AthenaHQ is an AI-first tracker that adds query fan-out, AI referral data and article writing, and it starts at $295 a month. SE Ranking AI Visibility sits inside an SEO suite with rank tracking, and API and MCP access come with every plan, but it has no query fan-out or AI referral data. DeepSmith is a strong alternative for teams that want the step after tracking handled too: it finds the content gaps, returns evidence-backed ideas and writes the articles, from $99 a month.
If your team already tracks rankings and now needs AI search visibility, the choice in AthenaHQ vs SE Ranking AI Visibility comes down to suite convenience against AI depth. SE Ranking adds AI tracking to a tool your team may already know, and AthenaHQ was built for AI search from the start. DeepSmith covers the same tracking ground and goes on to plan and write the content that fixes what the tracking finds.
AthenaHQ vs SE Ranking AI Visibility: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want tracking, content gap analysis, evidence-backed ideas and publish-ready articles on one self-serve plan, starting at $99 a month with a 7-day free trial.
- Choose AthenaHQ if you need query fan-out, AI referral traffic and 11 engines on the entry paid plan, and you can plan around a $295 a month Starter price that is metered in credits.
- Choose SE Ranking AI Visibility if your team lives in rank tracking and audits, and you want AI tracking from $129 a month in the same suite, with API and MCP access on every plan.
Comparison table
| Criterion | DeepSmith | AthenaHQ | SE Ranking AI Visibility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | $295/mo (Starter) | $129/mo (Core, suite plan) |
| Annual price | $80/mo | Not listed | $103.20/mo |
| Free plan or trial | 7-day free trial | Free Essential plan, 300 credits | 14-day free trial, no card |
| Tracking capacity at entry tier | 50 prompts | 3,600 credits/mo | 100 prompts daily |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT) | 11 | 5 |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 | 11, more on request | 5 |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Query fan-out | - | Yes | No |
| AI referral traffic | - | Yes | No |
| Content generation | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| Security certifications | SOC 2, GDPR, ISO | SOC 2 Type 1 and 2, GDPR | Not listed |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.9/5 on G2 | 4.7/5 on G2 (whole suite) |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ is an AI search visibility platform from a San Francisco company founded in 2025 and backed by Y Combinator. It tracks prompts across 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 one tool.
The standout is how much it covers past tracking. A Content Hub writes briefs and full articles, optimizes existing pages, and publishes to eight CMSs. A GA4 integration shows AI-referral sessions, and a Fan-out run option adds three prompt variations to each response. AthenaHQ says it is trusted by more than 300 brands, and that count is its own claim.
The real limit is the way usage is metered. Starter gives 3,600 credits a month. One credit buys one response on six engines, but Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral cost five credits each, and a fan-out run uses four times the credits. AthenaHQ's own calculator example comes to 7,145 credits a month, which is above Starter's allowance. Starter's annual price is shown only as 17 percent off, API access is a paid add-on, and the Starter plan covers a single region and language.
On G2, AthenaHQ shows 4.9/5 from 48 reviews as of September 30, 2026. Reviewers praise the citation and competitor analysis and the responsive support. Some say building a useful prompt library takes time.
SE Ranking AI Visibility
SE Ranking is an SEO platform founded in 2013, and its AI Visibility tracker sits inside it. It is built for SEO teams and agencies that already run rank tracking and audits and want AI visibility next to them. The AI Results Tracker covers five engines: Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Country, location and language can be set per engine.
The standout is how it fits an existing workflow. Core at $129 a month includes 100 prompts tracked daily, rank tracking, keyword research and a site audit, and the API and a hosted MCP server with more than 180 tools come with every plan. SE Ranking also documents its method: it captures real answers through the interface, checks daily, and says how it matches mentions and links.
The real limits are around the edges of the AI product. Claude and Copilot are not tracked, sentiment lives in a separate product called SE Visible, and query fan-out and GA4-based AI traffic reports are marked as coming soon. Full answer text is kept for 30 days, with presence metrics kept for one year. SE Ranking publishes no SOC 2, ISO or SSO details that we could verify.
The G2 score of 4.7/5 from 1,606 reviews covers the whole SE Ranking suite and not the AI tracker alone. AI-specific reviewers value repeatable monitoring and ask for more flexible ways to organize prompts and sources.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks, plans and writes on one plan
Both tools in this comparison stop at a point where your team has to pick the work back up. SE Ranking tells you where you are missing from AI answers and hands the writing to a separate process. AthenaHQ goes further, with a Content Hub that writes from an approved brief, and it prices that on credits that also meter your tracking. DeepSmith puts tracking, planning and production on a single plan with a published price and a fixed monthly article allowance.
It starts with tracking. DeepSmith checks the questions you define on a schedule and reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice and sentiment, along with which of your pages AI cites and which competitor pages win the citations you miss. Then Content Map turns your site and your competitors' sites into one map of topics, so coverage is a measurement. It flags the topics where a competitor publishes more than you, and the topics where you have nothing at all. Sitemaps are re-checked every 24 hours, so the map stays current.
