AthenaHQ
Credit-metered AI visibility with five surfaces free
Entry price
Free (Essential, $25 credit), then $295/month
Typical annual
$3,540/year at Starter, or $2,938 with the 17% annual discount
Free trial
Better than a trial, a permanent free tier with 5 surfaces
Contract
No, monthly available; annual saves 17%
About AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ is the easiest place in this category to find out whether AI visibility tracking is worth paying for, because a working version of it is free. The Essential tier gives you $25 of credit, five surfaces (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude) unlimited team members, competitor insights and the Athena agent, with no card. Nothing else at this tier is that generous. Paid starts at $295 a month for nine models, GA4, Search Console, Shopify and Webflow integrations, CSV export and both on-page and off-page optimisation actions. Enterprise is where the distinctive machinery lives: the Athena Citation Engine, Oracle discrepancy detection, knowledge base and claim review, persona targeting and multi-region support. One thing to understand before you budget. This is priced in credits, not prompts or seats. The $295 tier carries 3,600 credits stated as $300 of value, but the site never says what a credit buys, so your real monthly cost depends on usage you cannot model in advance. Ask before you sign. API access and extra credits are add-ons even at the paid tier.
Full specification
Pricing & Model
- Entry price
- Free (Essential, $25 credit), then $295/month
- Median annual cost
- $3,540/year at Starter, or $2,938 with the 17% annual discount
- Pricing model
- Credit-metered, not per-prompt or per-seat
- Free trial
- Better than a trial, a permanent free tier with 5 surfaces
- Contract required
- No, monthly available; annual saves 17%
- Overage pricing
- Extra credits sold as a paid add-on; per-credit rate not published
Searches / Topics / Queries
- What they call it
- Credits
- Entry tier limit
- Essential: free, 300 credits, 5 AI platforms, unlimited seats
- Mid tier limit
- Starter: $295/mo, 3,600 credits, 9 AI models, integrations, CSV export
- Enterprise limit
- Enterprise: custom credits, ACE, Oracle detection, SSO, multi-region
- Boolean support
- Not applicable, prompt-based, not Boolean query-based
Mentions / Results
- Counting method
- Credits consumed; the site does not publish what one credit buys
- Entry tier
- 300 credits
- Mid tier
- 3,600 credits/month
- Enterprise tier
- Custom credit allocation
- Historical lookback
- Not published
Users & Seats
- Entry tier users
- Unlimited (even on the free tier)
- Mid tier users
- Unlimited
- Enterprise users
- Unlimited
- Extra seat cost
- None, team members are unlimited from the free tier up
Key Features
- Sentiment analysis
- Yes, prompt and response analysis
- Emotion detection
- Not documented publicly
- Intent classification
- Persona targeting at Enterprise
- Entity extraction
- Yes, brand and competitor entities within answers
- Image recognition
- Not applicable to this category
- Webhooks
- Not documented publicly
- API access
- Paid add-on even on Starter, not included at any published tier
- Publishing tools
- No, but it does ship optimisation actions and a content agent
- News / media coverage
- No, this tracks AI answers, not news or social
- Language support
- Multi-language is an Enterprise feature
- Interface languages
- EN
AI Visibility Tracking
- AI surfaces tracked
- 5 free (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude); 9 models on Starter
- Prompts tracked
- Credit-metered: 300 free / 3,600 per month at $295, credit value not published
- Citation analytics
- Yes; Athena Citation Engine (ACE) at Enterprise
- Competitor share of voice
- Yes, competitor insights, included even on the free tier
- Content recommendations
- Yes, on-page and off-page actions plus a self-learning content agent
- AI crawler analytics
- Not documented publicly
Best For
- Primary audience
- Teams that want to test whether AI visibility matters to them before spending, and e-commerce and content sites already on Shopify, Webflow, GA4 or Search Console, since those integrations come at the first paid tier.
- Regional focus
- Global; multi-region support is an Enterprise feature
Similar platforms
Other ai visibility / llm mention tracking tools, cheapest published price first.
Free (one-time grade, no account), then $50/month for ongoing tracking
Compare AthenaHQ and HubSpot AEO GraderFree (50 prompt credits/month), then £89/month for 2,000 credits
Compare AthenaHQ and Authoritas$95/month (Starter), or $80/month billed annually: €85 / €70 in Europe
Compare AthenaHQ and Peec AI$117.33/month annual (SEO plan, $139 monthly). AI tracking included in plans
Compare AthenaHQ and Semrush AI Toolkit