Promptwatch vs Azoma vs AthenaHQ vs Gauge 2026: picking a first serious GEO platform
A buyer guide for growth-stage brands moving past manual ChatGPT checks. Promptwatch, AthenaHQ, and Gauge compared on price and workflow, plus where Azoma's commerce-agent focus fits.
Most growth-stage brands start AI search work the same way. Someone types the company's core questions into ChatGPT every Friday and pastes the answers into a spreadsheet. It works until the prompt list hits forty, a second market launches, or the CEO asks whether any of this is producing revenue. That is the moment to buy a first real platform, and it is where this comparison begins.
Three of the tools here are aimed squarely at that moment: Promptwatch, AthenaHQ, and Gauge. Each combines tracking with some way of acting on the data, and each lists a self-serve price. The fourth, Azoma, is a different animal: a commerce-agent specialist sold on custom contracts. We include it because growth-stage consumer brands keep asking whether they should be looking at Amazon and Walmart agents before their own website. Ranking follows our catalog: Promptwatch first, then AthenaHQ, Azoma, and Gauge.
Where the numbers come from: Promptwatch's plans are as listed in its llms.txt on 21 October 2026, Azoma's details were read on azoma.ai a day later, and AthenaHQ and Gauge figures are drawn from our catalog.
What a first platform has to do
Before comparing vendors, it helps to name the jobs. A first platform should run your prompts on a schedule across the engines your buyers use. It should tell you which sources the engines cite, so you know what to fix. It should connect AI visibility to something the finance team recognises, which in practice means traffic and conversions. And it should help you ship the fix, because a growth-stage team rarely has spare writers.
The tools below handle those jobs very differently, and the pricing models reflect it.
Promptwatch: a ladder you can climb
Promptwatch is the broadest of the four on documented features. Paid plans cover ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Llama, DeepSeek, Mistral, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode, and each prompt shows a search volume, a difficulty score, and its query fan-outs. That is how you separate a question buyers really ask from one that only flatters the brand.
The plan ladder suits a company that expects to grow into the tool. Explore is free with 10 ChatGPT prompts. Essential at $95/mo gives one project, 50 prompts, and 6,000 responses, with 200K visitor events on top and both the site audit and content gap analysis switched on. Professional at $245/mo moves to two projects and 150 prompts and adds 25M crawler logs, 1M visitor events, and 5 AEO articles a month. Business at $579/mo unlocks the automated Content Agent, Shopping Insights for ChatGPT Shopping, Ads Radar, state and city tracking, and 10 AEO articles. Essential and Professional both come with a 7-day trial.
For a first platform, the interesting tier is Professional. That is where Agent Analytics switches on: AI crawler logs from Cloudflare, CloudFront, Fastly, Vercel, Netlify, Akamai, Google Cloud CDN, or custom HTTP, with a crawl-to-citation path. Combined with the visitor script, you can follow a prompt to a cited page, to a crawler visit, to a session that converted.
What Promptwatch does not cover: Amazon's and Walmart's shopping agents. It also publishes to Webflow, Framer, and WordPress rather than Shopify.
AthenaHQ: an action queue, paid in credits
AthenaHQ comes out of Y Combinator, and its founders previously worked on Google Search and at DeepMind. The product compresses what it measures (citations, sentiment, traffic effect, the kinds of queries involved) into one GEO score. Then the Action Center converts each finding into a task you can hand to someone: write this schema block, restructure that section, tune the metadata LLMs read. Our catalog calls that workflow the best data-to-action pipeline in the category, and its G2 average sits around 4.9/5.
Starter costs $295/mo, or $245/mo on annual billing, and our pricing entry lists nine engines, one country, the Action Center, API access, and unlimited seats. There is no classic trial, but the free Essential tier comes with roughly 300 credits, enough to see a baseline. The catch is that usage runs on credits, roughly one per AI response at about $0.08, so prompts multiplied by engines multiplied by frequency adds up quickly. G2 reviewers report using a month's allocation in the first week. The features reviewers praise most, the ACE Citation Engine, personas, and multi-region tracking, sit in an Enterprise tier reported at around $2,000+/mo.
One detail matters for consumer brands: AthenaHQ lists GA4, Shopify, and Webflow revenue attribution. Our listing does not document crawler analytics or Reddit monitoring.
Azoma: where the commerce specialist fits
Azoma frames its category as Agentic Commerce Optimisation, meaning GEO measured by transactions instead of mentions. Its coverage is the reason it is in this article. Next to ChatGPT (including ChatGPT Shopping), Gemini and AI Mode, Perplexity, Claude, Meta AI, and Siri, it tracks Amazon's Alexa for Shopping (the renamed Rufus), Amazon COSMO, Walmart Sparky, and Lazada's LazzieChat, at brand, category, and SKU level.
