AthenaHQ vs Semrush for AI Search Visibility: Which Delivers More ROI?

April 24, 2026 11 min read

Andrew Yan

Co-Founder, CEO of AthenaHQ

VS

Summary

• AthenaHQ is purpose-built for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), tracking brand presence across 8+ major LLMs including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.
  Semrush is a traditional SEO platform with secondary AI visibility features.

• AthenaHQ is the stronger choice for e-commerce brands.
  Its native Shopify integration directly connects AI citations to revenue, enabling brands to measure the business impact of AEO efforts. Semrush does not offer this capability.

• AthenaHQ offers specialized infrastructure for B2B SaaS companies and agencies.
  This includes autonomous workflows for content creation and optimization specifically designed to increase citation probability, as well as a suite of agency tools that make it easier to scale AEO offerings as a service line. Semrush offers broader marketing coverage but lacks AEO depth.

• Semrush uses a tiered subscription model that covers a wide range of marketing tools.
  AthenaHQ uses a credit-based model starting at $295/month, with custom enterprise plans that include unlimited seats, API access, and dedicated support for AI search strategy.

• The two platforms are not direct competitors.
  AthenaHQ is the best choice for teams that need to win in AI search and prove that visibility translates into pipeline and revenue. Semrush is a solid option for teams that need a consolidated platform for traditional SEO.

Head-to-Head Feature Comparison: AthenaHQ vs. Semrush

AthenaHQ

The AI-Native Answer Engine Optimization Platform

AthenaHQ is an AEO platform created by experts from Google Search and DeepMind with a single purpose: helping teams win AI search. Where Semrush retrofits AI features onto a traditional SEO core, AthenaHQ was architected specifically around how generative engines work, with deep coverage across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, among others. Every metric, report, and workflow enables marketers to understand and improve on how their brand is being cited in AI responses.

Key AthenaHQ features include:

• Comprehensive AI Engine Tracking: AthenaHQ provides a unified view of your brand’s presence across all major AI Search platforms, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
• Actionable Insights: AthenaHQ translates raw monitoring data into a prioritized queue of executable optimization tasks.
• Autonomous Agents (ACE): AthenaHQ’s proprietary Athena Citation Engine (ACE) agent independently analyzes content gaps, drafts on-brand optimizations, and autonomously executes multi-step workflows for even the most complex, enterprise-scale AEO plays.
• Integrated Workflows: AthenaHQ seamlessly connects insights to actions, surfacing prompts and automating content production and optimization for high citation probability.
• Business Outcome Focus: Through native integrations with Shopify and Google Analytics, AthenaHQ delivers a rare capability: directly attributing AI visibility efforts to key business metrics and revenue. Customers achieved measurable results like 1,561% ROI by converting AI visibility into quantifiable leads and sales pipeline.
• Enterprise Scalability: With flexible pricing and unlimited seats, AthenaHQ scales with organizations, instead of locking teams into per-user restrictions.

Results in AthenaHQ

AthenaHQ customers have seen dramatic results in their AI search visibility, including:

• 50 % increase in demos from AI search
• 38 % MoM increase in leads from AI search
• 40 % increase in brand mention rate
• 85 % faster response to brand mentions
• 50 % reduction in time spent on AI visibility tracking
• 2.5 x increase in AI-driven organic traffic
• 5 x increase in AI content citations
• 10 x increase in citation rate

Customer Response

AthenaHQ has a 4.9 star rating on G2, earning top marks for depth of insights, usability, and high value. Its customers include SoFi, Wix, and ZoomInfo. Teams have praised AthenaHQ across multiple industries and verticals, including:

Computer Software

“We’re a software company in the developer tools space. Our buyers are technical and increasingly skeptical of traditional marketing. They research tools by asking Claude or ChatGPT for recommendations before they ever visit our site. We knew this was happening but had no visibility into it.
AthenaHQ gave us that visibility without requiring a dedicated analyst to interpret results. The prompt tracking shows exactly what questions potential customers are asking and whether we appear in the answers. The competitive benchmarking revealed that a smaller open-source competitor was being cited more frequently than us for our core use case, despite having less than half our feature set. What I appreciate most is the bias toward action. Other tools we tried gave us beautiful charts and left us wondering what to do. AthenaHQ tells us specifically which content to create or update, with context on why it matters.”

