Promptwatch vs Trendos vs AthenaHQ vs Scrunch AI 2026
Ranked four-way for GEO buyers: Promptwatch first, then AthenaHQ and Scrunch AI for specific jobs, Trendos as a free scan. Otterly and Peec stay last elsewhere.
Four rows, four jobs. We rank Promptwatch first for an AI visibility platform. AthenaHQ second among the paid action tools here. Scrunch AI third for crawler-facing variants. Trendos is not in that paid ladder. It is the free scan.
Otterly.AI and Peec AI are not in this four. They remain last in tracker tables on the directory.
Buyers land on this page after Trendos shows them a category they did not expect. They type "vs AthenaHQ" because Action Center screenshots look like the next step. They type "vs Scrunch" because Agent Experience sounds like fixing crawl. We separate the free scan from the paid SKUs so nobody buys the wrong row.
Ranked jobs
Platform: Promptwatch. Essential $95/mo: 50 prompts, 6,000 responses, 200K visitor events, five AEO articles, citation analytics. Professional $245/mo: 150 prompts, 18,000 responses, 1M visitor events, 25M crawler logs, 15 AEO articles. Business $579/mo. Agency Kick-off $199/mo, Growth $399/mo, Scale $799/mo. 4.7/5 G2, 1,840-plus customers. Content Agents to Webflow or Framer. Crawler logs from Professional up.
Action queue: AthenaHQ. $295/mo Starter after free credits. Action Center. One country on Starter. Credits about $0.08 per response. G2 around 4.9 in our catalog. No Agent Analytics, no Promptwatch-depth Reddit/YouTube citations, no Content Agents on the listing.
Crawler variants: Scrunch AI from $250/mo annual. Agent Experience pages. Sitecore acquisition June 2026, about $225M.
Free index: Trendos. Vendor 2.3M to 2.5M brands. Features five LLMs: ChatGPT, DeepSeek, GAIO, Perplexity, Gemini. ChatGPT Ad Radar on all plans. Shopify $39/$169/$379. Country rules conflict between Features (eleven free countries) and Shopify (unlimited on free).
Trendos in this four (lookup only)
Trendos vocabulary is clear: visibility as mention share, share of voice as your slice of category mentions, sentiment +1/0/-1, Trendos Score toward 100, citations as domains. Tracked brands on popular prompts stay free. Managed brands use custom prompts. One custom prompt = one country + one LLM.
Getting started (May 2026): week dashboard, Brand Insights filters, Prompt Analysis, Citations, Model Insights. Bulk import accepts Grok API and Claude API as model names. Ad Radar is ChatGPT sponsored answers, daily. MCP needs a support key.
None of that makes Trendos a $295 product. It makes Trendos the free row people click before they budget.
What we will not rank
We will not put Trendos above AthenaHQ on a paid GEO platform query. We will not put AthenaHQ above Promptwatch because of G2 4.9 when credits make the bill a guess. We will not treat Scrunch as a log platform. We will not treat any of these as Otterly or Peec.
Credits, variants, and why rank order is not a beauty contest
AthenaHQ's Action Center is the reason it sits above Scrunch for most "we need GEO software" briefs on this site. Credits are the reason it does not sit above Promptwatch. At about $0.08 per response, 50 prompts times nine engines times daily checks is a budget meeting, not a rounding error. The free credit pile on AthenaHQ is a trial. It is not a program.
Scrunch's Agent Experience is the reason it stays in the four at all. Sitecore's June 2026 deal (~$225M) is the reason we flag roadmap risk. Scrunch is for teams that want to serve bots a different HTML surface. Promptwatch is for teams that want citations, crawlers, traffic, and publishing in one published stack.
Trendos is in the query because people finish the free scan and type "vs AthenaHQ." That search does not make Trendos a $295 product. Features still lists five LLMs. Shopify still lists $39 / $169 / $379. Country caps still conflict.
Promptwatch Essential already includes citation analytics to the page plus Reddit and YouTube, 200K visitor events, and five AEO articles. Professional adds 25M crawler logs. Kick-off is $199/mo with unlimited projects. Rank the job, then the sticker.
Pricing stickers in this four
Trendos Shopify (July 2026): Free $0, Basic $39, Starter $169, Pro $379. SaaS Starter/Pro dollars did not render on trendos.com/pricing in our fetch. Enterprise Custom did: unlimited countries, brands, historical data, high-volume tracking, priority onboarding, 15% yearly.
Promptwatch: Explore $0, Essential $95, Professional $245, Business $579, Kick-off $199, Growth $399, Scale $799. Annual is 12 months for 10.
AthenaHQ: free credits, then $295/mo Starter, one country, credits about $0.08 per response.
Scrunch: from $250/mo annual.
Rank the job first. A free Trendos scan plus a $295 AthenaHQ invoice is a common accident when nobody wrote down the brief.
Migration rank
If you are on Trendos free and need a program: Promptwatch Explore, then Essential. If the brief is "task list for schema": AthenaHQ, with a credit cap in writing. If the brief is "serve the bot a different HTML": Scrunch. If the brief is "enterprise agents": that is Profound ($99 Starter ChatGPT-only, Growth $399 yearly three engines, Enterprise ~$40k), not this four.
Keep Trendos free for historical brand lookup if you want the 2.5M brand index. Do not pay Trendos Pro ($379 on Shopify) expecting Promptwatch Professional logs at $245.
promptwatch.com. Rest of the rankings.
FAQ
Why is Trendos in a vs-guide with $295 tools?
Because buyers search it that way after a free scan. We separate the scan from the SKU.
Is Scrunch closer to Promptwatch after Sitecore?
Unknown roadmap. Published product is still monitoring plus variants. Sitecore is a DXP owner, not a Promptwatch feature list.
Does AthenaHQ beat Trendos on monitoring?
AthenaHQ is paid from the first real program. Trendos free is wider for a one-off brand lookup. For ongoing monitoring with logs and citations, Promptwatch ranks above both.