Profound vs AthenaHQ: pricing, engines and who each one is for

Profound and AthenaHQ both measure how AI engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity talk about your brand, and both can publish content to fix it. They are built for different buyers. Profound sells to enterprise marketing teams. AthenaHQ sells both self-serve and enterprise, with published prices.

All facts below come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation, checked on 13 October 2026. We make XeoRank, a third tool in the same category, and say where it fits at the end.

The short answer

Choose Profound if you are an enterprise brand that needs SSO, SCIM and a security review, or you want AI crawler analytics from your CDN logs. Choose AthenaHQ if you want to start today without a sales call and engine coverage matters most. Neither describes a full technical SEO crawl or Google rank tracking, which is the gap XeoRank covers.

Side by side

Choose Profound if

• you are an enterprise brand that needs SSO, SCIM and a security review;
• you want AI crawler analytics from your CDN logs, or Profound's prompt-volume data;
• you value its published research on how AI engines cite sources, such as its analysis of 680 million citations.

Best for enterprise marketing teams. Skip it if you want a public price or a self-serve start.

Choose AthenaHQ if

• you want to start today without a sales call;
• engine coverage matters most: 11 engines on a self-serve plan is the widest we found;
• you publish new content to Webflow, Sanity, Contentful or Payload and want the tool to do it.

Best for teams that want to start without a sales call and track the most engines. Skip it if your job also includes full technical SEO audits and Google rankings.

Where neither one fits

Both tools are built around AI answers. Neither describes a crawl for broken links or slow pages, or tracks your Google rankings. For a lot of agencies and in-house SEOs, those are most of the job.

That is the gap XeoRank covers. Pro is $49 per site a month, and XeoRank asks ChatGPT, Gemini (grounded in Google Search) and Perplexity your buyer questions; see pricing for what each plan includes. The same plan includes a technical SEO crawler, rank tracking for 100 keywords, Search Console and GA4 reporting, and an AI agent that edits your existing WordPress pages, including Elementor layouts, through the XeoRank MCP server, with your AI assistant asking before each change. It tracks fewer engines than either Profound or AthenaHQ, so if engine count is the deciding factor, start with AthenaHQ.

Best for agencies and in-house SEOs whose job is mostly crawling, rank tracking and fixing pages. Skip it if engine count is the deciding factor.

Compare all the options in Profound alternatives and AthenaHQ alternatives.

Sources and how we compared

We compared each tool using its own pricing page, feature pages and help documentation, all checked on 13 October 2026. For each one we recorded the lowest paid plan, the free option, the AI engines and unit of usage, AI crawler data, technical SEO and rank tracking, whether it can change your website, and whether it offers an MCP server.

Where two of a vendor's own pages disagree, we show both figures. We did not buy every plan, so features behind a sales call are described from the vendor's documentation. XeoRank is our product, and its details come from our own pricing page and documentation.