–Verified Customer Review, G2

Financial Services

“We were paying nearly $6k/month for another AI visibility platform that our team dreaded using. The dashboards were so dense that extracting a single insight for leadership took hours. Exporting data for our monthly reports required workarounds involving screenshots and manual transcription. It felt like the tool was built for data scientists, not marketers.
AthenaHQ costs less and actually gets used. It surfaces what matters without forcing us to dig. Last month it identified that we were completely absent from prompts about retirement planning for high-net-worth individuals, which is literally our core business. We had content on the topic, but it wasn’t structured in a way AI models could parse. The platform showed us exactly which pages needed work.
I also appreciate that the team responds to feedback quickly. We reported an issue with how sentiment was being categorized for financial terms, and they adjusted the model within two weeks.”

–Verified Customer Review, G2

Healthcare

“In healthcare tech, we can’t just plug in any SaaS tool and hope for the best. Our legal and compliance teams scrutinize everything. AthenaHQ passed their review faster than most vendors we evaluate, partly because the team was transparent about data handling and partly because the platform doesn’t require us to expose sensitive systems to get value.
The prompt tracking gives us visibility into how AI models discuss our category, which matters when misinformation could have real consequences. We caught ChatGPT recommending a competitor’s product for a use case where it’s actually contraindicated. That’s not just a marketing problem. AthenaHQ helped us identify it, and we worked with our medical affairs team to publish clarifying content.
The dashboard is genuinely intuitive. Our marketing ops person picked it up in a day. No dedicated analyst required.”

–Verified Customer Review, G2

Real Estate

“We manage multiple residential real estate brands across thousands of franchise locations. The way consumers find agents is shifting fast. Five years ago it was referrals and yard signs. Then it was Zillow and Realtor.com. Now we’re seeing buyers and sellers ask ChatGPT things like “best real estate agent for luxury homes in Scottsdale” or “which brokerage has the lowest commission fees” before they ever visit a brand website. AthenaHQ helped us understand how our brands perform in those conversations.
We discovered that AI models were recommending competitors for specific property types and price points where we have strong market share. Worse, some responses contained outdated information about our commission structures that made us look less competitive than we actually are. The regional tracking has been particularly valuable. Real estate is hyperlocal, and AI models respond differently by market. We can now segment visibility by metro area and give our regional marketing teams data they can act on. A brand manager in South Florida sees different insights than someone covering the Pacific Northwest, which is exactly how it should be.”

–Verified Customer Review, G2

Retail

“We operate 200+ retail locations across North America. What works for brand visibility in California doesn’t necessarily work in Texas or Quebec. AI models respond differently by region, and most tools we evaluated treated the US as a monolith.
AthenaHQ’s regional segmentation was a differentiator for us. We discovered that our AI visibility in the Southeast was half what it was on the West Coast, even though our store density is similar. The platform identified specific content gaps around product categories that index higher in Southern markets. Our regional marketing teams now have data to act on instead of guessing.
The reporting is also clean enough to share with franchise owners who are not marketers. They can understand the visibility scores and see why certain content investments matter.”

–Verified Customer Review, G2

Semrush

An Established SEO Suite with Bolted-On AI Features

Semrush is an established SEO platform that supports a range of digital marketing capabilities, including PPC management, content marketing, and competitive intelligence.
In response to the rise of AI-powered search, Semrush has further expanded to include AI visibility monitoring. For teams already embedded in the Semrush ecosystem, this provides a familiar entry point into tracking how their brand appears in AI-generated results. However, as yet another feature in an already expansive SEO and digital marketing suite, it lacks the depth and nuance required to truly execute AEO effectively. Multiple users have specifically complained about Semrush’s AI features:

• “Sometimes AI overview results are not so accurate, especially when it comes to rankings. Keywords that are ranking in top positions manually sometimes don’t get reflected accurately in the AI overview. The AI overview algorithm needs improvement.” –Dolly D ( G2)
• “Some data isn’t always 100% accurate, so you still need to use judgment rather than relying blindly on the numbers.” –Manit A ( G2)
• “I find it a bit disappointing that Semrush doesn’t provide any AI searching data to check the AI search results.” –Waqar H ( G2)
• “The tool should provide more flexibility, allowing me to better optimize and track only the prompts and keywords that are actually relevant to my users in AEO.” –Avinash B ( G2)

