Profound vs Otterly vs AthenaHQ: The Best AI Citation Tracking Tools Compared (2026)
Three serious tools for tracking how often ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews cite your brand. Here's what each does well, what they miss, and which one to pick.
SEO, AEO and GEO consultant · Technical SEO, local SEO and content strategy
Last reviewed October 31, 2026
SEO, AEO & GEO consultant based in Rangpur, Bangladesh. Technical SEO, local search and content strategy. Full bio →
You can't optimize what you don't measure. Three tools have emerged as the serious contenders for tracking AI citations — Profound, Otterly, and AthenaHQ. I've used all three for client work for 6+ months. Here's the honest comparison.
Which AI citation tracking tool should I buy?
Pick Profound if you're an agency or enterprise needing white-label reports and the deepest data — it's the priciest but the most complete. Pick Otterly if you're a single-brand marketing team that wants the cleanest UI and fastest setup. Pick AthenaHQ if you're a startup that needs flexible API access and competitive intelligence at a lower price point.
Profound: the enterprise pick
Choose priorities from documented reader needs and your own search evidence. Preserve dated records and compare equivalent conditions. No universal market share, measured lift, audience-size benchmark or fixed result deadline is established by this guide.
Otterly: the cleanest UX
Strengths: gorgeous, focused dashboard. Easy to set up — paste your domain and prompts and you're tracking in 10 minutes. Solid alerting. Weaknesses: smaller engine coverage (no Claude yet), shallower competitive data, and limited API access. Best for in-house marketing teams that don't need agency features.
AthenaHQ: the flexible challenger
Strengths: best API access of the three, flexible pricing tiers starting at $99/mo, and good competitor intelligence. Weaknesses: UI feels less polished, sentiment analysis is weaker than Profound, and reporting templates are basic.
Pricing comparison
Profound: $499–$2,499/mo. Otterly: $149–$799/mo. AthenaHQ: $99–$499/mo. All three offer free trials. None have meaningful free tiers.
What none of them do well yet
Click-through attribution from AI surfaces to revenue. The whole category is stuck at 'we counted citations' — closing the loop to pipeline is still manual. Whoever solves this first wins the next 18 months.
Frequently asked
For under 20 prompts you can spreadsheet it. Above that, the tools pay for themselves in saved hours.
Weekly for active campaigns, monthly for steady-state monitoring. AI engine outputs vary day-to-day so single-point-in-time checks mislead.
Measure actual source links, referral visits and qualified enquiries separately. Record prompts, dates, settings and denominators. Tool coverage and attribution have limitations; no universal conversion multiplier, accuracy percentage or expected share-of-voice result is established here.
Google is rolling out limited AI Overview impressions in Search Console. OpenAI has hinted at a publisher dashboard but nothing shipped as of May 2026.