AthenaHQ and Conductor both track how AI engines answer questions about your brand, but they point you at different work. Conductor pairs tracking with always-on technical site monitoring and AI crawler analysis, sold through sales, while AthenaHQ turns the gaps it finds into articles and publishes them, with a $295 Starter plan you can buy yourself. DeepSmith is a strong alternative when the bottleneck is content, because it tracks AI answers and publishes AEO-ready articles from $99 a month.
When you compare AthenaHQ vs Conductor, the real decision is whether your AI visibility problem sits in the site or in the content. Conductor watches your pages around the clock and reports which AI crawlers visit them, but it stops short of publishing to a CMS. AthenaHQ writes and publishes from the gaps it finds. DeepSmith sits on the content side of that same loop, with tracking and publishing on one plan.
AthenaHQ vs Conductor: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want to track AI answers, find the topics you have not covered, and publish SEO and AEO-formatted articles to your CMS, each repurposed for social, from $99 a month with no long-term contract.
- Choose AthenaHQ if your team wants monitoring and content action in one self-serve tool, with 11 engines on the $295 Starter plan and a free Essential plan to try first.
- Choose Conductor if you run a large site and need 24/7 technical monitoring, AI crawler analysis and AEO checks next to your SEO data, and you can buy through a sales-led contract.
| DeepSmith | AthenaHQ | Conductor | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | $295/mo (Starter), free Essential plan | Not published |
| Annual price | $80/mo | Not listed | Not published |
| Free trial or free plan | 7-day free trial | Free Essential plan, no trial | 3-week free trial |
| Engines at entry paid tier | ChatGPT | 11 | Not listed |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 11 | 8, plan access not published |
| Tracking allowance at entry tier | 50 prompts | 3,600 credits/month | 2,500 AI Search credits/year |
| AI crawler analytics | - | Not listed | Yes, included on Enterprise |
| Technical site audit | - | Yes | Yes, 24/7 monitoring |
| Content generation | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Yes | No |
| Content repurposing | Yes | Partial | Partial |
| API | Yes | Yes, paid add-on on Starter | Yes, included on Enterprise |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 4.9/5 | 4.5/5 |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ is a San Francisco company founded in 2025 and backed by Y Combinator. It runs your tracked prompts against up to 11 AI surfaces and reports mentions, citations, position, sentiment and share of voice. It is built for marketing, SEO and content teams that want monitoring and content action in the same product, from small self-serve teams up to enterprises and agencies.
The standout is that it does not stop at a dashboard. Its Content Hub writes full articles from an approved brief, optimizes existing pages, targets competitor pages, and publishes to Shopify, WordPress, Webflow, Wix, Framer, Payload, Sanity and Contentful. Credits meter the tracking, at one credit per response on six engines and five on Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral.
The limits are mostly about cost clarity. AthenaHQ's own credit calculator gives an example of 7,145 credits a month, which is well above the 3,600 that Starter includes, so heavy tracking pushes you toward add-on credits whose price is not published. Starter's annual price is shown only as 17% off, and the API is a paid add-on on that plan. Several features sit on Enterprise, including multiple countries and languages and SSO.
Reviewers on G2 give it 4.9/5 from 48 reviews (checked September 2026), and they praise actionable recommendations and responsive support. Some say building a useful prompt library takes time. It is a young company, with roughly 12 to 17 staff.
Conductor
Conductor was founded in 2006 in New York and sells four connected products. Intelligence covers AI search and keyword visibility, Creator is a Writing Assistant for drafting and scoring, Monitoring checks your site around the clock, and AgentStack offers an MCP server, a Data API and agents. It is built for large and mid-to-large enterprise SEO, content and web teams, often running several sites, that want AI visibility next to keyword, analytics and technical data.
The standout is the technical side. According to Conductor, Monitoring crawls continuously and checks AEO signals such as content depth, semantic HTML, schema coverage, JavaScript rendering mismatches and AI robot directives. Log file analysis separates visits from OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic and Meta bots, using logs from Akamai, CloudFront, Cloudflare Logpush or Fastly.
The real limitation is that Conductor does not publish. Its Writing Assistant produces outlines and drafts, 60 a year on Essentials and 180 on Growth, and says final publishing stays in your CMS. Prices are not public, and its terms describe order-form contracts that are noncancellable and nonrefundable by default, with automatic renewal unless you give 90 days' notice.
Conductor's G2 rating is 4.5/5 from 788 reviews, with 4.7/5 on Capterra and 9.3/10 on TrustRadius. Reviewers praise support and training and say the price is hard to justify for smaller teams. Some mention a learning curve.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and publishes
Between these two, the gap for a reader who is short on content is the step from finding a gap to having a published page. Conductor measures a great deal and stops at the draft. AthenaHQ writes and publishes, and it does that on credits and a Starter price of $295, with several pieces of pricing left for a quote. DeepSmith closes the loop on published terms, with tracking and production on the same plan.
DeepSmith tracks how AI engines answer the questions that matter in your space. The AI Visibility views report mention rate, citation rate and share of voice, show which of your pages AI actually cites, and list which competitor pages win citations for your prompts. Content Map then turns your site and your competitors' sites into one map of topics, so coverage gaps (topics where a competitor publishes more) and untapped topics (where you have nothing) become something you measure. Opportunity Agents read that data and return content ideas, each with the data point that justifies it.
Production runs from there. The Writer turns a planned idea into a finished article that is researched, linked internally and externally, and given a cover image and publish-ready metadata, grounded in your Deep IQ brand context. Autowrite can write on a scheduled date and take it all the way to published hands-off, or you can review in Produced Content and publish to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful. Every finished article arrives with social posts already written, and the Apps Library adapts it for LinkedIn, X, newsletters and more.
