One tracks brand visibility inside AI answers, the other checks crawler access
AthenaHQ and AI Crawl Score are both described in the context of “AI search,” but AthenaHQ is a paid, credit-metered platform for tracking and improving how a brand is mentioned across AI assistants, while AI Crawl Score is a free one-time technical scan of whether a site’s own pages are reachable.
What AthenaHQ does
Per third-party pricing coverage reviewing AthenaHQ’s own published plans, AthenaHQ offers a free Essential tier with a limited monthly credit allowance, and paid Starter, Growth and Enterprise tiers priced from roughly $95–$295/month (annual vs. monthly) up to custom Enterprise pricing, metered by a credit system where each AI-prompt analysis or content action consumes credits. Its stated features include AI-mention and visibility tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and other models, competitive benchmarking, citation intelligence, and AI-assisted content optimization recommendations. This pricing detail comes from secondary reporting, not a direct read of athenahq.ai/pricing in this research pass, so treat the specific dollar figures as reported-not-independently-verified, consistent with this repo’s standard for unconfirmed competitor pricing.
What AI Crawl Score does
AI Crawl Score’s free readiness checker has no AI-prompt tracking, credit system, or brand-mention monitoring. It runs a bounded raw-fetch scan of up to five pages, checking robots.txt rules by crawler identity, sitemap presence, JSON-LD structured data, and delivered-HTML accuracy. There is no account or credit balance to run it.
Side by side
| Question | AI Crawl Score | AthenaHQ |
|---|---|---|
| AI-answer brand/mention tracking | No | Yes |
| Credit-metered usage | No | Yes |
| Robots/sitemap/schema technical check | Yes | No |
| Pricing model | Free | Free tier + paid plans, reported from ~$95/month |
| Account required | No | Yes |
Which one fits your situation
Run AI Crawl Score first when the question is purely technical: can crawlers reach a given page, is the sitemap valid, is structured data present. Consider AthenaHQ when the ongoing need is monitoring and improving how a brand is mentioned across AI assistants over time, which is outside AI Crawl Score’s scope entirely. The two check different things: a clean AI Crawl Score result says nothing about whether a brand is actually surfaced inside an AI answer, and AthenaHQ’s visibility tracking does not substitute for confirming that the underlying pages are even crawlable. Google’s AI-optimization guidance still frames technical soundness as a prerequisite, not an alternative, to AI-era visibility work.
See ai citation tracking methodology, ai overview position tracking methodology, and generative engine optimization guide.
Frequently asked questions
Does AI Crawl Score track brand mentions across ChatGPT or Perplexity like AthenaHQ?
No. AI Crawl Score has no visibility into AI-platform outputs; it only reports technical crawler-access findings for the pages of a site.
Is AthenaHQ free to use the way the AI Crawl Score scan is?
AthenaHQ reportedly offers a free Essential tier with a limited monthly credit allowance, but its fuller feature set sits behind paid plans; the AI Crawl Score readiness scan itself has no paid tier.