Surfais and AthenaHQ compared on engine access, credit metering, free tiers and published method, with figures read from both sites on 6 September 2026.
Verified
6 September 2026
| Dimension | Surfais | AthenaHQ |
|---|---|---|
| AI engines included | All five on every plan, including the £69 Starter: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. | Five on the free Essential tier: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot. Nine to ten on the $295 Starter tier, adding Google AI Mode, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI. Enterprise covers all models. |
| Engine gating | None. No engine add-ons and no engine unlocks by tier. | Yes. The free tier is capped at five engines, and Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and AI Mode require the $295 tier. |
| Entry price | £69/mo Starter, ex-VAT. Growth £199, Scale £479, Enterprise from £1,999. 15% off annual. | $0 for the Essential free tier. Starter is $295/mo, with 17% off on annual billing. Enterprise custom. |
| Prompts at entry price | 20 prompts, 1 brand, 1 country, 2 competitors. Extra prompts £6 each on brand tiers. | Metered in credits rather than prompts: 300 credits on the free tier, 3,600 credits per month on Starter. One credit is one AI response check, so three prompts across five engines daily works out at roughly 450 credits a month. |
| Seats | Not published. Plans are scoped by brands, prompts, countries and competitors rather than by seat. | Unlimited seats on every tier, including the free one. |
| Refresh cadence | Twice weekly on brand tiers, weekly on Agency Mode, daily on Enterprise. | Not published, and reported as user-configurable. |
| Published score methodology | AIS Score weights are published and versioned. Version 2, dated 10 June 2026: Visibility 60%, Position 15%, Sentiment 10%, Share of voice 15%. Published at surfais.com/methodology. | AthenaHQ names a Query Volume Estimation Model (QVEM) which weights prompts by likely ask frequency, but publishes no formula, weights or reproducible definition. An Athena Citation Engine (ACE) is named but not explained. |
| Free trial | 7 days, no card. 1 brand, one weekly scan plus two manual scans, one audit. | No time-limited trial as such. The Essential tier is free permanently, with 300 credits and five engines. |
| Agency / white-label | Agency Mode at £59 per client brand, minimum 5 brands, 20 prompts each, pooled. White-label reporting is scheduled to ship at the end of September 2026 and is not live. | No formal agency or white-label programme found. |
| API and integrations | No public API, no MCP server and no Looker Studio connector. | REST API from the Starter tier as a separately priced add-on. No MCP server. Integrations include GA4, Search Console, Google Ads, Shopify, Webflow, Wix, Framer, WordPress, Payload, Looker Studio and Slack. |
| Security certifications | None. No SOC 2 and no ISO 27001 — SOC 2 is budgeted, not achieved. No SSO or SAML. | SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, and GDPR, on their own trust centre. |
| Company stage | Early-stage UK company. Small customer base, no published customer count, no named enterprise logos. | $2.2M seed in June 2025. Founded 2024, Y Combinator W25, around 9 staff. San Francisco. |
Verified 6 September 2026. Prices and features in this category change often; check each vendor's own site before you buy. Prices are shown in each vendor's own published currency and are not converted.
AthenaHQ's free tier is a genuinely good offer, and the gating sits just behind it. Essential covers five engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot — with 300 credits. Claude, Google AI Mode, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI require the Starter tier at $295 a month. Surfais includes Claude alongside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews at £69.
The second thing to look at is metering. AthenaHQ charges in credits, where one credit is one AI response check, so three prompts across five engines running daily consumes roughly 450 credits a month. Credits are consumed by prompts multiplied by engines multiplied by frequency, so it is worth modelling your own usage before you buy. Surfais meters in prompts, and the number of engines does not multiply your bill: twenty prompts at £69 means twenty prompts across all five engines.
Third, method. AthenaHQ names a Query Volume Estimation Model but publishes no formula, weights or reproducible definition, and its Athena Citation Engine is named but unexplained. Surfais publishes and versions the AIS weights and lowered them in June 2026 against its own commercial interest.
AthenaHQ is a nine-person company that has shipped several things we have not.
Security. SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, plus GDPR, on their own trust centre. Surfais has neither certification — SOC 2 is budgeted, not achieved — and no SSO. That a team of nine has completed Type 2 while we have not is a fair point against us, not a rounding error.
