AI Rankly vs AthenaHQ
Comparing AI Rankly and AthenaHQ?
AthenaHQ's cheapest paid plan is $295/mo for 3,600 credits, and one credit is one AI response. Run three engines daily (the same set AI Rankly Starter covers) and that budget stretches to about 39 tracked prompts. AI Rankly Starter is $99 for 100 prompts, every day, on the same three engines. That is $0.99 per tracked prompt against roughly $7.56.
- $99 against $295, on the same three engines running daily.
- 100 tracked prompts against roughly 39, worked from their own published credit calculator.
- $0.99 per tracked prompt against about $7.56.
- 3 answer engines
- 100 prompts, re-run daily
- 5 competitors tracked
- Unlimited team seats
7-day free trial. Cancel any month.
Trusted by teams tracking 100% of their AI answer share
The same brief. The question is what each plan actually includes.
Capabilities sorted by whether the mid-tier plan on each side actually includes them, or holds them back for a higher tier, an add-on or a contract.
AI RanklyStarter · $99/mo10 of 11
included on this plan
- Prompt volume you can plan against
- Daily tracking without spending more
- Entity accuracy ledger
- Questions in each market's language
- Prompt discovery with demand data
- White-label client reports
- Unlimited team seats
- Citation outreach pipeline
- Crawlability auditing
- REST API & MCP
- SSO / SAML
5 of 11
included on this plan
- Prompt volume you can plan against
- Daily tracking without spending more
- Entity accuracy ledger
- Questions in each market's language
- Prompt discovery with demand data
- White-label client reports
- Unlimited team seats
- Citation outreach pipeline
- Crawlability auditing
- REST API & MCP
- SSO / SAML
The plan you'd actually buy, side by side
| Feature | AI RanklyStarter · $99/mo | AthenaHQStarter · $295/mo |
|---|---|---|
| What $99 and $295 each buy | ||
| Plan compared | Starter | Starter |
| Price per month | $99 | $295 |
| Published allowance | 100 prompts | 3,600 credits |
| Prompts at three engines, daily | 100 | ~39 |
| Cost per tracked prompt | $0.99 | ~$7.56 |
| Prompts at five engines, daily | 300 on Professional | ~23 |
| Team seats | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Competitors tracked | 5 | Unlimited |
| How the measurement is done | ||
| Mentions matched semantically, not by string | ||
| City-level and "near me" tracking | ||
| Questions asked in each market's own language | ||
| Tracking cadence included in the price | Daily | Costs credits |
| Turning findings into work | ||
| Agent that drafts the fixes | ||
| Citation outreach with stored contacts | ||
| E-E-A-T scoring | ||
| Entity accuracy ledger | ||
| Prompt discovery with demand data | ||
| White-label client reports | ||
| Crawlers and technical readiness | ||
| Crawlability audit from robots.txt | ||
| llms.txt graded, not just generated | ||
| AI crawler activity log | ||
| Crawlers verified against published IP ranges | ||
| Outbound webhooks | ||
| Where AthenaHQ is stronger | ||
| A free tier | ||
| Engines on their entry plan | 3 | 10 |
| Public capacity calculator | ||
| REST API & MCP | Paid add-on | |
| ChatGPT Ads tracking | ||
| Published security certification | ||
AthenaHQ figures were read from their public pricing and product pages on August 31, 2026 and may have changed since, so check www.athenahq.ai/pricing. Rows compare each vendor's mid tier, Starter · $99/mo against AthenaHQ Starter · $295/mo, because that's the plan most teams buy; a ✕ means it is not included on the plan compared. Both prices are month-to-month. AI Rankly also bills annually at $291/mo. Our pricing is public in full.
Measure it, then actually move it
Track
Every buyer question, re-run daily
Add the questions your buyers actually ask. We run them through every engine on your plan, every day, and capture the full answer text, not just whether you were named.
Cover
Five engines on the plan you buy
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, all included on Professional rather than parcelled out as add-ons or held back for a contract.
Benchmark
See exactly who gets recommended instead
Share of voice against the competitors you name, per prompt and per engine, so you can tell the difference between losing everywhere and losing one question that matters.
Act
Fixes drafted, not just findings filed
The supervised agent turns each gap into reviewable work: the page edit, the schema, the citation to chase. You approve it; you don't write it from scratch, and it isn't metered in credits.
Credits are a budget. Prompts are a number.
Give AthenaHQ credit for transparency: they publish the allowance, the conversion and a public calculator. 3,600 credits a month, one credit per AI response, one credit for most engines and five for the heavier ones. You can work out exactly what you get before you pay, and more vendors should do this.
Do that arithmetic and the shape of the plan appears. Three engines running daily is fifteen credits per prompt per week and change, about 39 prompts inside 3,600. Five engines takes it to 23. Turn on all ten models they advertise and it is four. Their own default cadence is Monday, Wednesday and Friday rather than daily, which lifts the three-engine figure to about 92, still below our 100, at three times the price, and only if you accept tracking that skips four days a week.
Where they are genuinely ahead: a real free tier, ten engines on that Starter plan including Claude, Grok and Copilot, self-serve API and MCP add-ons, unlimited competitors, ChatGPT Ads tracking, SOC 2 Type II with a public trust centre, and a published 17% annual discount. If breadth of engines matters more to you than depth of coverage, they are the better buy and this page won't argue otherwise.
Buy AI Rankly if you want a prompt count you can plan against and daily tracking that does not consume a budget. Buy AthenaHQ if engine breadth matters more than depth, because their $295 plan reaches ten models and ours reaches three.
Six months, three teams, numbers they signed off
E-commerce+244%
AI-referred sessions in six months
$5,600 in sales attributed to AI search.
E-commerce+193%
AI-referred sessions in six months
$32,462 in sales attributed to AI search, from zero.
B2B SaaS+900%
AI-referred sessions in six months
50 customers acquired from AI search, from zero.
Before you decide
They publish 3,600 credits a month on Starter and a calculator that converts credits to prompts: prompts x locations x credits per response x days x 4.33. One credit is one AI response. Tracking three engines daily works out at about 39 prompts; five engines at about 23; all ten models at four. At their default Monday/Wednesday/Friday cadence the three-engine figure rises to roughly 92. It is a budget rather than a cap, extra credits can be bought through checkout, though the unit price isn't published.
Yes, substantially, at the entry tier. AI Rankly Starter is $99/mo for 100 prompts tracked daily across three engines. AthenaHQ Starter is $295/mo, and the same three engines running daily fit about 39 prompts inside their credit allowance, roughly $7.56 per tracked prompt against $0.99. They do offer a free tier that we don't match, and their annual billing brings Starter to $245.
Ten engines on their entry plan, including Claude, Grok, Copilot, DeepSeek and Meta AI, the first two are Enterprise lines here and the rest we don't track at all. They have a genuine free tier, a public credit calculator, self-serve API and MCP add-ons, unlimited competitors, ChatGPT Ads tracking with an advertiser leaderboard, and SOC 2 Type II on a public trust centre. Their outreach tooling is also a match for ours, with contact enrichment and drafted emails.
Yes, seven days on the plan you're considering, running its real engines against your own brand rather than a demo account. The prompts and competitors you set up during the trial carry straight over if you stay.
See where you actually stand
Find out how the engines answer about your brand today. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, on your own brand and your own engines, not a demo account.