XeoRank vs AthenaHQ: more AI engines, or AI visibility with SEO and site edits

Choose AthenaHQ if engine coverage matters most: it tracks 11 AI engines and has a free plan. Choose XeoRank if you also do the SEO work, because it tracks fewer engines but adds a technical SEO crawler and rank tracking (live checks on Pro and above), plus Search Console and GA4 reporting, an MCP server on every plan, and an agent that edits your existing WordPress, Elementor, Framer and code sites, with your AI assistant asking before each change. AthenaHQ's own site audit checks what AI assistants can read, and we found no rank tracking described.

We make XeoRank, so weigh this page with that in mind. Every AthenaHQ fact below comes from its own pricing page and integration docs, checked 13 October 2026. Prices change, so confirm before you buy.

The short answer

AthenaHQ suits teams that want wide engine coverage, a free plan to start and publishing to headless CMSs, with technical SEO covered by another tool. XeoRank suits agencies, consultants and businesses where the same person measures AI visibility, fixes the site and reports to a client. If engine count decides the purchase, AthenaHQ is the better fit.

Side by side

Pricing

AthenaHQ's pricing page lists a free Essential plan with $25 of credit on five engines, a Starter plan at $295 a month with 3,600 credits on 11 engines, and custom Enterprise pricing. One credit is one AI response, so the number of prompts you can track depends on how many engines you run each one on. API access is a paid add-on to the Starter plan.

XeoRank's pricing is Starter at $19 a month with a 14-day free trial and no card, Pro at $49 and Growth at $109. Live rank checks, backlinks and the Writing Agent are on Pro and above.

See the pricing page for the full plan details.

For small teams, the main gap is the step from AthenaHQ's free plan straight to $295 a month. XeoRank's paid plans start lower; AthenaHQ's free plan is the cheaper way to try wide engine coverage.

AI engines and how results are reported

AthenaHQ Starter covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral (pricing). If your buyers use Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI or Mistral, AthenaHQ tracks them and XeoRank does not.

XeoRank asks ChatGPT, Gemini (grounded in Google Search) and Perplexity your buyer questions; see pricing for what each plan includes. Each engine is reported on its own, next to an overall citation rate. That matters because the engines behave independently: Profound found that how long a page stays cited on one engine says almost nothing about how long it stays cited on another, with correlations of 0.03 to 0.09 (Profound). In its words, "The engines decide independently."

Technical SEO and reporting

AthenaHQ handles robots.txt and llms.txt, and its crawler reads public pages to check what AI assistants can see: JavaScript dependencies, title tags, structured data and whether AI crawlers are allowed in. We found no full technical SEO crawl or keyword rank tracking described on its pricing page.

XeoRank's crawler checks HTTPS, redirect chains, broken links, soft 404s and error status codes, missing or placeholder titles, missing meta descriptions, missing H1s and skipped heading levels, images without alt text, conflicting canonicals and errors in existing structured data, plus site-level problems such as duplicate titles, H1s and content, many pages canonicalised onto one URL, and sitemap URLs that declare a different canonical. Checks that need context the crawler cannot establish, such as author, sources, dates and thin content, are kept out of the issue list, and dashboard crawls render pages that need JavaScript in a headless browser.

Issues go into a fix queue linked to your goals.

Rank tracking covers country, state or city, language and device. The Search Console report shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate, position, branded against non-branded queries, top queries and top pages, with GA4 data that includes AI referral traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot. Reports export as a PDF or a Google Doc, and Growth adds white-label reports.

Changing your site

AthenaHQ publishes posts to WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, Wix, Framer, Payload, Sanity and Contentful. If your team writes new articles for a headless CMS, that is a real time saver, and XeoRank does not publish to Webflow, Wix, Payload, Sanity or Contentful. Its WordPress integration also updates existing posts, and on Enterprise or Agency plans its Shopify Catalog Optimization publishes optimized titles, descriptions, metadata and FAQs for your products.

XeoRank's agent works on the pages you already have. Through the XeoRank MCP server, Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor or VS Code can rewrite a heading, add schema, fix a title in Yoast, Rank Math or All in One SEO, or rebuild an Elementor section as native widgets. It can also edit Framer pages and CMS items and commit to code sites deployed on Vercel. On WordPress, writes are off for each site until you enable them, new pages are created as drafts, and every change to a page's content is snapshotted so you can restore it. The content engine creates new posts as WordPress drafts; when it optimises an existing post, it updates that post in place.

Choose AthenaHQ if

• you need Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI or Mistral tracked on a self-serve plan;
• you want a free plan to start, and $295 a month fits once you upgrade;
• you publish new content to Webflow, Shopify, Wix, Payload, Sanity or Contentful;
• your technical SEO and rank tracking are already covered by another tool.

Best for teams that want wide engine coverage and CMS publishing. Skip it if your work also covers full technical SEO audits and rankings.

Choose XeoRank if

• the same person measures AI visibility, fixes the site and reports to a client;
• you want a technical SEO crawler, rank tracking and Search Console and GA4 reports in the same plan as AI tracking;
• you want changes made to existing WordPress, Elementor, Framer or code pages, with your AI assistant asking first and rollback on WordPress;
• you want an MCP server on the entry plan rather than an API add-on.

Best for agencies, consultants and businesses that do SEO and AI visibility together. Skip it if engine count or headless CMS publishing decides the purchase.

What XeoRank does not do

It tracks fewer engines than AthenaHQ. It has no one-click article generator: the Writing Agent drafts only from your own material, and the content engine creates WordPress drafts for new posts and updates existing posts in place. It does not publish to headless CMSs, and it does not edit Shopify products.

If those decide the purchase, AthenaHQ is the better fit.

Testing both fairly

Write a list of the questions your buyers ask an AI assistant, without your brand name in them, and run the same list in both tools. AthenaHQ's free plan covers five engines; XeoRank's free AI visibility check asks Gemini three questions with no login, and you can run your own list on Starter's trial. Compare the sources each tool reports as cited, not only the headline numbers. For more options, see AthenaHQ alternatives and our AthenaHQ review.

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 it tracks, 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.