Opportunity Agents read that data and return content ideas, each with the data point that justifies it attached. You can defend the backlog because every idea carries its evidence. From there, ideas move to Planned Content, where Autowrite can write each article on its scheduled date with no one in the app. The Writer produces a researched, internally and externally linked article with a cover image and publish-ready metadata, grounded in the brand context stored in Deep IQ. Each article also arrives with social posts already written, and the Apps Library adapts it for LinkedIn, X, newsletters and more. You can publish to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks.
Plans run on published prices: Pro is $99 a month for 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts and 5 seats, Grow is $199 for 40 articles and 100 prompts, and Scale is $399 for 90 articles and 200 prompts. Annual billing brings those to $80, $160 and $299 a month. There is a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract. DeepSmith is rated 4.8/5 on G2 and holds SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certifications. Its tracking reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, sentiment and trend, and it doesn't include query fan-out or referral data, so the value here is in what happens to the gaps afterward.
Engine coverage
AthenaHQ wins on engine coverage. Starter tracks 11 surfaces, including Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI, and extra models are available on request. SE Ranking tracks five, with both Google AI surfaces and location settings for them, and it does not track Claude or Copilot.
The catch with AthenaHQ's breadth is that five of its engines cost five credits per response, so the full list on Starter is a different thing from running every prompt on every engine. SE Ranking's smaller list is easier to budget.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks ten engines in all, and the plan decides how many you get. Pro tracks ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten, including Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek.
Tracking depth and data
AthenaHQ has the deeper tracking. Fan-out lets it capture the queries a model issued and run prompt variations, and its GA4 integration ties AI visibility to AI-referral sessions per content URL. SE Ranking has no query fan-out and no AI referral reporting today, and only estimated traffic potential from the Google AI surfaces. Both of those features are listed on its pages as coming soon.
SE Ranking is clearer about method. It says answers are captured through the interface, checked daily, and counted in a documented way. AthenaHQ's pages and third-party research do not say whether answers come from model APIs or consumer interfaces, or how long answer history is kept. That matters for how far you trust week-to-week changes, and if you want more background there is a good guide on why API and chat results differ.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith keeps the full answer history for each prompt and shows per-prompt mention and citation rates over time, along with the specific pages of yours that were cited. The Pages view shows each page's share of your citations and the prompts that drive them.
Competitor and citation analysis
Both tools are strong here, and on this axis it comes out close to even. AthenaHQ offers unlimited competitor tracking on Starter, a topic heatmap and a Sources page at domain and URL level. SE Ranking's Sources tab lists cited domains and pages with the mention opportunities and the sources that cite only competitors, and its AI competitor research covers five domains on Core and 15 on Growth.
AthenaHQ has a small edge for teams that want to act on competitor pages, because its Snipe flow targets a competitor's page directly. SE Ranking has a small edge for paid placements, since it tracks ads that show up in ChatGPT and AI Mode answers.
Pricing and value
On price, SE Ranking AI Visibility vs AthenaHQ is mostly a question of how you want to enter. SE Ranking is the cheaper way in. Core is $129 a month, or $103.20 billed annually, and it covers 100 prompts tracked daily plus the whole SEO suite. Growth is $279 a month for 250 prompts. If you need more checks, an AI Search add-on runs $89 a month for 200 checks and up to $345 for 1,000, though how plan prompts and add-on checks combine is not clear from its pricing page.
AthenaHQ costs more to start, at $295 a month for Starter, but it has a free Essential plan with 300 credits and five engines, which is a real way to test it. The harder question is how far 3,600 credits goes. With fan-out and the five-credit engines, a heavy prompt set can pass that quickly.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes four plan tiers with fixed allowances. Pro at $99 a month includes 20 articles, so tracking and production come from one bill instead of a tracker plus a writing tool.
From insight to action
AthenaHQ wins this one between the two. Its Content Hub moves from a brief to a full article with approval columns and version history, and it publishes to Shopify, WordPress, Webflow, Wix, Framer, Payload, Sanity and Contentful. SE Ranking's AI tracker has recommendations and a Sources tab with suggested actions, and its suite includes an AI Writer, but that sits outside the AI visibility product.
Neither one starts from a competitor coverage map, which is where a content plan usually begins. Teams that choose either tool tend to add a planning step somewhere else.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith runs the whole loop in one place. Content Map shows where competitors cover topics you do not, Opportunity Agents turn those gaps into ideas with evidence, and Autowrite produces and can publish the articles on schedule. The same data that found the gap feeds the writing, so the article is built around it. If you want to see how the gap-to-backlog step works, the guide on turning AI-visibility gaps into a content backlog covers it.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith: the broadest fit for teams that want tracking and production without stitching tools together. It suits content and marketing leads who need to know where they are missing in AI answers, decide what to write from competitor coverage, and get on-brand articles out on a schedule, starting at $99 a month.
- AthenaHQ: the better pick between the two for a team that wants AI-first depth, meaning query fan-out, AI referral sessions and 11 engines, and has the budget for $295 a month Starter plus credits.
- SE Ranking AI Visibility: the better pick between the two for an SEO team that already runs rank tracking, wants AI tracking from $129 a month in the same login, and cares about API and MCP access on every plan.
If you want to see the track-plan-write loop on your own site, you can start a free DeepSmith trial and run it with real data before you pay.
