5 | €90/mo | No |
| Otterly | cheapest credible tracking | 4 | $29/mo | No |
| AthenaHQ | agencies and multi-brand | 5 | $295/mo | Partial |
| Scrunch AI | crawler and agent visibility | 5 | Quoted | Technical only |
| Semrush AI Visibility | teams already on Semrush | 5 | $99/mo add-on | Via Semrush |
| Writesonic | content production first | 4 | $49/mo | Content |
Prices checked September 2026.
Pricing, in the unit you actually consume
Every vendor prices in a different unit - prompts, credits, queries, tracked keywords, brands - and none of them is the thing you buy. What you buy is model responses per month: questions times engines times frequency.
Converted, the ordering changes completely.
| Tool | Entry | Engines | Refresh | Responses/mo | Per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Peec AI | EUR 90/mo | 5 | Daily | ~3,000 | ~$32 |
| AthenaHQ | $295/mo | 5 | Daily | ~7,500 | ~$39 |
| Peak Answer | $49/mo | 6 | Weekly | ~650 | ~$75 |
| Otterly | $29/mo | 4 | Weekly | ~160 | ~$180 |
| Semrush | $99/mo | 5 | Weekly | ~540 | ~$183 |
| Writesonic | $49/mo | 4 | Weekly | ~240 | ~$204 |
Two things this makes visible. Daily refresh dominates the economics: Peec and AthenaHQ look expensive monthly and are the cheapest per response, because they measure seven times as often, which is only value if you will act seven times as often, and most teams will not. And the cheapest monthly price is the most expensive per unit: Otterly at $29 costs roughly five times more per thousand responses than Peec at EUR 90.
Figures rounded, from published entry plans.
What each one does after it has measured
The rows that separate these products are the bottom seven, not the top two. Everything here tracks brand presence. The question is what happens next, and whether anybody at your end is going to do it if the product does not.
What the measurement actually says
Most writing in this category is advice. This section is the measurement behind it, and it is ours: fourteen markets measured end to end, and 505 tracking runs on our own category.
How winnable a market is varies more than anyone admits
We measured fourteen markets with the same engine the product runs for customers, scoring every domain the engines cited. The entry bar - how small a cited site can be and still get quoted - ranged from 12 to 66 out of 100.
That is the difference between a quarter of work and a year of it, in the same discipline, decided entirely by which market you are in. Any vendor quoting one timeline has measured one market at most.
In Invisalign providers in a single city the bar was 12 and the typical cited site scored 25: a handful of well-made procedure and cost pages clears it. In men's health supplements the bar was 66 and GNC, a national retail chain, scored 62 and cleared it on one question in three, because the engines answer health questions out of medical sources and will not name a shop.
In most markets, your own site is not what gets cited
Content share is the proportion of cited sources that are somebody else's article rather than any vendor's own page. In nine of fourteen markets it was 100%.
In those nine, publishing more of your own content cannot put you in the answer, because no vendor's own content is being cited at all. The mechanism is editorial: being named inside the pages that do get cited. The one outlier was wedding photography at 56%, where the answer to the question is a list of photographers and the engines cite their portfolios directly.
This is the single most useful thing to know before choosing a tool, and almost none of them will tell you, because almost none of them report at the source level.
The gap between the floor and the middle is where newcomers get in
A wide gap means the engines are citing a few large publications and, underneath them, a scattering of much smaller sites. That tail is the opening. Freight brokerage had a bar of 14 against a median of 46, the widest spread we measured, and almost any serious page clears 14.
A narrow gap means the opposite. LinkedIn outreach tools had a bar of 45 against a median of 49 - four points - which means every cited site is roughly the same size and nothing small is getting in underneath.
We ran the same study on this category
505 tracking runs, 22 buying questions, every citation recorded and attributed to the question that produced it.
Two things fell out of it. Semrush at 345 citations is nearly two and a half times the next domain, and it is cited on use case, pricing and category questions rather than comparison ones: the engines reach for established publishers when the question is general. And Reddit at 118 citations is a top-ten source, which is the most actionable line on this page for a small company. You cannot become Semrush. You can answer a question in a thread.
The question type that quietly wastes a measurement budget
Six of our 22 questions were "alternatives to [competitor]". Those six produced most of the competitor citations in the whole study.