Core Focus: All-in-One vs AI-Native

Semrush does a lot of things. Its core value is an expansive suite of tools covering every aspect of traditional SEO and digital marketing under one roof. If your team needs keyword research, backlink analysis, PPC tracking, and content auditing in a single platform, Semrush delivers. Its AI visibility features fit into this ecosystem as one layer among many, which makes them convenient but not comprehensive.

AthenaHQ is specifically built to excel in its specialty area: helping brands significantly improve their AI search visibility. Its entire architecture is intentionally designed for the AI search era. From the proprietary Athena Citation Engine (ACE) to its autonomous workflows for content creation and optimization, every feature exists to solve GEO challenges at scale. That singular, foundational focus gives AthenaHQ a structural advantage that broader platforms like Semrush simply cannot replicate.

AI Engine Coverage and Monitoring

Semrush addresses general AI visibility and gives teams a starting point for understanding how their brand surfaces in AI-generated results. For organizations already invested in the platform, this serves as a point of entry for basic AI monitoring.

AthenaHQ goes considerably deeper. It tracks brand presence across 8+ major LLMs, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, providing marketers a comprehensive view of their presence across every major AI search environment. It also goes beyond simple tracking with its proprietary Query Volume Estimation Model (QVEM), which predicts prompt frequency with over 95% accuracy.

This matters because AI search is driven by nuanced conversational queries, not tidy keyword searches. Understanding which prompts your audience is actually using, and how often, requires deeper data support than traditional keyword volume. AthenaHQ tells you what people are asking, what AI says in response, and how your brand fits into that picture.

Actionability and Optimization Tools

Semrush provides traditional SEO recommendations. The challenge is that the platform was designed to surface data about Google rankings. Adapting that logic to AI citation optimization requires additional interpretation and manual adaptation.

AthenaHQ makes actionability a core product feature, not an afterthought. It converts monitoring data into a prioritized, executable task list, telling you which content to fix, how to effectively optimize it, and why it matters for citation probability. The platform goes even further with autonomous ACE agents that scan for content gaps, detect citation issues, and optimize automatically, making AEO work scalable without proportionally growing headcount. For deeper content work, On-Brand Content Agents can rewrite underperforming pages to specifically align with how different AI models evaluate and cite content.

For teams that can’t afford to spend hours reverse-engineering AI behavior, this automated workflow layer is a genuine force multiplier.

Revenue Attribution and E-commerce Capabilities

When it comes to understanding traditional search performance, Semrush delivers strong analytics. What it does not offer is a direct, native connection between AI visibility and revenue. You can see how your site ranks, but not how AI citations are driving sales.

This is where AthenaHQ has a clear and practical advantage. Its native Shopify integration connects AEO efforts directly to the bottom line, allowing brands to see exactly which AI citations are translating into purchases. This is not just useful for understanding ROI, but justifying AEO investment. Client results back this up: Popl.co achieved a 1,561% ROI, and Lago increased demos by 50% using AthenaHQ.

B2B and Agency Features

Semrush has multiple features for agencies managing client SEO campaigns. Its reporting tools are reliable, and its breadth of data makes it useful for general client analysis and competitive intelligence across traditional search.

AthenaHQ is specifically built to help agencies establish and grow high-margin AEO service lines. Tools like the Pitch Workspace can generate a data-backed client report in under five minutes. The platform also offers a qualified lead routing program for certified partners and centralized multi-client management, giving agencies the infrastructure to run AEO services at scale.

For B2B companies, the case is equally compelling. G2 research shows that 71% of B2B buyers now rely on AI chatbots for software research, and 84% of CMOs use LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude for vendor discovery. AthenaHQ is built to ensure that when a buyer asks “what is the best project management tool for a 50-person team,” your product is cited prominently and favorably. Semrush can support keyword research for the same topic, but doesn’t address the AI discovery layer where that buyer is actually starting their search.

