AthenaHQ vs Profound: Which GEO Platform Actually Delivers?

Two of the most talked-about contenders in the Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) space are AthenaHQ and Profound.

• AthenaHQ positions itself as a flexible, marketing-friendly GEO solution, offering daily tracking and share-of-voice metrics.

• Profound, by contrast, focuses on enterprise-scale analytics, with advanced capabilities like hallucination detection, multilingual prompt analysis, and dedicated strategic support.

Both platforms offer valuable capabilities—but they also come with trade-offs in usability, depth, and cost. In the next section, we’ll compare them head-to-head across core GEO features to help you decide which (if either) fits your needs.

Then, we’ll introduce a third—and arguably better—option: Probe Analytics.

AthenaHQ vs Profound: Feature-by-feature comparison

AthenaHQ and Profound both aim to help businesses understand and influence how large language models (LLMs) describe their brand. While their core mission overlaps, their approaches differ significantly across functionality, flexibility, and implementation. The table below summarizes the most important features across both platforms, followed by a deeper look at each category and a verdict on which tool comes out ahead.

Prompt visibility and tracking

Prompt tracking is the foundation of any effective GEO strategy. It tells you how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers, how you rank across different models, and how that visibility changes over time. The ability to track this at both a persistent and on-demand level is critical for measuring performance and reacting to shifts in real time.

• AthenaHQ supports daily tracking for a set list of prompts. Once a prompt is added to your watchlist, the platform runs background jobs to track changes over time—such as rank shifts, sentiment updates, and visibility trends. However, AthenaHQ does not allow ad-hoc prompt search, meaning you can't quickly look up how a model responds to a new query unless it's been pre-configured.

• Profound, on the other hand, offers both daily tracking and on-demand prompt search. This gives users greater flexibility to explore LLM outputs without needing to wait or predefine prompt sets. Profound also allows you to dig into the full conversation history for each tracked prompt, providing deeper context around how answers evolve and where your brand fits in the narrative.

Prompt suggestion and discovery

Tracking existing prompts tells you how you're performing. Discovery tells you what you're missing. This feature is about identifying new prompts—questions, comparisons, or topics—where your brand should appear but currently doesn’t.

• AthenaHQ does not offer any kind of prompt discovery or suggestion engine. All tracking must be manually configured. If you don’t already know which prompts are important, the platform won’t help you find them. This makes AthenaHQ best suited for teams that already have a strong handle on their GEO strategy and simply need to monitor a known set of queries.

• Profound includes a strategic discovery layer. While it doesn't automatically generate prompt suggestions in-app, it pairs each customer with a dedicated strategist who helps uncover new prompts through competitive audits, category analysis, and LLM query monitoring. This approach is less scalable than algorithmic prompt discovery, but it delivers highly curated insights for enterprise teams with specific positioning goals.

Citation and hallucination analysis

One of the most critical (and overlooked) aspects of GEO is not just if your brand is mentioned, but how it is framed—and whether those statements are supported by factual sources. The line between truth and hallucination in LLMs is thin, and tools that surface this distinction provide major strategic value.

• AthenaHQ includes basic citation tracking. You can see some reference links and whether or not your brand is cited, but the insights stop there. There's no classification between factual and hallucinated statements, no breakdown of source quality, and no visibility into how citations vary between models or prompt types.

• Profound offers advanced citation analysis and hallucination detection. For each tracked prompt, you can view whether the brand mention is grounded in an actual citation or hallucinated, which domains are cited, and how citation patterns shift across platforms. Profound also flags potentially risky hallucinations, which is critical for regulated industries or sensitive brand positioning.

Competitive benchmarking

This feature shows how your brand stacks up against competitors in AI-generated answers—based on rank, frequency, and positioning across tracked prompts.

• AthenaHQ includes basic competitive benchmarking through its share-of-voice and sentiment dashboards. You can see how often your brand appears in comparison to competitors across tracked prompts, along with the emotional tone of those mentions. However, the level of granularity is limited. There’s no way to drill down into prompt-level differences or analyze how specific competitors are being positioned differently than you.