Obvious on reflection and we had not reflected on it: asking an engine to enumerate a competitor's alternatives returns competitors, cited from competitor comparison pages, none of which is a site you can get a link from. We cut that question type from six to two. The signal was worth having once; it was not worth a quarter of the budget every week.
If you are evaluating tools, this is worth checking in whatever you buy. Look at what your prompt set is made of, and look at what the citations come back as. A set made entirely of vendor-selection questions can only ever produce a citation list of vendors.
The one distinction that decides which work pays
Everything else on this page is detail. This is the thing to get right.
An AI engine answers in one of two ways, and they need opposite fixes.
Retrieved. The engine ran a web search, read a handful of pages, and summarised them. Those pages decide the answer. Content and placement work, and they work in weeks, and a small company can win because the engine is summarising documents rather than ranking brands.
Remembered. The engine answered from training data that closed months ago. Nothing you publish this quarter will be read, because nothing is being read. Only breadth of presence moves it: reviews, directories, consistent description, over months.
Work on the wrong one and you get no result and no explanation, which is how a year disappears. So the question to ask any vendor is not how many engines they track. It is whether they will tell you, per question, which of these two you are facing.
Most of this category cannot. It is the row in the feature table worth more than the other fourteen put together.
Peak Answer: for the work, not just the report
Six engines weekly from $49/mo, and the measurement drives the work rather than ending at a chart: articles written against questions you measurably lose and sent to your CMS as drafts, the sites the engines already quote for your category ranked with outreach drafted, social threads surfaced, technical faults fixed. Multi-brand is supported.
Published method, including fourteen markets measured end to end. The trade-off against AthenaHQ is client-reporting polish.
Profound: for enterprise rather than agency
Quoted pricing, deepest analysis in the category. Different buyer: a large organisation looking inward rather than an agency looking across clients.
Peec AI: for one brand, done cleanly
From €90/mo. Daily, five engines, one brand, the best simple interface here. If leaving AthenaHQ is about having one brand rather than eight, this is the natural landing place.
Otterly: for the cheapest credible option
$29/mo, four engines, weekly. Does less and says so.
Scrunch AI: for the crawler question
Whether AI crawlers and agents can reach and correctly represent a site. A different question, complementary rather than competing.
Semrush AI Visibility: for consolidation
About $99/mo as an add-on. Weaker data, beside the traditional search numbers your team already reads.
Writesonic: for production-led teams
Content platform with tracking attached. Right ordering if volume is your constraint.
AthenaHQ vs Peak Answer
Choose AthenaHQ when
You manage several brands for clients who pay for reporting, and the polish of what you send matters as much as what it says.
Choose Peak Answer when
The reporting is for you rather than a client, and what you actually need is the work: content, placements, outreach and technical fixes, ordered by measurement. $49/mo against $295.
How to choose, whatever you pick
Convert every plan into responses per month. Questions × engines × frequency. Pricing in this category is quoted in prompts, credits and tracked keywords, and those are not the same unit. The cheapest headline price is frequently the most expensive per response.
Decide who acts. Most of these products report and stop. That is correct design if you have a content function. If you do not, a reporting subscription produces homework rather than results.
Check the two engines you care about, not the total count. Six is not better than five if your buyers use the five.
Ask to see raw captured answers, not a summary. An index you cannot audit is a number taken on faith, in a category too young to extend that.
Run two in parallel for a month. They will disagree on absolute numbers, which is expected. They should agree on direction and on which questions you lose, and that agreement is what you act on.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best AthenaHQ alternative for agencies?
Peak Answer supports multiple brands and does the work; Profound has the deepest analysis if the client is enterprise. For pure reporting polish at agency scale, AthenaHQ remains strong and leaving may not be the right move.
Is there a cheaper alternative to AthenaHQ?
Substantially. Otterly at $29/mo and Peak Answer at $49/mo are both an order of magnitude below it, though neither is built around client reporting in the same way.
Can I run AthenaHQ alongside something else?
Yes, and for a month it is a reasonable way to check whether its numbers and another product's agree on direction.
Does AthenaHQ write content?
Partially. It is not the product's centre of gravity, and teams who need content generation as a primary function usually pair it with something else.