Noma vs AthenaHQ

Why AI search visibility needs its own tool

When a customer asks an assistant for a recommendation in your category, an answer comes back naming two or three brands. There is no list of ten blue links, no second page, and usually no click. You are in the answer or you are absent from the consideration set entirely — and absent looks exactly like not existing.

That has created a measurement problem SEO tools were never built to see. Rank tracking answers where a page sits in an ordered list; it cannot tell you whether a generated paragraph named you, which source it drew on, or how it described you. A brand can rank third for a keyword and go unmentioned by every engine answering the same question, and nothing in a traditional dashboard will show it.

Noma and AthenaHQ both exist to close that gap, which makes this a genuine like-for-like rather than two products talking past each other. This page compares what each tracks, what each costs, and where they diverge — using AthenaHQ’s published pricing and product claims as checked at publication, and saying so plainly wherever their documentation does not state a position.

What to look for in an AI visibility tool

Four questions separate tools that change what a team does from tools that add a dashboard. They are worth asking of both products below, and of whatever you are using today.

Noma vs AthenaHQ, feature by feature

Rows come from AthenaHQ’s public pricing and product pages as checked at publication. “Not published” means their documentation does not state a position, not that the answer is bad. “Not offered” means outside the product’s stated scope — AthenaHQ does not market itself as a creator or paid media platform, and a row saying so is a note about category rather than a criticism.

Where Noma fits

Noma runs your category prompts against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Grok on a schedule and records whether your brand is named in the answer each one generates. Five engines, polled daily — the fifth being Grok, which most tools in this category do not cover.

Being mentioned is only half the reading. When an engine cites a page, Noma records which page: your own site, a marketplace listing, a review roundup, or a competitor’s blog. That is the difference between knowing you are invisible and knowing what to do about it. Alongside the mention it captures the wording used to describe you, because being named as a budget option is a different outcome to being named as the category leader.

Share of voice is measured per prompt rather than as one site-wide number, because visibility is never uniform across a category — most brands are strong on a handful of questions and absent on the rest. The prompt set is built from questions customers actually ask rather than from a keyword list, and the recommendations that come back are ranked by expected impact: the pages to write, the wording to fix, the structured data to add.

Noma also sits on one platform with Nia for creator marketing and Pulse for paid media, so AI visibility can be read next to the channels competing with it for budget. Whether that matters depends entirely on whether you have those problems too.

What Noma actually measures

The rest of the platform: Noma for AI search visibility, Nia for creator marketing and attribution, Pulse for Google and Meta Ads — or how the three apply in your category.

Where AthenaHQ fits

AthenaHQ does answer engine optimisation properly and does not pretend to do anything else, which is worth more than it sounds. It covers the four engines carrying most commercial queries, tracks citations rather than only mentions, and turns that into content work. A team whose problem is AI search visibility and nothing else will be served better by a tool built for exactly that than by a general SEO platform with an AI tab bolted on.

What it does not cover

• No Grok coverage — four engines to Noma’s five. How much that matters depends on whether your audience is on it.
• Polling cadence is not published, so how quickly a change in the answers reaches the dashboard is unknown before you buy.
• No creator discovery, campaign management or conversion attribution. Those sit outside its stated scope and need a separate platform.
• No paid media analysis, so AI visibility cannot be read against the Google and Meta spend competing with it for budget.
• No free tier is published, so at $295 a month the cost of finding out whether AI search matters in your category is a paid month.

Which one your team actually needs

What a rollout looks like

AI visibility is not a switch. This is the sequence that gets a team from “we think we are missing from these answers” to a trend a content team can work against.

The verdict

Two tools doing the same job, and the choice turns on scope. AthenaHQ is focused, established in the category and priced as a specialist tool. Noma covers a fifth engine, records the source behind each citation, starts on a trial that needs no card, and sits beside creator and paid media reporting on one platform. If AEO is genuinely all you need, buy the tool that does only that. If AI visibility is one of three questions your team is trying to answer, buying three tools to answer them is the more expensive path.

Common questions