AthenaHQ vs Scrunch AI (2026): action queue or crawler-side pages?
AthenaHQ and Scrunch AI compared on pricing, credits, engines, crawler features, reporting, and fit. Two enterprise GEO platforms with very different ideas about where the work happens.
Quick verdict
AthenaHQ and Scrunch AI sit second and third in our ranking, and they solve the same problem from opposite ends. AthenaHQ turns visibility data into a queue of tasks your team works through. Scrunch AI changes what AI crawlers read by serving them a separate, machine-friendly version of your pages. If you have marketers who will work a task list every day, AthenaHQ is the stronger buy of the two. If you have a big content library and engineers who can wire up an edge worker, Scrunch has a lever nobody else in this pair offers.
Neither one shows you the whole chain from crawl to citation to conversion, though. That is the gap that keeps Promptwatch above both of them, and it's worth a trial before you sign either contract.
Side by side
| AthenaHQ | Scrunch AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Enterprise GEO platform | Enterprise GEO platform |
| Entry price | Free Essential tier (about 300 credits); Starter $295/mo, or $245/mo billed annually | Starter $250/mo billed annually ($300 monthly); no free tier, 7-day no-card trial |
| Usage model | Credits: one per AI response, about $0.08 each; add-on packs around $100 per 1,250 | Prompt credits consumed per engine; Starter includes 350 custom plus 1,000 industry prompts |
| Engines | Nine on Starter, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, AI Overviews, AI Mode | Up to nine on Enterprise; confirm per-tier coverage with sales |
| Geography | Starter is single country; multi-region on Enterprise | Not published on our listing |
| Seats | Unlimited on every tier, with role-based access | 3 on Starter; extra seats $25/mo |
| Signature feature | Action Center: insights become assignable tasks (schema, reformatting, LLM metadata) | Agent Experience Platform: serves AI-optimized page versions to LLM crawlers |
| Crawler data | Not published | Crawler traffic analytics showing which bots fetch which pages |
| Attribution | GA4, Shopify, and Webflow revenue attribution | Not published |
| Refresh cadence | Not published | Weekly, per user reviews |
| Ownership | Independent, YC-backed | Acquired by Sitecore in June 2026 (reported around $225M) |
How AthenaHQ works in practice
AthenaHQ was built by former Google Search and DeepMind engineers, and the product shows a search team's instinct for turning data into tickets. Tracking rolls up into a single GEO score that blends citations, sentiment, traffic impact, and query types. That score is fine for a dashboard. The Action Center is the real product.
Every finding ends as a task you can assign. Generate a schema block for this page. Restructure that answer section. Fix the LLM metadata on a product template. Teams that have struggled to get from "we're not cited" to "here is what we change on Monday" get that translation done for them. Our AthenaHQ review calls it the best optimization workflow in the category, and it is the reason AthenaHQ sits at number two.
The catch is the meter. Every AI response costs a credit. Fifty prompts across nine engines checked daily is 450 responses a day before you add a second market, and G2 reviewers on our listing describe burning a month's allocation in the first week. Starter is also locked to one country, and the features reviewers praise most (the ACE Citation Engine, personas, multi-region) sit on an Enterprise tier our listing puts around $2,000+ a month.
How Scrunch AI works in practice
Scrunch's starting idea is that the page a person should read and the page an AI crawler should ingest are not the same page. Its Agent Experience Platform detects LLM crawlers and serves them a parallel version of your content: tighter answer blocks, explicit entity statements, denser structured data. The human-facing page stays untouched and canonical.
That is a genuinely different lever. Most GEO tools tell you what to edit. Scrunch edits what the crawler sees. Setup runs through your CDN or an edge worker, so you need engineering time, but once it runs you can ship a variant, watch crawl patterns shift in its crawler analytics, and look for citations to follow.
