Recomma vs AthenaHQ (2026): breadth and content vs defensible numbers

AthenaHQ and Recomma both measure how often AI answers name your brand, and both go on to tell you what to fix. AthenaHQ casts the wider net: eleven models on its first paid plan, a content agent that publishes to Shopify, WordPress or Webflow, and GA4 and Search Console wired in. It sells answers as credits, so how many questions you can track depends on how many models and how often. Recomma sells a fixed number of prompts, captures answers from the interface a reader sees, and puts a sample size and an error bar on every figure. Teams that want breadth and a content engine tend to fit AthenaHQ; teams that need defensible numbers on a smaller budget tend to fit Recomma.

At a glance

AthenaHQ's figures are from its pricing page and its public documentation. Recomma's are from the plan table the product enforces.

Plans, prices and credits

AthenaHQ has three tiers. Essential is free, with 300 credits, five models (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot) and unlimited members. Starter is $295 a month for 3,600 credits and eleven models, with unlimited seats, role-based access, CSV export and the integrations below. Enterprise is custom, and adds SAML and OIDC single sign-on, audit logs, a two-hour SLA, a dedicated Slack channel, persona targeting and multi-region tracking. API access and extra credits are add-ons on Starter at prices given by sales. AthenaHQ pricing.

A credit is one AI response, and a run sends every selected prompt to every selected model (API docs). The arithmetic matters more than the headline. Assuming one response per prompt per model per run, Starter's 3,600 credits cover about 80 prompts asked of all eleven models once a week, or about 40 prompts asked of three models every day. The schedule screen shows an estimate before you save, and the credit calculator takes prompts, locations, models and cadence as inputs.

Recomma limits prompts instead of answers. Starter is $30 a month for 50 prompts, sampled daily, on one project. Growth is $299 for 300 prompts, sampled daily, across three projects. Scale is $999 for 500 prompts with no limit on projects or engines. Prompts pool across the workspace, so an agency decides which client gets the coverage. The full table is on the pricing page.

So at roughly $300 a month the two buy different things: AthenaHQ buys breadth — eleven models, if you ask them less often or ask fewer questions — and Recomma buys depth, 300 questions a day on up to three engines. Below that, AthenaHQ's free tier is a genuine way to look before paying; Recomma has no free plan, but its Starter costs $30.

Engines, and how answers are collected

AthenaHQ's Starter lists ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral, with more models on request. Its docs say a run sends prompt text "to the selected external AI providers"; they do not say whether the answers come from each model's API or from the consumer product a buyer uses.

Recomma captures ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and Google AI Mode from the interface a reader sees, and asks Perplexity through its own API. Capturing is deliberate: in our own study, only 8% of the pages ChatGPT's interface cited also appeared in the API answer to the same question. What sampling can and cannot see sets out the trade-off. The cost is coverage: Copilot is not sampled, and Claude is not sampled at all.

What happens after the number

AthenaHQ goes a long way past the visibility figure. Its content agent drafts and improves pages in your brand voice and publishes them to Shopify, WordPress, Webflow, Contentful, Sanity, Framer, Wix or Payload; GA4 puts traffic and conversions beside visibility, and Search Console turns your queries into tracked prompts (integrations). Site Health audits how AI crawlers read the site, ranks fixes by citation impact, and shows how often AI cited a fixed page in the 30 days before and after the fix (docs). An AI Search Value estimate, priced from Google keyword data and shown as a range, is rolling out in phases (docs). There are also shopping-carousel and ads reports.

Recomma does less, and is stricter about whether a number means anything:

• Every figure carries the number of answers behind it and a 95% Wilson interval, and a reading too thin to mean anything is dimmed rather than drawn as a trend. Why the error bar.
• Each tracked question is priced with keyword data — monthly searches, the share of clicks a top result takes, and what advertisers bid — so you can see what the market behind a gap is worth.
• A gap becomes an action. When it closes, the reading on its prompts is frozen, and fourteen days later the same prompts are asked again on fresh answers. The verdict is kept whether or not anything moved.
• The site is audited against fifteen markup rules that AI crawlers trip on, with each failing page's markup as it is and as it should be. The checklist lists all fifteen.

Recomma does not write or publish content; its GA4 connection reports the visits assistants send, beside the answers that sent them. If you want one tool to find the gap and ship the page, AthenaHQ does both.

API, MCP and exports

AthenaHQ's REST API covers websites, prompts, responses and metrics, and is a paid add-on on Starter, included on Enterprise. Its MCP server connects ChatGPT, Claude and other clients; write tools are available on API-key connections and to signed-in users whose role allows them, with the same validation and audit log as the dashboard (MCP docs). Looker Studio is listed among its integrations, and Tableau, Power BI and Looker on Enterprise.

Recomma's read-only REST API comes with Scale; CSV export comes with every plan. Its MCP server, also on every plan, reads and writes too: an assistant can list the gaps, read the site findings with their before-and-after markup, propose prompts and close an action. Every write previews first and needs a separate write scope, and new prompts land as suggestions that spend nothing until a person accepts them. Fixing what AI search gets wrong, from Claude Code walks through it.

Where AthenaHQ is the better choice

• Engine breadth. Eleven models on Starter, including Claude, Copilot, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek. Recomma tracks five, and three below Scale.
• A free tier. Essential gives five models and 300 credits with no card; Recomma's only trial is three days of Growth, with a card.
• Content that ships. An agent that writes in your brand voice and publishes to your CMS or Shopify store.
• Analytics joined up. GA4 and Search Console on the first paid plan, Search Console queries turned into prompts, and BI connectors on Enterprise.
• Enterprise readiness. SSO, audit logs, a two-hour SLA, multi-region tracking, and SOC 2 listed on the site.
• Track record. AthenaHQ has customers and reviews to check; Recomma is new and has none yet.

Where Recomma is the better choice

• Price. $30 a month for a paid plan, against $295 for AthenaHQ's first paid tier.
• Questions per dollar. 300 prompts asked daily on Growth at $299; the same money at AthenaHQ covers about 40 prompts daily on three models.
• Answers as readers see them. ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and Google AI Mode captured from the interface, not an API whose citations differ.
• Numbers you can defend. A sample size and confidence interval on every figure, so noise is shown as noise.
• Proof that a fix worked. Actions re-measured on the same prompts fourteen days after they close, against a frozen baseline.
• A predictable bill. Prompts are the limit, not credits, so adding a run day does not drain the plan.

Choose AthenaHQ if… choose Recomma if…

Choose AthenaHQ if you need Claude, Copilot or the long tail of models; you want one tool to find the gap, write the page and publish it; you live in GA4 and Search Console; or you are buying through procurement and need SSO and an SLA.

Choose Recomma if ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and Google AI Mode and Perplexity cover the engines your buyers use; you want hundreds of questions tracked daily for under $300; you have to show which changes moved the number, with the error bar to back it; or you work from an AI assistant and want it to fix the site with a preview before every write.

For other comparisons, see Recomma vs Peec AI, Recomma vs Rankscale and Recomma vs Profound, or the wider list of the best AI visibility tools.

How we compared

AthenaHQ's plans, credits, models, integrations, schedules and API were read from its public pricing page, integrations page and documentation on 14 October 2026, in US dollars. Where AthenaHQ does not publish something — the yearly price, the price of the API and extra credits, how answers are collected — the page says so rather than guessing. The prompt counts per plan are our arithmetic from its credit definition, not AthenaHQ's. Third-party review scores were left out because they could not be checked at the source. Recomma's figures are drawn from the same plan table its API enforces, so they change on this page when they change in the product.