A permanent free tier. $0 forever, five engines, 300 credits, and unlimited seats. Surfais has no free tier at all, only a seven-day trial.
Seats. Unlimited on every tier including the free one. We do not publish a seat allowance.
Engine breadth at the paid tier. Nine to ten engines at $295, including Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI. Surfais covers five and does not go beyond that at any price.
Integrations. A published list including GA4, Search Console, Google Ads, Shopify, Webflow, Wix, Framer, WordPress, Payload, Looker Studio and Slack, plus a REST API from Starter. Surfais has no API and no Looker Studio connector.
Oracle. Their Enterprise-only hallucination and discrepancy detection is genuinely distinctive, and we have nothing like it.
Choose AthenaHQ if you want to start at zero cost, if you need the whole team in the tool, or if SOC 2 Type 2 is a requirement. Also choose them if you need Grok, DeepSeek or Meta AI, which we do not cover at any price, or if hallucination detection matters enough to justify an Enterprise conversation. Their integration list is longer than ours and their free tier is a real product rather than a demo.
Choose Surfais if Claude matters to you and $295 a month does not fit, or if you would rather be billed in prompts than in credits you have to model in advance. Claude at £69 against Claude at $295 is the clearest single line between these two products.
A sensible route: run AthenaHQ's free tier to see whether AI visibility is a problem for your brand at all, then decide which paid product fits how you actually work.
AthenaHQ is a San Francisco company, founded in 2024 and part of Y Combinator's W25 batch, with around nine staff and a $2.2M seed round raised in June 2025. It positions itself around agents to win on AI search, and covers competitor share of voice, sentiment, citation source reporting and content recommendations. Its Enterprise-only Oracle feature detects hallucinations and discrepancies in what engines say about a brand, which is one of the more distinctive capabilities in this category.
Surfais is a UK measurement product covering five AI answer engines on every plan and scoring the result on a published, versioned 0–100 scale, with a monthly deep-dive audit at every tier.
The products meter differently and this is the detail most likely to catch a buyer out. AthenaHQ sells credits: one credit is one AI response check, so your consumption is prompts multiplied by engines multiplied by frequency. Three prompts across five engines, run daily, is roughly 450 credits a month against the free tier's 300 or Starter's 3,600. That is a shape worth modelling against your own prompt count, engine count and scan frequency before committing.
Surfais sells prompts. Twenty prompts on the £69 Starter plan means twenty prompts measured across all five engines at a twice-weekly cadence, and adding engines does not consume budget because there are no engines to add. Extra prompts are £6 each on brand tiers and £3 on Agency Mode. That is a premium per prompt and we would rather argue for it than bury it: the trade is engine completeness and prompt quality over volume.
A permanent free tier with five engines, 300 credits and unlimited seats is more generous than most companies in this category offer, and considerably more generous than our seven-day trial. If you are trying to work out whether AI visibility is worth budget at all, starting there costs you nothing. The gating is reasonable and clearly signposted: the wider engine list, including Claude, arrives at $295 a month.
AthenaHQ references a Query Volume Estimation Model, which weights prompts by how frequently they are likely to be asked. That is a sensible idea — not every prompt deserves equal weight — but no formula, weights or reproducible definition is published, so a customer cannot check the model or see when it changes. The Athena Citation Engine is named in the same way, without explanation.
Surfais publishes the AIS weights — Visibility 60%, Position 15%, Sentiment 10%, Share of voice 15% in version 2, dated 10 June 2026 — and versions them. That version lowered scores across the board after we found a customer with six mentions across sixty-nine runs was being described as competitive. The IAB's August 2026 framework calls measurement decision-grade when it is reproducible, disclosed and versioned, and the claim we make is precisely that narrow one: about the headline score formula, not about openness generally.
No SOC 2 and no ISO 27001, no SSO, no public API or MCP server, no Looker Studio connector, no free tier, twice-weekly refresh below Enterprise, white-label reporting not shipping until the end of September 2026, and no published seat allowance. AthenaHQ holds SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 with nine staff, which is a straightforward advantage over us today.
Verified 6 September 2026. Prices and features change; check the vendor's own site.