AthenaHQ meters its tracking in credits, with a free plan and a $295 Starter plan you can buy online. Evertune sells one $800 Pro plan with 100,000 tracked prompts, each sampled up to 100 times, but only after a demo. AthenaHQ fits teams that want to self-serve and publish to a CMS, and Evertune fits teams that want heavy sampling data. DeepSmith is the alternative that tracks and writes on fixed public allowances, from $99 a month with a 7-day trial.
Choosing between AthenaHQ and Evertune comes down to how much AI answer data you want to buy and how you want to act on it. This AthenaHQ vs Evertune review looks at how each one meters and samples prompts, what each costs, and what each lets you do with the results. DeepSmith sits alongside them as a third option that puts tracking and article production on one plan.
AthenaHQ vs Evertune: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want tracking and publish-ready articles on one self-serve plan, with a published price ($99 to $399 a month), fixed prompt and article allowances, a 7-day free trial and no sales call.
- Choose AthenaHQ if you want to start free or at $295 a month, buy online, publish straight to a CMS, and you are comfortable watching a credit balance.
- Choose Evertune if you are a mid-market or enterprise team that wants a very large tracked-prompt allowance with every prompt sampled many times, and you are fine going through a demo.
| Criterion | DeepSmith | AthenaHQ | Evertune |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | Free Essential plan; $295/mo (Starter) | $800/mo (Pro), via demo |
| Annual price | $80/mo billed yearly | Not listed | Not listed |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | Credit-metered, 3,600 credits/mo | 100,000 |
| Engines at entry tier | ChatGPT | 11 on Starter | 11 AI models |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 11, more on request | 11 AI models |
| Free trial or plan | 7-day free trial | Free plan, no timed trial | None, demo only |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Competitor benchmarking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Content generation | Yes | Yes | Yes (25 articles/mo on Pro) |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Yes | No |
| API | Yes, read-only | Yes, paid add-on on Starter | Not listed |
| MCP server | Yes, read-only | Yes | Not listed |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes | No |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 4.9/5 | Unrated |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ is an AI search visibility platform from NuvoTech, a San Francisco company founded in 2025 and backed by Y Combinator. It runs your tracked prompts against up to 11 AI engines and reports mentions, citations, position, sentiment and share of voice. A Content Hub drafts, optimizes and publishes content, and the company says it serves everyone from self-guided small teams to enterprises and agencies.
The standout is how easy it is to start. The Essential plan is free and comes with 300 credits, and Starter at $295 a month can be bought without talking to anyone. Starter includes unlimited seats, 3,600 credits a month and all 11 engines.
The real limitation is the credit meter. One credit buys one AI response on most engines, but Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral cost five, and turning on fan-out multiplies usage by four. AthenaHQ's own calculator example, at 7,145 credits a month, is well above Starter's 3,600 and points to add-on credits. Several advanced features also sit on Enterprise.
On reviews, AthenaHQ showed 4.9/5 from 48 reviews on G2 when we checked on September 30, 2026. Reviewers praise the citation and competitor analysis and the support, and a few say that building a useful prompt library takes time.
Evertune
Evertune is a New York AI search marketing platform founded in 2024 by early team members of The Trade Desk. It measures how AI models mention and rank a brand against competitors, and it connects that data to content, site fixes, affiliate placements and ChatGPT and programmatic ads. It is aimed at mid-market and enterprise brands and the agencies that serve them.
The standout is the measurement design. Evertune says it asks every prompt 100 times per model, and it states a margin of error of about 1 point overall and 2 at topic level. Pro lists 100,000 tracked prompts across 11 AI models, with daily, weekly or monthly runs.
The real limitation is how you buy it. Both plans say "Request a demo", there is no free plan or standard trial, and Enterprise is custom. Evertune also has no CMS connector, no listed SOC 2 report (its own January 2026 comparison page says SOC 2 Type II is in progress), and no listed API or MCP server.
There is little independent review evidence. G2 showed no reviews on September 30, 2026, so most proof points are Evertune's own case studies.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes on fixed allowances
Both tools can write content now, so the difference for DeepSmith is the terms. AthenaHQ takes a credit meter and a brief-then-article flow. Evertune takes a demo and exports Markdown or HTML for you to paste into a CMS. DeepSmith puts tracking and production on one self-serve plan with the limits printed on the pricing page.
The plans are Pro at $99 a month with 50 tracked prompts and 20 articles, Grow at $199 with 100 prompts and 40 articles, and Scale at $399 with 200 prompts and 90 articles. Billed annually they come to $80, $160 and $299 a month. The trial lasts 7 days, there are no long-term contracts, and nothing sits behind a demo.
On the tracking side, AEO checks the questions you define on a schedule and reports mention rate, citation rate and share of voice, with a per-engine breakdown, a competitor leaderboard and the sources AI cites most. It shows which of your pages AI actually cites, and the prompts behind each one. Discover Prompts builds a starter set from your product, persona and buyer-stage context, so you are not starting from a blank list.
On the production side, Opportunity Agents turn that data into ideas that each carry the evidence behind them. The Writer then turns a planned idea into a finished article that is researched, linked, grounded in Deep IQ and delivered with a cover image and metadata. Autowrite can run it on a set date without anyone in the app. Produced Content publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity and Contentful or to your own webhooks, and Repurpose adds social posts to every finished article. DeepSmith's plans don't include crawler log analytics or an ads manager, so the focus stays on measuring and producing the content itself.
Prompt capacity and metering
Evertune wins on raw capacity, and AthenaHQ wins on how little you have to commit to start. That is the main point in Evertune vs AthenaHQ on volume.
