OmniSEO vs AthenaHQ (2026): Cheap Engine Coverage or a Working Action Queue?
OmniSEO watches up to 10 AI engines from $89/mo. AthenaHQ costs $295/mo but turns visibility gaps into assignable tasks. Which one moves your AI visibility, and where Promptwatch fits.
The entry plans of OmniSEO and AthenaHQ sit $206 apart. OmniSEO Essentials is $89 a month. AthenaHQ Starter is $295. The gap pays for one thing: AthenaHQ converts what it finds into tasks your team can assign, while OmniSEO mostly measures and advises. Whether that is worth $206 depends on who in your company will do the work. We also price both against Promptwatch, because its $95 plan lands almost exactly on OmniSEO's and its $245 plan matches AthenaHQ's annual rate.
Snapshot
| OmniSEO | AthenaHQ | Promptwatch | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry paid plan | Essentials, $89/mo | Starter, $295/mo ($245 annual) | Essential, $95/mo |
| Free way in | 7-day trial, no card, ChatGPT and AI Overviews only | Free Essential tier, about 300 credits | Free Explore plan (10 prompts, ChatGPT); 7-day trial on Essential |
| Engines | 4 on Essentials, 10 on Professional ($349/mo) | 9 on Starter | All tracked LLMs, Essential included |
| How usage is counted | Saved prompts: 50, 100 or 500+ | Credits, one per AI response | Prompts and responses (50 and 6,000 on Essential) |
| Geography | Custom regions on Enterprise | One country on Starter; multi-region on Enterprise | Country on every plan; state and city from Professional |
| What it does with findings | Per-prompt recommendations, AI strategist | Action Center tasks: schema, reformatting, LLM metadata | Content Agents write and publish; Unified Actions to-do list |
| AI crawler logs | Not published | Not published | From Professional ($245/mo) |
| AI-referred traffic | Not published | GA4, Shopify and Webflow revenue attribution | Visitor analytics with conversions |
| Best for | Agencies that want breadth at a published price | Teams that will work a task queue every day | Teams that want tracking, publishing and verification together |
OmniSEO: breadth for the money
OmniSEO comes from WebFX and SEO.com, and it reads like a tool built by an agency for agencies. Prices are public. The trial needs no card. Professional, at $349 a month, covers ten engines: Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Meta AI, Grok and DeepSeek. Prompt research estimates query volume for each prompt, and the citing-domain view names the sources behind answers, Reddit and YouTube among them. AthenaHQ does not offer Reddit monitoring, which makes OmniSEO the better source-research tool of the two.
The plan structure is less generous than the engine list. Essentials stops at four engines and has no exports. Both self-serve plans cap competitor tracking at five. Moving from 50 to 100 saved prompts costs $260 more a month, because it also means moving to Professional. And the trial only covers two engines, so you buy the ten-engine plan without testing it.
When it comes to acting, OmniSEO gives each prompt recommendations and an AI strategist to talk them through. Enterprise ($899+) adds monthly AEO and GEO consultations. Nothing on the self-serve plans writes or ships a page.
AthenaHQ: the queue is the product
AthenaHQ tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek and AI Overviews and rolls the results into a single GEO score made of citations, sentiment, traffic impact and query type. That score is fine. The Action Center is the reason people buy it. Gaps become tasks: generate this schema, reformat that page, fix this LLM metadata. Schema and entity tagging can run automatically at scale. For a team that dislikes interpreting dashboards, that is a large time saving. Starter also includes API access and unlimited seats.
Credits are where you need a spreadsheet. Each AI response uses a credit, at roughly eight cents. Thirty prompts on nine engines, checked daily, comes to about 8,100 responses a month, so the allowance goes faster than the plan name suggests. Start with a narrow prompt set.
The other limits are about scope. Starter covers a single country. The ACE Citation Engine, personas and multi-region tracking sit on Enterprise, reported at around $2,000 a month or more. Recommendations still need editing before they ship, and AthenaHQ does not publish to a CMS for you.
Who wins which buyer
Choose OmniSEO if you run an agency, already employ writers and need to show clients coverage across ten engines at a price you can quote. Its citation sources and prompt volume estimates feed a content team well.
Choose AthenaHQ if you are an in-house team in one market and the bottleneck is deciding what to do next. The task queue removes most of that thinking, and the GA4, Shopify and Webflow revenue attribution gives a commerce team a number to report upward.
Neither one verifies. After a page changes, both wait for the next prompt run and look for a mention. Neither lists AI crawler logs, so you cannot see whether ChatGPTBot or PerplexityBot fetched the new version.
Where Promptwatch fits
Promptwatch Essential costs $6 more than OmniSEO Essentials and runs its 50 prompts across every LLM it tracks, against OmniSEO's four. It also includes 5 AEO articles a month. That alone makes it worth a look before either named tool.
The bigger difference comes at Professional, $245 a month, the same price as AthenaHQ Starter on annual billing. That plan adds Agent Analytics, which logs AI crawler hits from ChatGPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, GoogleOther and the Meta AI crawler and shows the crawl-to-citation path. Visitor analytics connects AI referrals to conversions. Content Agents go past a task list: they find content gaps, draft the article, park it in a review inbox and publish to Webflow or Framer. Citation analytics covers pages, domains, Reddit threads and YouTube videos, which closes the gap AthenaHQ leaves on Reddit. State and city tracking also start on this plan, so a team outgrowing AthenaHQ's single-country Starter has somewhere to go without an Enterprise contract.
Verdict
OmniSEO is the better buy for coverage per dollar, and AthenaHQ for a team that wants to be told what to fix next. Promptwatch is still where we would start. At $95 it competes with OmniSEO on price, and at $245 it does what AthenaHQ's queue does plus the two steps both tools skip: publishing the page and checking afterwards that crawlers and visitors arrived. You can start on the free Explore plan and compare.
FAQ
Is AthenaHQ's free tier enough to compare it with OmniSEO?
It is a fair baseline. The free Essential tier has about 300 credits, which shows your starting visibility. OmniSEO's 7-day trial covers ChatGPT and AI Overviews only, so neither free option shows the full paid product.
Which one handles Reddit and YouTube sources better?
OmniSEO. Its citing-domain view includes sources such as Reddit and YouTube. AthenaHQ does not list Reddit monitoring.
How does Promptwatch compare with OmniSEO and AthenaHQ together?
It covers OmniSEO's tracking role at a similar entry price and AthenaHQ's action role at a similar mid-tier price, then adds crawler logs, AI-referred conversions and CMS publishing. Neither named tool documents those three.