Profound vs Peec AI vs AthenaHQ for tracking AI citations
Pick Profound if you are an enterprise team that wants nine answer engines, an AI Marketer that drafts and stages content, and SSO, and you accept sales-quoted pricing. Pick Peec AI if you want the clearest self-serve citation tracking, from $95 a month, with recommended actions but no writing. Pick AthenaHQ if you want tracking plus a content optimization agent on a published plan, from a free tier to $295 a month. All prices were checked on 24 October 2026.
We make Nagent, whose visibility agent DRIS does overlapping work, so it gets its own clearly marked section near the end. The three named tools come first, judged on their own pages.
How do Profound, Peec AI and AthenaHQ compare at a glance?
Each block below covers what the tool is, who it suits, how it is priced and the limit worth knowing. Every figure comes from the vendor's own pricing page, read on 24 October 2026.
Profound
What it is: an "AI Marketer" platform. Answer Engine Insights tracks how engines describe you; Agent Analytics tracks AI crawler and referral traffic across your domains; agents draft and rewrite content.
Best for: enterprise marketing teams and agencies that want tracking and content work in one contract.
Pricing: a free Trial runs 50 prompts daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Enterprise is custom, with up to nine engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search. Agencies can add client workspaces at $399 a month each (Profound pricing, checked 24 October 2026).
Limitation: no self-serve paid plan is published for brands, so you cannot price it without a sales call. Some third-party roundups still quote an old $99 starter tier; Profound's own page no longer shows one.
Peec AI
What it is: AI search analytics. Daily tracking of visibility, position, sentiment and share of voice against competitors, plus source gap analysis, ranked recommended actions, an agent with skills, AI referral and crawler insights, and a crawlability audit.
Best for: SEO and content teams that want transparent, prompt-based pricing and daily data.
Pricing: Starter $95 a month (50 prompts, 3 models, 1 project), Pro $245 (150 prompts, 2 projects), Advanced $495 (350 prompts, 5 projects, multi-country, Looker Studio). Base models are picked from ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI; each extra model costs $30, $70 or $140 a month depending on the plan. Annual billing saves 15%. Enterprise is custom, up to 13 models (Peec AI pricing, checked 24 October 2026).
Limitation: Peec recommends and explains; its pages do not say it writes or publishes changes to your site, so someone on your team still does the work.
AthenaHQ
What it is: an AEO and GEO platform with prompt tracking, citation intelligence, content recommendations and a content optimization agent.
Best for: teams that want broad engine coverage and help producing optimized content on a published price.
Pricing: Essential is free with 300 credits on five engines. Starter is $295 a month with 3,600 credits, where one credit is one AI response, across eleven engines including Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral. Enterprise is custom and adds the Athena Citation Engine, a Recommendation Engine, SAML and OIDC SSO and an audit log (AthenaHQ plans, checked 24 October 2026).
Limitation: credits are spent per response, so a bigger prompt set or more engines burns through 3,600 quickly. The site describes a Shopify integration that publishes content but does not describe an approval step.
What does "tracking AI citations" actually mean in each tool?
The word "citation" hides two different measurements, and buyers often compare the wrong ones.
A mention is your brand named in the answer text, linked or not.
A citation is your URL listed among the sources the engine used.
All three tools report both in some form. Peec's own research separates a page that was retrieved from one that was actually cited, and reports benchmarks by engine; for example, it treats 2.0 or more citations per answer as a strong rate on ChatGPT (Peec AI citation benchmarks). Profound's data team found that the median page loses half its citation share within 11 days of peaking (Profound). That second finding matters for buying: a monthly snapshot will miss most of what happens. Daily or weekly sampling on a fixed prompt set is the minimum for a trend you can trust.
Questions to ask each vendor:
Is a citation counted only when my domain is in the source list, or also when my name appears?
Is the prompt set fixed, so this month compares with last month?
How many times is each prompt asked per period, and is that count shown next to the figure?
Are answers taken from the engine's API or from a logged-in app session?
Which tool covers the most answer engines?
Engine coverage is where the three differ most, and it drives cost.
Profound lists nine engines on Enterprise, but the free trial covers three.
Peec AI includes three models on every self-serve plan. More models are paid add-ons; Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and others appear on Enterprise.
AthenaHQ includes five engines free and eleven on Starter.