Evertune's number is simple to read. Pro lists 100,000 tracked prompts across 11 models. The pricing page does not define what counts as one prompt, and the terms allow per-prompt fees and overages whose amounts are only set on the order page, so ask about that in the demo.
AthenaHQ has no fixed prompt cap. Its formula is prompts times locations times credits per response times days times 4.33 weeks. By that formula, 100 prompts in one location, run once a week on a one-credit engine, use about 433 credits a month. The same set on a five-credit engine uses about five times that, and fan-out multiplies it by four. AthenaHQ's docs suggest starting with 50 to 100 prompts, which fits comfortably inside Starter if you stay on cheaper engines and a weekly schedule. Daily runs are possible by picking all seven days, at seven times the weekly cost.
The trade is predictability against flexibility. Credits let you shift spend between engines and schedules, but your capacity depends on choices you make every month.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith gives you a fixed number you can plan around. Pro tracks 50 prompts, Grow 100 and Scale 200, and the article allowance sits beside it on the same plan. There is no credit conversion to do before you know what a plan covers.
Tracking depth and data method
Evertune wins on how much it tells you about its own method.
Evertune separates two layers. It samples the base models of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Llama and DeepSeek through provider APIs, and it tracks the consumer apps for ChatGPT Search, Gemini Search, Perplexity, Copilot, AI Overviews and AI Mode. Asking each prompt many times matters because AI tools don't always give the same answer twice. A single run can swing, and a larger sample gives you a steadier number. The 1 and 2 point margins are Evertune's own figures, and the third-party research we saw did not contradict the method, though it did not test it either.
AthenaHQ stores each response in full, with its cited domains and URLs and a position for your brand, and it can show the sub-queries a model ran when they are available. What it does not say is whether answers are collected through model APIs or consumer interfaces, which model versions it uses, or how long it keeps history. If you plan to defend your numbers to a skeptical executive, those gaps matter.
For smaller prompt sets, repeated sampling is less of a worry than it sounds, because you can read the same prompts over several months and look at the direction. Our guide on why AI citations keep changing covers that approach.
Engine coverage
AthenaHQ wins on the number of consumer-facing engines it tracks.
Starter lists 11 surfaces, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral, with more on request. The free plan covers five of them. Evertune also lists 11 AI models, but its help center says Claude, Meta AI and DeepSeek are tracked only as base models, not through their consumer apps, and Perplexity and Copilot only as consumer apps. Grok does not appear on any Evertune page we found, and Evertune does not publish a per-plan engine split.
If your buyers use Claude or Grok, AthenaHQ's list is closer to what they see. If you care about the difference between what a model knows and what a search product returns, Evertune's split is the more useful view.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks ten engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. Pro covers ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten.
Pricing and value
AthenaHQ wins on entry cost, and Evertune wins on volume if you truly need it.
AthenaHQ costs nothing to try and $295 a month for Starter. Starter's annual price is shown only as 17% off, and API access and extra credits are paid add-ons with no public price. Evertune's Pro is $800 a month, no annual figure is listed, and it includes three onboarding sessions and 25 AI-optimized articles a month. Both leave Enterprise as a quote. A SourceForge reviewer called AthenaHQ expensive, though that is a single opinion and not a consensus.
The question is whether you need Evertune's volume. If each of the 100,000 prompts counts as one, the price works out to under a cent per prompt. AthenaHQ's own docs suggest starting with 50 to 100 prompts, so a team with a list that size would not get much from the larger allowance.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith's public plans start at $99 a month and carry both tracking and articles. Scale at $399 includes 200 prompts and 90 articles a month, and every plan includes five or more seats. There is a 7-day trial before you pay, and no contract to cancel.
From insight to action
AthenaHQ wins on getting content out the door, and Evertune is wider on activation beyond content.
AthenaHQ's Content Hub writes a brief for you to approve, drafts the article, optimizes existing pages, and publishes to Shopify, WordPress, Webflow, Wix, Framer, Payload, Sanity and Contentful. It also offers an API and an MCP server for reading data and creating content. Evertune's Content Studio builds briefs from visibility gaps, and its Content Agent writes blog drafts from six templates, but the publish step is a Markdown or HTML download. Its wider reach is on the activation side: Site Audit, Bot Analytics, affiliate placements through impact.com and PartnerStack, and a ChatGPT Ads Manager that is still in beta.
Where Evertune has no listed integrations, such as an API, an MCP server, or alerts, AthenaHQ lists them. Where AthenaHQ lists no bot monitoring, Evertune does.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith runs the whole loop in one place. Tracking finds the gaps, Opportunity Agents propose ideas with evidence, the Writer produces the article, and Produced Content publishes it to your CMS or webhook. The API and MCP server are read-only, so you can pull workspace data into your own tools, and webhooks notify your systems when content changes status.
Security, access and reviews
AthenaHQ wins on procurement readiness, which is where Evertune vs AthenaHQ is least close.
AthenaHQ's trust center lists SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 and GDPR, and Enterprise adds SAML and OIDC single sign-on. Evertune lists SSO on Enterprise only and has no SOC 2 report on record. Its G2 page has no reviews, against AthenaHQ's 4.9/5 from 48. A modest review sample is still more than none.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified and rated 4.8/5 on G2.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits a content or marketing team that wants one self-serve plan for tracking and for producing the articles that close the gaps. It works for a team of a few people or an agency, and you can try it for 7 days before paying.
- AthenaHQ fits a team that wants to start free or at $295 a month, wants a SOC 2 report and a CMS connector, and does not mind managing credits as usage grows.
- Evertune fits a mid-market or enterprise team that values repeated sampling and a very large prompt allowance, plans to use affiliate or ad activation too, and accepts a sales-led purchase.
Start a free 7-day trial at DeepSmith and see tracking and production on one plan.
