AthenaHQ is an AI visibility monitor with a free plan, 11 models on Starter and credit-based pricing, at one credit per AI response. Peak Answer tracks 6 engines on a flat monthly plan and also does the work that follows: it writes articles (saved as drafts by default) and can publish them to 13 CMSs, finds the sites, directories and threads worth getting mentioned on, and drafts the outreach. AthenaHQ goes wider on engines, countries and reporting, and Peak Answer goes further on content and mentions, starting at $49 a month.
Prices and features checked between 11 October 2026 and 9 November 2026 on each vendor's own site.
| AthenaHQ | Peak Answer | |
|---|---|---|
| AI engines | 5 on the free plan (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot). 11 on Starter, adding AI Mode, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral | 6 on every plan (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode). Claude covers the top 5/10/13 questions a week and Perplexity up to 50/100/100 |
| Refresh | Set per prompt, every 1 to 4 weeks or on chosen days of the month. Daily not stated | Top 10/25/50 questions daily, the rest weekly |
| Runs per question | Not stated. It runs generated variations of each prompt | ChatGPT 3 times a week per question, other engines once |
| Search vs memory | Shows the searches the model ran, no searched or memory label | Yes, every answer is marked as searched or from memory |
| Sentiment | Positive, neutral or negative per response, plus brand attributes (Starter and up) | Yes, per mention, plus recurring descriptions of the brand |
| Citation analysis | Yes, with sources split into owned, competitor, partner and third-party | Yes |
| Competitors | Unlimited, with auto-discovery | Unlimited |
| Content writing | Content Hub writes a brief, then a full article, and optimizes existing pages | 15/30/60 articles a month |
| CMS publishing | 8 CMSs, including WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and Sanity | 13 CMSs, drafts by default |
| Help earning links and mentions | Outreach workflow finds the author and drafts a pitch (premium) | Ranks cited sites, finds contacts, drafts outreach for you to send |
| Directories | Not stated | Finds and queues the directories worth listing on, you submit |
| Social threads | Cited posts only | Finds Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn and X threads, drafts replies for you to post |
| Technical audit | On-demand full site audit and AI crawler access checks; robots.txt and llms.txt management on Starter | 30 site checks, 10/50/250 audited pages, copy-paste fixes |
| Search Console / Analytics | Both, Starter and up | Full Search Console and GA4 data on every plan |
| API and MCP | MCP server; API on paid plans, an add-on on Starter | API and MCP on every plan, including the trial |
| Brands and seats | Unlimited users; multiple brands through Groups; multi-region on Enterprise | 1 brand per plan, extra brands at a volume discount up to 25, unlimited users |
| Countries | One country and language on Starter, multi-region on Enterprise | One market per brand |
| Reports and alerts | CSV and PDF export, scheduled reports by email or Slack; BI dashboards (Tableau, Power BI, Looker) on Enterprise; alerts not stated | Weekly digest email, loss and win alerts, weekly screenshots, CSV downloads |
| Free plan or trial | Free Essential plan with 300 credits | 7-day trial, card required |
| Starting price | Free, then $295/month | $49/month |
AthenaHQ covers more engines. The free Essential plan checks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot, and Starter adds Google AI Mode, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral for 11 models in total, with more available on request. Peak Answer covers 6 engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode) on every plan. On Peak Answer, Claude covers your top 5 to 13 questions a week depending on the plan, and Perplexity up to 50 or 100, so those two see fewer of your questions than the other engines.
AthenaHQ runs prompts on a schedule you set, repeating every one to four weeks or on chosen days of the month, and you can also run them on demand. It runs generated variations of each prompt, and its docs don't mention a daily schedule. Peak Answer asks your top 10, 25 or 50 questions every day, depending on the plan, and the rest every week. Claude and Perplexity run weekly. On paid plans, ChatGPT runs each question three times a week.
Both show some of what happens behind an answer. AthenaHQ records the searches a model ran while answering and lets you filter responses by them. Peak Answer marks every answer as searched or answered from memory, shows you the full answer texts and citations for each tracked question, and uses that to suggest the fix: a page for questions the engine searched, and mentions on trusted sites for questions it answered from memory. For sentiment, AthenaHQ labels each response positive, neutral or negative and scores brand attributes from -1 to 1. Peak Answer labels sentiment per mention and groups the recurring ways the engines describe you (like "a cheaper alternative to X"), with an example answer and the likely source.
AthenaHQ's Content Hub writes a brief, then a full article once you approve it, and can also optimize existing pages. It publishes to Shopify, Webflow, Wix, Framer, WordPress, Payload CMS, Sanity and Contentful. Starter includes a content optimization agent, and a more advanced agent is on Enterprise. Its pricing page doesn't give a number of articles per month.
Peak Answer writes 15, 30 or 60 articles a month depending on the plan, each for a question where a competitor is named and you aren't. Before writing, it reads the top 10 pages for that question to set what the article needs to cover, and keeps any founder facts you give it word for word. Articles go to 13 CMSs, including WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Wix, Ghost, Framer, HubSpot, Notion and Sanity, as drafts unless you turn on live publishing. Published articles are checked for decay and rewritten when they slip.
AthenaHQ has an outreach workflow that finds the author of a cited page and drafts a pitch, listed as a premium feature. On social, it covers the posts the engines cite. Its site doesn't mention directory listings.
