Profound vs AthenaHQ vs Linkeddit (2026): One Engine for $99, Ten Models for $295, Four Engines With the Fix for $99

01The short answer

Profound if you want the category’s deepest review base, prompt volume data from real users, agents with credits, and up to nine engines, and you budget from $399 rather than $99, because the $99 tier tracks one engine. AthenaHQ if you want to start free on five engines including Claude, you like a credit meter you can size exactly, and you want an Action Center that prioritises tasks across content, PR and product, with the caveat that the next step after free is $295. Linkeddit if you want four engines including Claude at a flat $99, MCP that carries the actions, and the measurement to end in a sourced fix and a re-measurement, accepting that we have no prompt volume data and far fewer reviews.

02Pricing on the day

Profound’s pricing page and AthenaHQ’s plans page were read on 4 September 2026 for their reviews, AthenaHQ’s as plain text so no price node was lost. Linkeddit’s figures are our own pricing page.

03Credits, prompts and engines, priced out

Two of the three meter the same thing, one AI response, which makes them directly comparable and makes Profound the odd one out. Here is what a programme costs on each, using printed figures. AthenaHQ credits are one per response; a prompt on ten models daily is ten credits a day, 300 a month.

Read the table for your shape. AthenaHQ is unbeatable at the bottom, free for a small set on five engines, and its $295 buys more responses per dollar than Profound’s $99 buys on one engine. Profound is the right buy when its non-tracking features are the point, prompt volume, agents, shopping visibility, because on tracking arithmetic alone it is the most expensive of the three below Enterprise. Our flat $99 is cheapest for a real programme on four engines, and the honest caveat is the same one we print everywhere: the allowance is credits shown in the app, one per measured sample, and the usage tool reports it before you spend.

04What each does, and where it stops

Profound tracks visibility, citations and sentiment per prompt and adds the features its reviewers and Reddit users single out: Prompt Volumes from real-user data, which a month-long r/Agentic_Marketing comparison called “genuinely unique”; Agent Analytics for crawler and referral behaviour; Profound Agents with credits for content and AEO tasks; shopping visibility; and Ask Profound for natural-language questions about your data. The same tester’s conclusion is the honest summary of where it stops: it “gives you the most sophisticated visibility intelligence in the market and then nothing happens, someone still has to go figure out the execution layer separately”.

AthenaHQ tracks visibility, citations, sentiment and competitors across five engines free and ten models on Starter, estimates prompt volume, and organises the work in an Action Center that prioritises opportunities across content, PR, product and technical teams. A vendor roundup that likes it calls it best for “teams that need AI visibility data with prioritized actions”, and an r/aeo agency lead preferred exactly that kind of “more autonomous tools with recommendations” over pure tracking. It stops at the prioritised task; G2 reviewers ask for industry prompt templates and workflow templates, which suggests the tasks are still mostly yours to shape.

Linkeddit Answer Radar asks your approved buying questions of four engines, grades every sample for admissibility, reports six defined metrics per engine, records every cited page and every fan-out search, ranks recommendation gaps by intent and evidence, assembles a fix skeleton from the recorded evidence with no prose generated, rejects any draft citing a source the run never recorded, saves it for a person to approve, and re-measures after an indexing delay as an observed delta. It stops short of prompt volume, of an index, of ten models, and of in-app publishing; the does-not-do page lists the rest.

05API and MCP

AthenaHQ’s plans page lists API access as a paid add-on on Starter, “contact us”, and we found no MCP server on its pages. Profound’s pages showed no MCP server when we read them for its review. Linkeddit ships every capability as an MCP tool on the $99 plan over one OAuth 2.1 connector, measurement and actions alike; the playbooks are recorded transcripts, including the guard rejecting a source the engines never cited. If working from Claude or Cursor is the job, that is the row that decides it today, and we say so knowing it is our row.

06Reviews and Reddit

Profound: 4.5 out of 5 on 1,128 G2 reviews, the deepest base in the category. Recurring dislikes in our review: the ChatGPT-only Starter, the jump to $399, and a learning curve, with praise for prompt volume data and citation depth. In r/aeo: “strongest on citation depth and multi-model coverage” and “quite expensive”.

AthenaHQ: 4.9 on 48 G2 reviews, 97 percent five-star. Dislikes in our review: overwhelming at first, no industry prompt templates, UI rough edges, requests for role-based onboarding and bulk controls. Zero price complaints, which is unusual for a $295 entry and consistent with a free tier that filters buyers. Likes: no add-on fee per engine against Semrush’s bolt-on, branded PDF export, same-day support, the gap-to-brief workflow. Founded through Y Combinator’s winter 2025 batch, per its reviews and the YC directory.

Linkeddit: far fewer reviews than either. The evidence for our product is the recorded playbooks and the methodology page rather than a review count, and a buyer should weigh that.

07Measured: what four AI engines say about the three

This section is ours and labelled as such, and one of the three vendors is us. On 4 September 2026 we ran our own Answer Radar project for linkeddit.com, 21 approved buying questions about AI visibility and competitive intelligence tools, through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity via their official APIs with grounded search. Profound and AthenaHQ are not tracked competitors on that project, so their numbers are volunteered mentions; Linkeddit is the tracked brand. Per engine, admissible samples only, counts stated, per the methodology.

Across our full population of 220 completed answers about this category, tryprofound.com was cited three times, twice by Perplexity and once by Gemini, and athenahq.ai zero times. Our own recommendation rate on our own prompts is low, 0 of 10 on Claude and 1 of 15 on Gemini, which is why the project’s action queue holds nine content gap cards and why this series of pages exists. A vendor that hides its own measurement has no business selling one.

08Matrix

09Questions to settle before you buy, per vendor

The three pricing pages leave different things unsaid, and the review threads tell you which ones bite. These are the open questions as of 4 September 2026.

Profound. Ask which engines your prompts will actually run on at the tier you are quoted, because the printed answer is one at $99 and three at $399, and Claude is Enterprise only. Ask what an agent credit buys and what happens when the 100 on Starter run out mid-month. Ask whether the Prompt Volumes data covers your category or only the broad ones, since that feature is the reason to pay the premium.

AthenaHQ. Size your programme in credits before the call: prompts times models times days. If it is over 3,600 a month, ask the price of extra credits, which the plans page lists as a paid add-on without a figure. Ask the API price the same way. Ask which single country Starter covers and what a second one costs. Ask to see the Action Center on your own gaps, because G2 reviewers wanted industry prompt templates that were not there yet.

Linkeddit. Run the usage tool before the first audit so the allowance is a number you saw. Ask to watch the faithfulness guard reject a source on your own project, not in a recorded playbook. Ask what the verification reads when the outcome is not comparable or ambient change not isolated, because both exist and neither is a success. The verify a fix help page lists every outcome and the threshold that decides them.

10Verdict, including against us

Pick Profound if you want the category’s most-reviewed specialist, prompt volume data from real users, agents with credits, shopping visibility and up to nine engines, and you budget from $399, because the $99 tier is a single-engine sample.

Pick AthenaHQ if you want to start free on five engines including Claude, you want a credit meter you can size exactly, you want ten models at $295 with a prioritised Action Center across teams, and the jump from free to $295 fits your budget. Ask about API pricing and industry prompt templates before you commit.

Pick Linkeddit if you want four engines including Claude at a flat $99, MCP that carries the actions as well as the data, the measurement to end in a fix built only from what the engines actually read and a re-measurement that says whether it moved, and a weekly competitor brief on the same bill. Do not pick us for prompt volume, ten models, or a long review base; Profound and AthenaHQ are the better-reviewed choices today, and we say so.

11Frequently asked questions