• Profound delivers a much more robust suite of competitive insight tools. You can compare brand rankings across individual prompts, analyze share-of-voice by platform and region, and examine how competitors are being cited, framed, and recommended in AI outputs. The system supports multi-language and global benchmarking, making it suitable for brands operating across multiple markets.

AI traffic analytics

Ultimately, visibility in LLMs is only useful if it leads to action. The ability to connect AI mentions to real website traffic helps teams prioritize the prompts, platforms, and models that drive the highest value. However, many GEO platforms still treat traffic as a secondary concern—or don’t track it at all.

• AthenaHQ includes basic AI traffic attribution, allowing users to see when visitors arrive from AI-generated links. While this is not deeply integrated with Google Analytics or other web analytics tools, it does offer a directional view of what’s working and which LLMs are driving engagement. For smaller teams without data engineering resources, this makes attribution far more accessible.

• Profound supports enterprise-level traffic tracking, but it typically requires custom implementations and doesn’t integrate natively with GA4. Its value here depends on your internal capabilities. Larger teams with analysts and developers may be able to extract more insight—but for most users, it’s not plug-and-play.

Usability and time to value

This category evaluates how quickly teams can start using the platform, how intuitive the interface is, and how much effort is required to get meaningful insights.

• AthenaHQ is built for marketing and growth teams. The interface is clean, non-technical, and easy to navigate. Setup is fast—users can begin tracking prompts and reviewing share-of-voice data with minimal onboarding. There’s no need for custom implementation, and the learning curve is low, making it well-suited for lean teams without data analysts or engineering support.

• Profound is designed for large organizations with complex needs. It offers more functionality, but the platform is heavier across the board. Onboarding often requires dedicated sessions with a strategist, integration work, and internal training. The interface prioritizes depth over simplicity, which can delay time-to-value for teams without technical resources or executive-level support.

Pricing

Pricing reflects not just cost, but also how scalable, transparent, and accessible a platform is to different types of businesses.

• AthenaHQ starts at around $270/month, based on a credit-based model. Pricing scales with prompt volume, and some advanced features may require higher tiers. That said, the entry point is accessible for most startups and mid-sized teams. There's no long-term commitment, and pricing is publicly available.

• Profound operates on custom enterprise pricing. Entry-level packages begin at $499 dollars per month. This model fits well with large enterprises but excludes most smaller businesses.

If you're a modern growth team, there's a third—and better—alternative

AthenaHQ is simple and accessible. Profound is deep and enterprise-ready. But both make trade-offs. One lacks visibility into why you rank. The other buries insights under a heavy, slow-moving interface. Neither offers a full picture of what’s really driving your AI search performance—let alone what to do about it.

Probe Analytics was built to change that.

It brings together the essential GEO functions—prompt search, tracking, competitive intelligence, and traffic attribution—into one platform that’s powerful enough for strategists and fast enough for operators. No technical skills needed. No $10K contracts.

Here’s how Probe stacks up.

Unified GEO stack (all features in one platform)

Most tools solve one part of the problem—visibility, analysis, or traffic. Probe does all three. It’s built to give you total control over how LLMs describe your brand, why competitors are winning prompts, and whether those mentions actually drive traffic.

If AthenaHQ offers ease and Profound offers depth, Probe combines both—with none of the trade-offs. It’s the only platform that gives you prompt-level intelligence across search, ranking, performance, and impact—all under one roof.

Prompt search

Most teams have no idea what ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini are saying about them until someone on the team manually checks—and by then, it’s too late. Probe eliminates that guesswork with an instant search feature that works just like AI users think: type in a natural-language prompt, hit search, and see how your brand shows up (or doesn’t) across major models.

There’s no setup. No tracking configuration. Just real-time results from real prompts—ranked by relevance, broken down by LLM, and complete with visibility, citations, and brand positioning insights. You can run up to 100 prompt searches per month, giving you a full lens into how LLMs are shaping perception around your brand and your market.

