AthenaHQ vs Scrunch AI

AthenaHQ tracks brand visibility across up to nine AI models with prompt and response analysis, competitor insights, and content optimization agents, with a real free tier. Scrunch monitors AI visibility and optimizes what AI agents see: prompt tracking with citations and sentiment, site audits of how AI consumes your pages, and an enterprise Agent Experience Platform. They compete only where the categories overlap, and the chapters below walk every dimension a buyer would price: which AI engines each can see, how the tracking actually meters, what each produces on the content side, what surrounds the core product, and the full published tier lists.

AthenaHQ is a San Francisco AEO platform with strong review credentials: a G2 High Performer for Answer Engine Optimization (Spring 2026) and 4.9-out-of-5 ratings on its badges. The product analyzes prompts and responses across up to nine AI models, estimates prompt volumes numerically, tracks unlimited competitors with sentiment, and acts through on-page and off-page GEO actions, a content optimization agent, smart robots.txt and llms.txt management, and an enterprise citation engine (ACE). Unlimited seats with role-based access come on every plan, and it publishes its own comparison pages against Profound, Peec, Scrunch, Semrush and Ahrefs.

Pricing model. Essential is free with a $25 credit (300 credits, five models including Claude); Starter is $295 a month with a $300 monthly credit (3,600 credits, nine models), with API access and extra credits as paid add-ons; Enterprise is custom with annual 17% off available.

Scrunch splits into two connected products, trusted by 500+ brands and agencies by its own count. The monitoring side tracks how your brand shows up in AI answers with citations, sentiment, personas, funnel stages and query fan-out. The agent side is more unusual: site maps of how AI consumes your site, AI agent and bot traffic analytics, and at the enterprise level AXP, the Agent Experience Platform, which delivers an optimized experience to AI agents crawling you. A 30-second AI audit and a 7-day free trial front the funnel.

Pricing model. Core is $250 a month after a 7-day trial with 125 prompts on four LLMs, one country and one page optimization a month; Enterprise is custom and unlocks nine LLMs, AXP, API access, Looker, MCP and SSO.

AthenaHQ. The free Essential tier covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude; Starter adds AI Mode, Copilot and Grok for visibility across nine models, with additional models available on request. Claude ships from the free tier, which is rare in this set; DeepSeek does not appear on the page.

Scrunch AI. Core supports four LLMs: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. The nine-LLM list, adding Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode and Grok, appears only under Enterprise, and DeepSeek appears on neither list.

Summarized: AthenaHQ reads 5 free; 9 on Starter (incl. Claude, Copilot, Grok, AI Mode); Scrunch AI reads 4 on Core (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AIO, Copilot); 9 on Enterprise. On Claude specifically, AthenaHQ: yes, from the free tier; Scrunch AI: enterprise only.

AthenaHQ. Metering is credit-based with one credit equal to one AI response: 300 credits free, 3,600 on Starter, custom on Enterprise. Tracking includes unlimited topics, numerical prompt-volume estimation, unlimited competitor tracking and benchmarking, prompt variations with conversation context, and real-time brand sentiment.

Scrunch AI. Tracking runs on unique prompts (125 on Core, custom above) with query fan-out, funnel stages, citations and sources, sentiment analysis and prompt management, across one country, two languages and three personas on Core. AI Search Trends covers three topics on Core.

AthenaHQ. Content recommendations ship on the free tier and a content optimization agent from Starter, with brand voice and guideline enforcement, on-page and off-page GEO actions, and Shopify and Webflow integrations. The enterprise Athena Citation Engine and Recommendation Engine extend the action layer; there is no long-form article pipeline described.

Scrunch AI. Content generation is graded Basic on Core and Advanced on Enterprise, with one page optimization a month on Core and custom volumes above. There is no CMS publishing on the page; the emphasis is optimizing existing pages for AI consumption.

AthenaHQ. There is no Google organic rank tracking and no local surface on the pricing page. GA4 and Google Search Console integrations connect AI visibility with site traffic, which correlates traffic with visibility; position measurement is a different job.

Scrunch AI. There is no Google organic rank tracking and no local surface. Site audits (5 a month on Core) analyze how AI consumes your pages, with site maps covering 25 pages on Core, a technical-AI surface, separate from rankings.

AthenaHQ. CSV export ships from Starter, GA4 and GSC integrate, and API access is an optional paid add-on billed on top of the Starter subscription, included only on Enterprise. Enterprise adds SAML and OIDC SSO, audit logs, multi-region and multi-language support, and executive dashboards with Tableau, Power BI and Looker support. No MCP server is listed.

Scrunch AI. Data access concentrates in Enterprise: Looker Studio access, query API access, advanced API access, MCP access (custom) and CLI access all read dash on Core. AI agent and bot traffic analytics ship on both tiers, and Google SSO is standard with SAML/OIDC on Enterprise.

Every cell below was read from the vendors’ own rendered pages as of August 2026. Where a vendor’s public pages neither confirm nor deny a capability, the cell says so.