Promptwatch vs AthenaHQ vs Scrunch AI vs Gauge: 2026 Comparison
Four GEO platforms compared: Promptwatch, AthenaHQ, Scrunch AI, and Gauge on credits, crawler-side serving, volume pricing, and who should buy which in 2026.
Promptwatch, AthenaHQ, Scrunch AI, and Gauge all claim to do more than a mention dashboard. That is true, and they still do four different jobs. One is an action queue with credit burn. One serves alternate pages to crawlers. One sells raw answer volume. One measures, attributes traffic, and publishes.
Google's AI features guidance is still the eligibility baseline for Overviews. None of these four replace Search Console, and Search Console does not replace them on ChatGPT.
Snapshot
| Promptwatch | AthenaHQ | Scrunch AI | Gauge | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| From | Free; paid $95/mo | Free credits; paid $295/mo | $250/mo annual ($300 monthly) | $599/mo (the old $99 Starter was removed) |
| Differentiator | Crawler logs + visitor analytics + Content Agents | Action Center, schema/entity tagging | Agent Experience Platform (page variants for crawlers) | 600 prompts daily, 6 engines, 18 articles/mo |
| Catch | CMS publish is Webflow/Framer today (WordPress coming) | Credits; Starter is one country; ACE/personas/multi-region are Enterprise | Weak reporting, per-engine prompt credits, weekly refresh | No G2/Capterra/Trustpilot footprint. Synthetic prompts. Claude/Grok are Enterprise |
| G2 / reviews | 4.7/5, 1,840+ brands | Strong G2 in our catalog, with credit complaints | Reporting is the top G2 complaint | Zero third-party reviews in our catalog |
AthenaHQ: the action queue you will feed daily
AthenaHQ comes from ex-Google Search and DeepMind engineers. Essential is a free credit pile (~300) that works as a trial. Starter is $295/mo ($245 annual): 9 engines, one country, Action Center, API, unlimited seats, credit-based usage. Enterprise is custom, reported around $2,000+/mo, and that is where ACE Citation Engine, personas, and multi-region live.
If your team will clear an action queue every morning, this is the product that was built for that habit. If you will not, you bought a credit meter. G2 reviewers in our catalog report burning a month of credits in the first week. Starter's single-country lock pushes anyone with more than one market into Enterprise immediately. Budget the real number.
Scrunch AI: optimization at the crawler, reporting in Excel
Scrunch's pitch is the Agent Experience Platform: serve AI-optimized page variants to crawlers without rewriting the live site. That is a lever a dashboard cannot pull. Starter is $250/mo on annual billing ($300 monthly) with 3 seats, 350 custom prompts plus 1,000 industry prompts. Growth is $417/mo annual ($500 monthly). Enterprise is custom (AXP at scale, SSO, SOC 2, data API).
The monitoring around that idea is the weak half. G2 in our catalog flags exports; people rebuild client charts in Excel. Prompt credits burn per engine, so "350 prompts" is not 350 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Data refreshes weekly. Advice shows where you are missing, not what to change. Sitecore acquired Scrunch in June 2026 (~$225M in our catalog). The roadmap now answers to a DXP vendor. Factor that in if you are not already in that orbit.
Gauge: volume, and a vendor bet
Gauge's Growth plan is $599/mo: 600 prompts daily, 6 engines, 18 articles a month, 10 seats, one location. Per answer, nothing else in this four-way is close (~108,000 answers/mo at that price). There is a one-week trial.
The $99 Starter vanished mid-2026. Entry is now $599. Claude and Grok, plus API and BI, are Enterprise. Visibility is scored against Gauge-generated synthetic prompts, not the questions your buyers type. Our catalog lists zero reviews on G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, or Trustpilot. You are underwriting a YC-backed startup with a thin public trail. Run the trial. Do not skip the trial.
Promptwatch: measurement you can audit, then publish
Promptwatch's paid engine list includes ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Llama, DeepSeek, Mistral, Copilot, Overviews, and AI Mode. Essential is $95/mo (50 prompts, 6,000 responses, 5 AEO articles). Professional is $245/mo (150 prompts, 18,000 responses, 1M visitor events, 15 AEO articles). Business is $579/mo. Agency Growth is $399/mo.
AthenaHQ will beat it on "tickets in a queue" if that is the culture. Scrunch will beat it if you specifically want crawler-side page variants. Gauge will beat it on raw daily prompt count at $599. Promptwatch is the one that still shows why a miss happened (crawler logs), which URL won (citation analytics), whether a human arrived (visitor analytics), and the draft (Content Agents). That is the default we rank first unless your constraint is one of those three specialist jobs.
Explore remains a free ChatGPT-only sandbox (10 prompts) if you need to see the UI before a credit-based or $599 conversation.
Who should pick which
- Promptwatch for an end-to-end GEO program on a public price list.
- AthenaHQ if an Action Center is the buying criterion and you can live with credits and a one-country Starter.
- Scrunch AI if serving alternate pages to AI crawlers is the point, and someone on the team will own Excel reporting.
- Gauge if 600 daily prompts and bundled articles matter more than third-party reviews or first-party prompt lists.
FAQ
Is Gauge cheaper than Promptwatch Professional?
$599 vs $245 is not cheaper. Gauge is cheaper per answer if you actually use 600 prompts daily. Most teams do not. If you need 150 real prompts and crawler logs, Professional is the smaller invoice.
Does Scrunch replace crawler log analytics?
No. Scrunch serves variants to crawlers. Promptwatch records the hits (ChatGPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, GoogleOther, and others) and the crawl-to-citation path. You can want both. They are not the same feature.
Can I start on AthenaHQ's free credits and switch later?
Yes. Spend the ~300 credits. If the Action Center fits, stay and watch the meter. If you wanted logs, traffic, and CMS publish without a credit surprise, the switch is Promptwatch, not another action-queue vendor.