Pricing & Investment Value

AthenaHQ operates on a flexible, credit-based subscription. The Self-Serve plan starts at $295 per month and includes 3,600 credits, where one credit equals one AI response.

For larger organizations, AthenaHQ offers custom Enterprise plans that include unlimited seats, API access, a dedicated Slack channel, white-glove onboarding, and custom credit allocations. The ROI case is clearest for organizations where AI search is already driving discovery or where it is becoming a primary acquisition path.

Semrush operates on a traditional tiered subscription model. It is a significant investment that covers a comprehensive suite of marketing tools. If your team is primarily focused on traditional SEO and uses Semrush across keyword research, backlink analysis, and content auditing, the cost-per-feature ratio is reasonable.

Pros and Cons

AthenaHQ

Pros:

• Purpose-built for AEO, with genuine depth in AI search optimization
• Powerful automation, including prioritized tasks and autonomous workflows for content creation and optimization
• Direct revenue attribution through Shopify and GA4 integrations proves ROI
• Strong client results, including Rootly’s 10x citation rate increase
• Specialized tools for agencies to build and scale AEO service offerings

Cons:

• Credit-based pricing requires upfront volume modeling for high-use teams
• As an AEO platform, traditional SEO feature set is intentionally limited in scope

Semrush

Pros:

• Comprehensive features across SEO, PPC, and content marketing
• Strong in traditional keyword research and competitor analysis
• A single subscription covers a wide range of marketing needs

Cons:

• AI visibility tools are an add-on, not the core focus
• Lacks the specialized automation and deep AEO workflows of a purpose-built platform
• No native e-commerce integration for direct AI-to-revenue attribution
• Less focused on providing actionable, automated fixes for AI search

The Verdict: Semrush or AthenaHQ for AI Search?

The right choice depends entirely on where AI search fits in your strategy.

Choose AthenaHQ if:

• AI search is a critical growth channel for your business and you need a specialized, action-oriented platform to compete in it.
• You are an e-commerce brand on Shopify and need to connect AI citations directly to sales data and prove ROI.
• You are a B2B company or agency looking to build a scalable, defensible advantage in AI-driven search with automated workflows and client-ready reporting.
• Your goal is not just to monitor AI visibility, but to actively optimize for it and win citations across the engines your buyers actually use.

Choose Semrush if:

• You need a single, consolidated platform that covers all your digital marketing activities in one place.
• AI visibility is a secondary concern, and your team’s primary focus remains on traditional SEO and paid search.
• You are just beginning to explore AI monitoring and want something that integrates with existing SEO workflows.

For many advanced teams, the right answer is not one or the other. Semrush handles the traditional SEO foundation. AthenaHQ handles the AI search layer. Together, they cover the full modern search stack.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Which platform is better for B2B, Semrush or AthenaHQ?

For general market research and competitor analysis, Semrush is a reliable tool. But for B2B teams that need to show up in the AI-generated answers their buyers are already using for vendor research, AthenaHQ is the stronger choice. Its AEO-focused workflows are built for exactly the kind of complex, fact-based queries that dominate B2B purchase research.

Which is better for e-commerce, Semrush or AthenaHQ?

AthenaHQ has a clear advantage for e-commerce brands. Its native Shopify integration lets brands see how AI citations translate directly into sales, which is a capability Semrush does not currently offer. For brands where AI-driven product discovery is a growing acquisition channel, that attribution capability is the difference between guessing and knowing.

What is the pricing difference for enterprise teams between Semrush and AthenaHQ?

Both platforms offer custom enterprise plans. Semrush’s enterprise offering covers a broad suite of marketing tools across traditional and AI search. AthenaHQ’s enterprise plan is a specialized investment in GEO, with unlimited seats, API access, a dedicated Slack channel, white-glove setup, and custom credit allocations. The comparison comes down to whether you need breadth across marketing channels or depth in AI search specifically.

Can AthenaHQ replace Semrush?

Not entirely, and that is by design. AthenaHQ is a specialist platform built for AI search visibility and optimization. Semrush is a comprehensive digital marketing suite. For teams serious about both traditional SEO and AI search, running them in parallel is increasingly the standard approach. AthenaHQ handles the AEO layer; Semrush handles the rest.