Peak Answer ranks the sites the engines cite in your niche, finds contacts there (contact pages, forms, emails and people), and drafts outreach for you to send from your own inbox. It finds and queues the directories worth listing on, and you submit them. It also finds Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn and X threads where your buyers' questions come up and drafts replies, shown next to the community's rules, for you to post. It doesn't run backlink exchanges or buy links.
AthenaHQ's Site Health runs an on-demand full site audit covering indexing, sitemaps, internal links and page speed, with a live access check for each AI crawler. Starter adds robots.txt and llms.txt management. Its docs note that the crawler checks don't come from real crawler IP ranges and suggest confirming in your server logs.
Peak Answer runs 30 site-wide checks (AI crawlers blocked, robots.txt, llms.txt, sitemap, schema, canonicals, broken links, Core Web Vitals and others) and audits 10, 50 or 250 pages a week depending on the plan. Each finding comes with steps and a copy-paste fix, like a robots.txt block or an HTML snippet. Search Console data adds fixes for striking-distance queries, low click-through rates and cannibalisation.
AthenaHQ connects to Google Search Console and GA4 on Starter and up. Search Console feeds prompt ideas and adds clicks and impressions to Content Hub, and GA4 shows traffic from AI search. For reporting it has CSV and PDF export, scheduled reports by email or Slack, and BI dashboards (Tableau, Power BI and Looker) on Enterprise. It has an MCP server, and API access is a paid add-on on Starter.
Peak Answer connects directly to Search Console and GA4 on every plan, and you can download your data as CSV. Reports come as a weekly digest email, alerts when you lose or win a question, and weekly screenshots of real answers. Its API and MCP server are on every plan, including the trial, so you can run it from your own AI tools: an AI assistant can read your questions, answers, citations and Search Console data, and add competitors or track new questions.
Both have unlimited users, and AthenaHQ adds role-based access control on Starter. AthenaHQ handles multiple brands through Groups, which put several web properties in one dashboard. Starter tracks one country and one language. Enterprise adds several regions and languages, plus persona targeting.
Peak Answer covers one brand per plan. Extra brands, up to 25, each cost 20% less than the one before, down to half the list price. Each brand is tracked in one market.
AthenaHQ Essential is free, with 300 credits and a $25 credit. Starter is $295/month for 3,600 credits a month, and annual billing takes 17% off. Enterprise is custom. One credit is one AI response, so the bill depends on how many prompts, models and locations you track and how often they run, and Grok responses cost 5 credits each. With all 11 models on, 3,600 credits covers about 240 prompt checks a month if each runs once per model.
Peak Answer Starter is $49 a month for 50 questions and 15 articles, with every engine included. Growth is $99 and Pro is $199, and annual billing gives two months free. Every plan starts with a 7-day trial, and a card is needed to start it. Peak Answer's plans list what each one includes.
Choose AthenaHQ if you want to start free, need engines like Grok or DeepSeek, track several countries, or report through BI dashboards. It suits a team that already writes and places its own content and wants detailed monitoring.
Choose Peak Answer if you want the measurement and the follow-up work in one plan: articles written and sent to your CMS, outreach drafted, and directories and threads found for you, and you want to run it from your own AI tools. It suits a founder or small team working in one market.
Use both if you need AthenaHQ's wider engine and country coverage for reporting, and want Peak Answer doing the content and mentions work on your main market.
You can see where you stand first with the free AI visibility checker, which needs no account. If you're still comparing tools, these AthenaHQ alternatives are laid out side by side.
AthenaHQ has a free Essential plan with 300 credits, a $25 credit and five engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot. Peak Answer has no free plan. It has a 7-day trial on every plan, and free tools that need no account.
AthenaHQ Starter costs $295/month for 3,600 credits a month, at one credit per AI response, and Enterprise is custom. Peak Answer starts at $49 a month for 50 questions across all 6 engines, with Growth at $99 and Pro at $199.
AthenaHQ connects to Google Search Console, GA4, Slack and eight CMSs, including Shopify, Webflow and WordPress, with BI tools on Enterprise. Peak Answer connects to Google Search Console and GA4 and publishes to 13 CMSs, including WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Ghost, HubSpot and Notion.
AthenaHQ has an MCP server, and its API is a paid add-on on the Starter plan. Peak Answer's API and MCP server are on every plan, including the trial, so an AI assistant can read your questions, answers, citations and Search Console data.
AthenaHQ Starter tracks one country and one language, and Enterprise adds several regions and languages. Peak Answer tracks one market per brand.
AthenaHQ and Peak Answer both write articles and publish them to a CMS. AthenaHQ's Content Hub writes a brief, then a full article once you approve it. Peak Answer writes 15, 30 or 60 articles a month, depending on the plan, for the questions where competitors are named and you aren't, and sends them as drafts.
AthenaHQ has an outreach workflow that finds the author of a cited page and drafts a pitch, listed as premium. Peak Answer ranks the sites the engines cite, finds contacts, drafts outreach for you to send, queues directories, and finds Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn and X threads with replies drafted.
AthenaHQ runs prompts on a schedule you set, every one to four weeks or on chosen days of the month, plus on-demand runs. Peak Answer checks your top 10, 25 or 50 questions daily, depending on the plan, and the rest weekly.