You’ll see:

• Whether you’re mentioned—and who else is

• The top 3 brands/models per prompt

• Position, visibility score, sentiment, and citation density

• What each model is saying, side-by-side

If you're flying blind on AI perception, this is where clarity starts.

Prompt tracking

Once you’ve identified high-value prompts, you need to monitor them over time—especially for competitive, buyer-intent queries where visibility can change daily. Probe lets you track up to 30 prompts per month (more on custom plans), running daily queries across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity to monitor changes in rank, sentiment, and citation behavior.

Each tracked prompt feeds into a real-time dashboard with:

• Position tracking by model

• Visibility % over time

• Mention deltas (e.g. dropped from top 3, replaced by X competitor)

• Citation trends and sentiment shifts

You don’t just see how you're performing—you see when and how things are changing, so you can react with speed.

Prompt suggest

Knowing what to track is just as important as knowing how you're performing. Probe includes an AI-driven prompt suggestion engine that identifies new prompts you should be monitoring—based on your brand, competitors, and evolving model behavior.

Suggestions are ranked by relevance and visibility potential. Each includes:

• The exact prompt text

• Option to accept or reject with one click

This is live prompt mining from the actual AI search layer—showing you the questions real users (and LLMs) are shaping your category around. Whether you’re expanding coverage, filling competitive gaps, or adjusting to how models are shifting, Prompt Suggest keeps your strategy moving with the market.

Citation analysis

In AI search, getting mentioned isn’t enough—how you’re mentioned matters. Are LLMs citing your content? Are they hallucinating claims about your brand? Are competitors being cited more often? Probe provides prompt-level analysis with complete citation visibility across all tracked models, enabling you to identify competitors and develop strategies to outrank them.

Every prompt response includes:

• A list of URLs cited by each model (yours and competitors’)

• Number of citations per domain or page

• Which brands were mentioned without being cited (potential hallucinations)

• Trends in citation volume and source repetition over time

This lets you spot false claims, uncover underperforming assets, and see which content actually earns model trust. You can also correlate changes in citation patterns with visibility shifts—so when you drop in rank, you’ll know if it’s because you lost a link, not just an algorithm tweak.

No other platform makes LLM citations this transparent or actionable.

Competitive insights

If you’re being outranked in AI results, you need to know by who, where, and why. Probe’s competitive insights module aggregates prompt-level tracking into a strategic dashboard that shows how your brand stacks up across your tracked landscape.

Key views include:

• Share of voice: Brand-level distribution of mentions across all tracked prompts

• Average rank: How your brand compares to others in model-generated lists

• Top cited competitors: Who’s earning the most citations per model

• Prompt-level displacement: Which competitor replaced you and when

You can filter all of this by model (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity), prompt category, date range, and sentiment. You’ll go from “We’re losing ground” to “We lost position 2 in X prompt to Y competitor due to citation shift”—and that kind of specificity unlocks meaningful strategy. That’s also why we built Probe.

Profound vs AthenaHQ vs Probe Analytics: Which is best for you?

If you’re choosing between AthenaHQ and Profound, the decision comes down to trade-offs.

AthenaHQ is faster to implement, easier to use, and more affordable—but it lacks depth. Profound is powerful and comprehensive—but heavy, complex, and priced for large enterprises.

Probe Analytics removes the trade-off.

It gives you the core visibility of AthenaHQ, the analytical depth of Profound, and adds what both lack: real-time prompt search, smart discovery, full competitive tracking, and actual traffic attribution.

Here’s the bottom line:

• If you’re a mid-market or enterprise org with a dedicated SEO or data team and budget isn’t a concern, Profound might be worth the complexity.

• If you need something lightweight, usable, and marketing-friendly, AthenaHQ is easier to start with—if you're okay with limitations.

• If you want a full-stack, affordable, and actionable GEO platform that shows what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what to do about it—Probe Analytics is the better choice.

Try it today.