INSIGHTS
Mar 8, 2026
If you've started paying attention to what AI models say about your brand, three names come up quickly: AthenaHQ, Profound, and Unusual. They're often mentioned together, and at a glance, they look like competitors for the same job. They're not.
Understanding why requires starting with a distinction that most of the marketing around these tools blurs.
Two different problems
When a prospect opens ChatGPT to research a purchase, two things happen. First, the model decides whether to mention your brand at all. Second, if it mentions you, it decides what to say.
These are separate problems. And they require different approaches.
The first problem — getting mentioned — is essentially a reach problem. More web presence, more content, more citations in sources AI models trust. It overlaps substantially with SEO. If your brand is well-represented online, AI models are more likely to surface you when someone asks a relevant question.
The second problem — controlling what gets said — is harder. AI models don't just list brands. They characterize them. They compare features, assess fit, make recommendations, and guide prospects toward or away from specific vendors based on their own understanding of your product and category. That understanding is often incomplete, sometimes wrong, and almost never fully in your control.
Most tools in this space were built to address the first problem. Unusual was built to address the second.
AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ tracks how often your brand appears in AI-generated responses across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and others. The platform shows you share of voice relative to competitors, sentiment in those mentions, and which external sources seem to be driving AI behavior in your category.
Founded by former Google Search and DeepMind engineers, it has a technically credible foundation. The interface is accessible — priced between $295 and $499 per month — which makes it a reasonable entry point for teams that want to understand their baseline AI visibility without a major investment.
The core output is monitoring data and content recommendations: here are the queries where you're not appearing, here are the sources your competitors are getting cited in, here is what you might do about it. Execution is up to your team.
AthenaHQ is a useful tool if you're starting from scratch and want to measure where you stand. Its limitation is that the frame stays at the level of mentions. Whether those mentions are accurate, whether they're positioning you correctly at the moments that matter — that's outside what the platform is designed to answer.
Profound
Profound has raised $58.5 million and processes over 100 million AI search queries per month. It tracks visibility across AI platforms and automates content creation to fill gaps. Customers include Ramp, MongoDB, Indeed, and DocuSign.
The limitation: Profound measures reach and frequency — how often you're mentioned, on which platforms, in which topics. It doesn't capture what the model actually believes about your brand, whether your differentiators are understood, or whether follow-up questions guide prospects toward you or away from you.
Profound tells you whether you showed up. It doesn't tell you what happened after that.
Unusual
Unusual starts from a different premise: that the more dangerous problem for most established brands isn't invisibility — it's misrepresentation.
AI models form opinions about companies. They absorb information from across the web, synthesize it, and use it to characterize brands when buyers ask evaluation questions. That characterization shapes what prospects believe before they ever talk to a salesperson. And because the buying journey is now increasingly compressed into a single extended AI conversation — from initial discovery through direct comparison — what the model says at each step carries real commercial weight.
The question Unusual is designed to answer isn't "how often are you mentioned?" It's "when you are mentioned, what is the model saying — and is it costing you deals?"
The workflow starts with what Unusual calls probes: a carefully constructed battery of questions designed to surface how AI models actually think about your brand, your competitors, and the decisions buyers face in your category. The goal is to understand the model's beliefs, trace where those beliefs come from, and identify where they diverge from reality in ways that affect outcomes.
From there, Unusual identifies the specific misperceptions driving those outcomes and works backward to figure out what content, sources, or signals would correct them. The output is targeted rather than generic — not "create more content about this topic" but "here is the specific thing the model believes, here is why it believes it, and here is what needs to change."
The result of that work was better late-stage positioning and more. Reducto — a document processing company serving Fortune 10 clients that had recently raised $108 million — was being described by ChatGPT as a "niche startup tool." Fixing that perception didn't just improve their win rate with prospects already in their pipeline. It increased the number of leads they were getting from AI, because the model started recommending them earlier and more confidently in those longer buying conversations. A bottom-of-funnel perception problem turned out to be a top-of-funnel growth lever.
The practical difference
Here's a concrete way to think about it.
Imagine a prospect asks ChatGPT: "We're evaluating observability platforms for a mid-size engineering team — what should we consider?" Your brand comes up. You appear in the response alongside three competitors. Your share of voice is 25%.
Then the prospect asks a follow-up: "Which of these is best for teams modernizing toward OpenTelemetry?" The model describes two of the four in depth. You're not one of them — not because the model doesn't know you exist, but because it doesn't associate you with that use case, even if you should be the obvious fit.
A visibility tool registers the first interaction as a success. Your mention count is up. Your share of voice is trending in the right direction.
What it doesn't register is that you lost the consideration two questions in — and that this is probably happening across thousands of conversations, invisibly, every week.
Who each tool is for
If you're an early-stage company with minimal AI presence, visibility is the right starting point. Understand where you stand, build content, measure the impact. AthenaHQ or Profound are reasonable tools for that job.
If you're a company with an established brand and a real sales funnel, you're being mentioned, you have buyers who evaluate you, you have competitors you consistently win or lose against - the more pressing question is usually not whether AI knows you exist. It's whether AI accurately represents you when it matters.
That's the problem Unusual is built for.
The two things aren't mutually exclusive. But knowing which problem you actually have is the prerequisite to picking the right tool.
Unusual runs brand surveys to understand how AI models describe your brand, then identifies the specific actions that change that narrative. If you're curious what AI is currently saying about you,book a demo.