The monitoring half draws more criticism. The most common G2 complaint on our Scrunch AI review is reporting: users export raw data to Excel to build client charts. Credits burn per engine, so one prompt across seven engines costs seven credits. Data refreshes weekly. Recommendations tend to point at where you're missing rather than what to change. And since the Sitecore acquisition, the roadmap answers to a digital experience platform vendor, which is worth weighing before a multi-year term.
Pricing compared
At list price the two entry tiers are close. Scrunch Starter costs $250 a month on annual billing. AthenaHQ Starter costs $245 a month on annual billing or $295 monthly. What you get for that money is shaped very differently.
AthenaHQ Starter gives unlimited seats, API access, nine engines in one country, and a credit pool. Your real bill depends on prompts multiplied by engines multiplied by check frequency, plus add-on packs when you run out. Forecasting it takes a full billing cycle.
Scrunch Starter gives three seats and a large prompt allowance, but credits still burn per engine. Growth is $417 a month on annual billing ($500 monthly). SSO, SOC 2, the data API, and the serving layer at scale sit on Enterprise, which is custom.
So the cheaper tool depends on how you track. A narrow, single-country program with a large team favors AthenaHQ's seats. A wide prompt set with a small team and engineering support favors Scrunch.
What both leave out
Line the two listings up against each other and the same holes show up on both sides.
Neither documents AI crawler logs with a crawl-to-citation path and error tracking. Scrunch comes closest, because its crawler analytics show which bots fetch which pages, but it doesn't publish a link from that fetch to the citation that followed.
Neither documents citation analytics down to Reddit threads, YouTube videos, and offsite mentions. AthenaHQ's listing notes no Reddit monitoring at all.
Neither publishes prompt search volumes, difficulty scores, or query fan-outs on its entry plan. And neither one writes and publishes the fix for you through a CMS.
Promptwatch covers each of those on published plans. Agent Analytics reads crawler logs from Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Fastly, Vercel, Netlify, Akamai, Google Cloud CDN, or a custom HTTP feed, and shows which pages ChatGPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, GoogleOther, and the Meta AI crawler fetched, with the crawl-to-citation path and errors. It starts on Professional at $245 a month with 25M crawler logs, the same monthly figure as AthenaHQ's annual Starter. Visitor analytics ties AI-referred sessions to conversions through a script or GTM template. Content Agents draft pages from content gap analysis and publish to Webflow, Framer, or WordPress through a review inbox, fully automated from Business at $579 a month. Tracking usage is a published number of responses per plan (18,000 on Professional), so you can size it before you buy rather than discover it on the invoice.
Who should pick which
Pick AthenaHQ if two or more marketers will work the Action Center daily, you run a single-country program, you want many seats without paying per head, and you are prepared to check credit burn every week.
Pick Scrunch AI if you run a large content site, you have engineers who can deploy an edge worker, and you want to shape what crawlers ingest rather than only measure answers. Budget time for manual reporting.
Pick Promptwatch if the question you get asked is "why did we lose that citation, and did it cost us anything?" That takes crawler logs, citation sources, and conversion data in one place, and it is what we'd trial first. For more options, see AthenaHQ alternatives and the full ranking.
FAQ
Is AthenaHQ or Scrunch AI cheaper?
At entry level they are within a few dollars on annual billing: AthenaHQ Starter at $245/mo and Scrunch Starter at $250/mo. AthenaHQ also has a free Essential tier with about 300 credits. Real cost for both depends on how many engines you track, because both meter usage per engine or per response.
Does Scrunch's crawler serving count as cloaking?
Scrunch targets declared LLM crawlers rather than Googlebot and keeps the human page canonical, which our listing compares to dynamic rendering. Conservative teams should still review the setup with their SEO lead.
Which one tracks AI crawlers?
Scrunch lists crawler traffic analytics as part of its serving layer. AthenaHQ does not publish crawler analytics. Promptwatch's Agent Analytics, from the Professional plan and on every agency plan, adds the crawl-to-citation path and bot error tracking.