Peec AI is the better first purchase for a small agency. It starts at $95 a month, publishes every limit, and produces dashboards a client can read without a call. AthenaHQ costs $295 a month and does more, which pays off once retainers need recommendations, extra models and security paperwork.
Prices and limits below come from athenahq.ai and peec.ai, checked on 6 November 2026.
What both tools measure
Both run a fixed list of prompts against AI engines on a schedule and record whether your brand appears in the answer, at what position, with what sentiment, and which URLs get cited. Both report share of voice against competitors.
Neither reports what real buyers typed into ChatGPT last week. Neither guarantees a citation. The number is a sample of your prompt deck from one day, and models return different answers on repeated runs, so a single day's move means little. Hold the prompt list steady for a month and the direction becomes readable.
AthenaHQ and Peec AI also differ in what sits around the core score. Peec AI scores prompt volume from 1 to 5, tracks brand perception attributes and the objections AI raises against you, follows products at SKU level in AI shopping, audits crawlability across 40+ bots and reports AI referral traffic. AthenaHQ ships a content optimization agent, on-page and off-page actions, sentiment tracking and management of robots.txt and llms.txt for AI crawlers.
Pricing and what the money buys
| AthenaHQ Starter | Peec AI Starter | Peec AI Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $295/month | $95/month | $245/month |
| Models | 11 | 3 active of 6 | 3 active of 6 |
| Prompt limit | Unlimited prompts, 3,600 credits | 50 prompts | 150 prompts |
| AI answers a month | 3,600 (1 credit = 1 response) | 4,500 | 13,500 |
| Projects | Unlimited topics | 1 | 2 |
| Users | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
The counting method matters more than the headline price. AthenaHQ sells AI responses: 3,600 credits is 3,600 answers, which at daily tracking across 11 models covers about 10 prompts a day, or about 40 a day if you run 3 models. Peec AI sells prompts and multiplies them by active models, so 50 prompts across 3 models over 30 days is 4,500 answers.
On answers alone, Peec AI Starter returns more volume than AthenaHQ Starter at a third of the price, and Peec AI Pro returns almost four times the volume for less than AthenaHQ charges.
AthenaHQ's advantage sits in coverage. One plan includes 11 models without add-ons, among them Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral. Peec AI charges $30 to $140 a month for an extra model on a self-serve plan and keeps Perplexity, Claude and Grok on Enterprise. AthenaHQ also includes unlimited competitors and one month of credit rollover.
Both let you test before paying. AthenaHQ's free Essential plan carries 300 credits across 5 engines. Peec AI runs a free trial.
The agency question
Peec AI sells a separate agency tier. Essential is $245 a month for 10,000 credits and 3 client projects, Growth is $495 for 10 projects, Scale is $795 for 25. Each includes free pitch projects for prospects, unlimited client logins, consolidated billing and shareable view-only dashboards. The pitch projects are the useful part: 3 to 7 prospect audits with 25 to 75 prompts, live for 7 days, which is how a new agency wins the first retainer.
AthenaHQ handles agencies through a partner programme: discounted licences, pitch workspaces, GEO certification, a dedicated agency growth manager and monthly office hours. Client-level controls such as SSO, audit logs, multi-region support and a 2-hour SLA sit on Enterprise.
For one or two clients, the Peec AI agency pricing is easier to model. At $245 a month, one client covers the tool and the second is margin. AthenaHQ's programme makes more sense when you resell licences at a margin and want the certification as a sales asset.
What agency owners argued about
r/aeo ran a 35-comment thread from a small agency choosing between the two. The longest argument was not about features.
One commenter argued the visibility score is a synthetic prompt deck sampled on a given day. It moves when the model updates or the prompts change, so an agency that sells a jump from 14% to 27% is selling sampling noise. The poster agreed the data is noisy but argued that every marketing metric is a proxy, and a stable prompt set tracked over weeks still shows direction. A third point drew agreement from both sides: a brand being named in an answer and a page of yours being cited are separate events, and one score hides the difference.
On the tools, the split was consistent. Peec AI was called easier to explain and demo to clients. AthenaHQ was called broader and more visual, and harder to explain in a first meeting.
The replies also filled with vendors pitching their own platforms. Treat tool recommendations in that thread the way you would treat a listicle.
Which one to pick
- Peec AI Starter, $95. A solo operator testing whether GEO sells. 50 prompts across 3 models is enough for one niche.
- Peec AI agency Essential, $245. Three paying clients, a need for pitch workspaces and client logins, and a budget that has to be approved this quarter.
- AthenaHQ Starter, $295. One client whose scope covers many markets or models, or a buyer who asks for Claude, Grok and DeepSeek in the same dashboard.
- AthenaHQ Enterprise. A client security review that requires SSO, audit logs and a 2-hour SLA.
Neither tool closes the gap between a dashboard and a result. The work is the prompt set, the pages behind the citations, and the outreach that puts your client's name into the sources AI engines read. If you want that run for you, a B2B AI SEO agency handles tracking, content and citation work as one service, and you keep the reporting.