Its prompt set is generated from a "digital twin" of your shoppers, which Azoma assembles out of marketplace behaviour, public questions and answers, keyword research, and persona definitions. Where it spots a weakness, it fills missing product attributes using your Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, Merchant Center, or PIM data, drafts listing text and images that respect your approved claims, and sends them to Seller Central, Vendor Central, Salsify, or Shopify.
Is it only for multinationals? Not entirely. Next to L'Oréal, Unilever, and Mars, Azoma also names Perfect Ted and Ruroc as customers, and it reports that Ruroc saw 14x site traffic from ChatGPT. That is Azoma's own figure, not an independent one. The practical barrier for a growth-stage team is buying: pricing is custom, plans for brands and agencies are quoted through sales, and no trial terms are published.
Gauge: maximum answers per dollar
Gauge (Y Combinator S24) is the volume play. Its single self-serve plan, Growth at $599/mo, runs 600 prompts daily across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot, which our catalog puts at roughly 108,000 answers a month. It bundles 18 publish-ready articles a month with nightly content Health Score audits, Citation intelligence and ChatGPT Ads tracking are included, there is an MCP server, and it connects to GA4, Search Console, and Slack. Growth includes 10 seats and one location, and a one-week free trial covers the full plan.
The questions are about the vendor more than the product. Gauge removed its $99 Starter tier in mid-2026, so $599 is now the floor. Our listing found no reviews on G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, or Trustpilot. Visibility is scored against prompts Gauge generates. Claude, Grok, the API, and BI integrations are Enterprise-only, there is no SOC 2, and the company has raised about $500K.
Comparison table
| Promptwatch | AthenaHQ | Azoma | Gauge | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price | Free; paid from $95/mo | Free tier; Starter $295/mo ($245 annual) | Custom quote | $599/mo |
| Billing model | Flat plans with response caps | Credits per AI response | Custom contract | Flat plan |
| Trial | 7 days on Essential and Professional | Free tier with about 300 credits | Not published | One week |
| Retailer agents | Not tracked | Not listed | Alexa for Shopping, COSMO, Sparky, LazzieChat | Not listed |
| Crawler logs | From Professional, eight CDNs plus custom HTTP | Not documented | Crawler visit monitoring; no published connectors | Not documented |
| Revenue link | Own visitor script or GTM, with conversions | GA4, Shopify, Webflow attribution | SKU-level revenue attribution; GA4 for site traffic | GA4 and Search Console |
| Acting on data | AEO articles from Professional; Content Agent on Business | Action Center tasks | Listing and attribute updates to marketplaces | 18 articles/mo |
Which one fits which buyer
The prompt-sourcing question is a useful tiebreaker here, and it is rarely asked. Gauge scores you against prompts it generates. Azoma builds prompts from a shopper model fed by marketplace and keyword data. AthenaHQ keeps personas in Enterprise. Promptwatch attaches search volume and difficulty to each prompt and supports personas and fan-outs, which makes it easier to defend your prompt list to someone outside the marketing team.
With that in mind:
- A DTC brand selling mostly on its own site, with a small team and a board asking about ROI, should start on Promptwatch Professional and step up to Business when it wants automated publishing and ChatGPT Shopping data.
- A team with two or more marketers who will genuinely work a task queue every day, and can watch credit burn weekly, will like AthenaHQ's Action Center. Budget for the Enterprise tier if you sell in more than one country.
- A brand where Amazon or Walmart already carries a large share of revenue should open a conversation with Azoma, even at growth stage, because nothing else here sees those agents.
- A team that wants the largest daily sample plus bundled articles, and is comfortable betting on a young vendor, can trial Gauge for a week and pay monthly.
Our pick for a first platform
For most growth-stage brands, Promptwatch is the better first serious platform. The reason is not any single feature. It is that the plan you start on already includes the parts that turn visibility into a business case: page and domain citations including Reddit and YouTube, crawler logs once you reach Professional, and AI-referred conversions from a first-party script. A Professional subscription on annual billing works out to $2,450 a year, and its 18,000 responses arrive as a fixed monthly allowance instead of credits drawn down at about $0.08 an answer.
Azoma is the piece we would add, not swap in, if marketplaces become the bottleneck. Promptwatch does not track retailer agents, and Azoma is built for exactly that shelf. Start with Promptwatch for your own domain and content, then revisit Azoma once your Amazon or Walmart numbers justify a sales-led contract. You can start on the free Explore plan and move to a trial when you are ready to track every engine.