The cost is on the pricing page. Pro is $99 a month ($80 billed annually) with 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts and 5 seats. Grow is $199 ($160 annually) with 40 articles and 100 prompts, and Scale is $399 ($299 annually) with 90 articles and 200 prompts. Enterprise is custom, there is a 7-day free trial, and there are no long-term contracts. DeepSmith is rated 4.8/5 on G2, and it is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified. DeepSmith's plans don't include crawler log analytics, so a team that needs bot-visit reporting would keep that tool alongside it.
Technical monitoring and AI crawler analysis
On AthenaHQ vs Conductor site monitoring, Conductor wins outright. It is the only one of the two with a documented answer, since AthenaHQ's pages describe managing crawler access with a smart robots.txt and llms.txt rather than reporting which bots visit. AthenaHQ also lists a Brand Integrity and Crawlability module that claims to detect inaccessible pages, but the depth of that audit is not documented.
On Conductor's side, the evidence is specific. Monitoring covers up to 100,000 pages on Essentials and up to 500,000 on Growth, with alerts ranked High, Mid or Low and sent to Slack or Microsoft Teams. Log File Analysis is included on Enterprise and listed as available on the two lower plans, and the page does not say whether available means an extra charge. If you suspect your pages render badly for AI bots, this is the evidence you would want.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith's plans don't include crawler log analytics or site monitoring. What it reports is the outcome that matters to most teams, which is the pages AI engines actually cite and the prompts behind those citations, and the Writer produces the pages that close the gap where you are not cited.
Engine coverage and tracking depth
AthenaHQ wins on published engine coverage. Starter lists 11 surfaces, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral, and the free Essential plan covers five of them. Conductor tracks eight engines, with ChatGPT in two modes, but it does not publish which plan includes which engine.
On depth, Conductor is the stronger of the two on configuration. Each prompt, engine, location and language is its own tracked unit, collection can be daily, weekly or monthly, and it shows the fan-out queries an engine ran. The catch is credits. Conductor's documented per-response costs run from 0.1 credit per response on Google AI Overviews to 2 on ChatGPT Search and Gemini, so 2,500 credits a year goes a long way on some engines and not on others. AthenaHQ's schedules run weekly on days you choose, and picking all seven days costs seven times the weekly credits.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks ten engines, with ChatGPT on Pro, Perplexity added on Grow, Gemini added on Scale, and all ten on Enterprise. You set the prompts that matter, and Discover Prompts generates a starter set from your product, persona and buyer-stage context. Each prompt shows its mention and citation rates and the full answer history.
From insight to action
AthenaHQ wins here, because it publishes and Conductor does not. Both turn their data into recommended actions and both write drafts from a brief, and both ground that writing in stored brand context, with Brand Kits on one side and Content Profiles and Knowledge Sources on the other. The difference is the last step. AthenaHQ pushes to eight CMSs with draft or live status and a scheduled publish. Conductor hands you a scored draft, tells you to review every one before publishing, and leaves the CMS step to you.
Neither one documents repurposing into social or email formats. AthenaHQ has a Slice flow that breaks content into several pieces, and Conductor builds image briefs and video scripts, but both records list article-to-channel repurposing as partial.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith runs the whole path in one place. Opportunity Agents and Content Map gaps produce the backlog, Planned Content gives each idea a date, and Autowrite writes it on schedule as a publish-ready article with SEO and AEO formatting built in. Publishing goes straight to your CMS, and every article already has its social versions. This is the step that matters most to a team that is short on content output.
Pricing and contract terms
In a Conductor vs AthenaHQ pricing check, AthenaHQ wins on openness. It lists a free Essential plan with 300 credits and a $295 Starter plan you can buy without a call. Conductor lists no dollar price for any plan, shows annual usage allowances instead, and sells through a quote, though it offers a three-week free trial with no credit card.
The two are close on what is left unclear. AthenaHQ does not publish its annual Starter price, extra credit prices or API add-on price. Conductor does not publish seats, prompt limits or what its plan grid means by available. On contracts, AthenaHQ's self-serve terms let you cancel in account settings with the change taking effect at the end of the paid period, and fees are generally nonrefundable. Conductor's published US terms point the other way, with fees set in an order form and 90 days' notice needed to stop a renewal.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes every plan. You can see 20, 40 or 90 articles a month and 50, 100 or 200 prompts against $99, $199 or $399, with annual billing lowering each rate. Because the allowance is a number of articles and not credits per response, you know what a month of output costs before you start. The 7-day free trial and the lack of long-term contracts mean you can test it on your own site.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits a marketing lead whose bottleneck is content output and who also wants to see where the brand is cited. It tracks AI answers, finds the topics you have not covered, and produces and publishes SEO and AEO-formatted articles, each with its social posts, from $99 a month with no long-term contract.
- AthenaHQ fits a team that wants tracking and article writing in one self-serve product and can accept credit metering. It is a sensible choice if you want the 11-engine list on a published $295 plan and a free tier to start on.
- Conductor fits an enterprise SEO or web team that has the technical health of a large site as its first problem. If you need always-on monitoring, AI crawler analysis and AI visibility next to keyword data, and you can sign a sales-led contract, the Conductor vs AthenaHQ choice favors Conductor.
If you are still deciding between AthenaHQ or Conductor, the evidence points to a simple split. When pages fail to load, render or get crawled, fix the site first, and Conductor is built for that. When the pages are fine and you do not have enough of the right ones, content comes first, and that is where AthenaHQ and DeepSmith both work. Start a DeepSmith free trial to see tracking and publishing on your own site.