If your buyers live in ChatGPT and Google's AI surfaces, three well-chosen engines may be enough. If you sell to developers or technical buyers, Claude and Perplexity matter more, and coverage on the plan you can afford becomes the deciding line.
Which one proposes or makes fixes, rather than only reporting?
This is the split that matters most after price.
Profound goes furthest into execution. Its home page says the AI Marketer rewrites pages losing citations and stages them in your CMS, and describes it drafting work and asking you for approval (Profound).
Peec AI stops at ranked recommended actions and agent outputs such as reports and diagnostics. Your team writes and ships.
AthenaHQ recommends on-page and off-page actions and includes a content optimization agent; its Enterprise tier adds a Recommendation Engine.
None of the three pricing or home pages describes ranking fixes against a business objective you declare, such as a target for AI answer presence by a date. Each ranks opportunities by its own model of impact.
What are the failure modes, and what does each cost you?
Prompt drift. If prompts change month to month, your trend line measures the prompt set, not your visibility. Cost: a quarter of reporting nobody can defend.
Too few runs. Answer engines vary from run to run. Peec's measurement guide quotes a practitioner's rule of thumb of about 10 responses per prompt for a quick estimate (Peec AI). Cost: chasing changes that never happened.
Engine blind spots. Tracking only ChatGPT when your buyers use Perplexity or AI Overviews. Cost: a confident report about the wrong channel.
Dashboard without an owner. The most common failure. A tool reports gaps every week and nobody has the hours to fix them. Cost: the subscription plus the opportunity.
Where does Nagent's DRIS fit against these three?
DRIS is the AI search and answer engine visibility agent on Nagent's Marketing team, reporting to MIRA, the AI Marketing Chief of Staff. We make Nagent, so read this section as the vendor's own account.
What DRIS does that overlaps:
Asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok the questions your buyers ask, records the exact prompt beside each citation, and keeps the prompt set fixed per account so a trend means something.
Measures six dimensions per target: coverage, share of voice, entity strength, recommendation position, sentiment, and whether the page is legible to an agent at all. Every figure carries its run count, window and engine.
Reads Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4, audits pages, and shows which AI crawlers fetch the site.
Where it differs:
You declare an objective, such as organic clicks or AI answer presence with a target and a date, and the Queue ranks fixes by how much each contributes to it.
Every fix is a proposal with its reason and confidence. Approving clears a step to run; it does not publish. Publishing a change to a live page needs a person at every level, and index or canonical rules never earn autonomy.
Approved titles, descriptions, headings and structured data go live through a site connection your developers wire in once, and Withdraw takes one off. Content gaps go to CREA's Content team as tasks.
What DRIS does not do: it does not publish directly to WordPress or Shopify, backlink analysis is coming soon, and its traffic view reads visits by source, not by landing page. Cost is in credits, not a separate subscription; an AEO page audit is about 10 credits, and the plan ladder is on Nagent pricing.
Which should you choose?
Choose Profound for enterprise scale, nine engines and content staged into your CMS.
Choose Peec AI for transparent self-serve tracking and recommendations your own team acts on.
Choose AthenaHQ for wide engine coverage plus a content optimization agent at a published price.
Choose DRIS if you want the fixes ranked against your own objective and applied only after a named person approves, inside the same workspace as your content and marketing teams.
For a deeper look at reporting results upward, see how to report AEO results to executives.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best AI search visibility tool in 2026?
There is no single best. Peec AI is the clearest self-serve tracker, AthenaHQ adds content help on a published price, and Profound suits enterprise budgets. Choose by which engines your buyers use and who on your team will act on the findings.
How do I track whether ChatGPT and Perplexity mention my brand?
Write 20 to 50 questions a buyer would ask before choosing a vendor, keep them fixed, and run them on a schedule in a tracker or by hand. Log whether your brand is named, whether your URL is cited, and which competitors appear.
Is Peec AI cheaper than Profound?
Peec AI publishes prices from $95 a month. Profound publishes only a free 7-day trial and custom Enterprise pricing, so a like-for-like comparison needs a Profound quote (both checked 24 October 2026).
Can I run two of these tools together?
Yes, and some teams do: one as the measurement source of record and another for content work. Expect the numbers to differ, because prompt sets, engines and sampling differ.
Want to see fixes ranked against your own objective? Book a Nagent demo.