Ahrefs Brand Radar
ToolAI brand visibility inside Ahrefs
- Brand monitoring
- Competitor tracking
- Reporting
Editorial score breakdown
Scored from recorded research evidence. How scoring works.
Pros and cons
- Backed by Ahrefs data
- Strong SEO integration
- Meaningful usage gets expensive
- One independent review measured large ChatGPT mention undercounts
- No GA4 attribution
Editorial review
Written from source-verified research (see Sources below and methodology). Vendor claims are labeled as such.
An Index, Not a Prompt Tracker
Brand Radar is the AI-visibility layer of the Ahrefs suite, and its defining design choice is that it is an index rather than a prompt tracker. Instead of asking you to write a list of questions to test, Ahrefs models prompts from real search behavior — Google People Also Ask data plus its 110-billion-keyword database (28.7 billion terms with positive volume) — expands them through semantic fanout, and runs them at scale against the free public web interfaces of each assistant. The live product counter showed 421 million-plus monthly prompts as of late July 2026, a figure worth dating because Ahrefs' own pages disagree with one another: the help center says 405M-plus while the pricing page still shows a stale 271M-plus. Seven platforms get precomputed indexes — Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Grok — though new Grok data collection was temporarily paused as of July 2026 following policy changes. Claude is the notable asterisk: it is available only through custom prompts, run via Claude Sonnet 4.6 with web search, and each Claude check consumes eight ordinary checks. Around the AI core, Brand Radar also tracks supporting channels: web and SEO visibility, YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok in beta. Detection is mechanical — stored raw responses are scanned for string-match mentions and linked-URL citations — and the derived Estimated Impressions metric weights mentions by Google search volume, which Ahrefs itself calls directional and explicitly not a substitute for audience measurement or traffic analytics.
What the Day-to-Day Looks Like
Onboarding is close to zero-setup: enter a domain and Brand Radar auto-identifies your brand and competitors, or use manual setup to define entities with custom names and sites; a grouping feature consolidates multiple brand names and websites into one tracked entity. From there you work across six report tabs — Overview, AI Visibility, Search Demand, Web Visibility, Video Visibility, and SERP Visibility — with stackable filters for platform, region, and date. The cadence is the thing to internalize before building workflows on it. Chatbot indexes refresh monthly with a 90-day reporting window; cadences differ sharply: chatbot indexes refresh monthly, search demand and AI Overviews every few days, and web visibility every few minutes. Custom prompts run on whatever frequency you configure. In practice that means daily operational monitoring applies to Google surfaces, while ChatGPT or Perplexity trends are a monthly rhythm. The most distinctive diagnostic arrived in April 2026: a citation funnel separating pages that were found in an AI response corpus from pages visibly cited in answers, exposing found-but-not-cited gaps, with a Position mode that tracks citation rank over time. Agencies get an API whose limits quadrupled at the Lite level in April 2026 (25K to 100K units), a Looker Studio connector, and Report Builder widgets. One gap reviewers note: per Ekamoira's review, there is still no centralized at-a-glance dashboard summarizing total brand health — you assemble the story by moving between reports.
What the Money Actually Buys
There are two doors in: a standalone product from EUR 179 per month, or a small quota bundled into ordinary Ahrefs plans — five tracked prompts on Lite (EUR 119 per month), ten on Standard, twenty on Advanced. Those bundled numbers are trial-sized, useful for a taste rather than a program. Meaningful coverage runs through add-ons priced in dollars on Ahrefs' help pages: a single AI platform at $199 per month, or all platforms at $699 per month including 2,500 prompt checks, with additional check packs from $50 to $250 per month for 2,500 to 25,000 checks. The unit economics matter: one check equals one prompt on one platform in one location, and a Claude custom prompt consumes eight checks, so Claude coverage drains quota quickly. Grok costs $199 per month on its own unless you take the all-platforms add-on — and with new Grok collection paused as of July 2026, that is worth confirming before paying for it. Video monitoring is a further $199 per month add-on in beta, though one competitor review noted it was free for paid subscribers at the time. Analyze AI, a third-party review, estimated a realistic full multi-surface setup at $828 to $1,148 per month including the base plan — a different bracket entirely from the entry price. For context, Semrush sells a standalone AI Visibility plan at $99 per month per domain billed annually (25 prompts), and Profound's entry plan starts at $99 per month billed yearly for ChatGPT only. Those are narrower products, but they frame the decision: Brand Radar's pricing only makes sense as part of a wider Ahrefs commitment.
Who It Fits, and Who Should Pass
The clearest buyer is an SEO team already paying for Ahrefs. The bundled prompt quota gives a free-ish starting point, the data lives inside the Ahrefs workspace the team already uses, and the API and Looker Studio connector slot into existing agency reporting. It also suits brands that want breadth without curation: because the prompt index is modeled from real search behavior at nine-figure scale, you get visibility without maintaining a prompt list — with the trade-off that you cannot fully control what gets asked. The citation funnel gives content teams a concrete work queue of pages that AI systems retrieve but never cite. The pass list is just as concrete. Teams that need week-over-week measurement of AI-assistant campaigns should look elsewhere; the monthly chatbot refresh, which Profound's review called a significant lag, makes Brand Radar the wrong instrument for short-cycle work outside Google surfaces. Anyone whose priority engine is Claude faces custom-prompts-only coverage at an eight-check cost per query. Profound's review also found no shopping or ecommerce AI tracking and no agent or crawler analytics, so retail brands and technical teams tracking bot traffic have unmet needs. And buyers who need measured AI referral traffic should note there is no GA4 attribution — impressions here are modeled, and Ahrefs says to treat them that way.
The Evidence Ledger
Ahrefs is unusually forthcoming about how the sausage is made: it publishes a full data-collection methodology, including its own caveats — English-heavy coverage, a panel that cannot represent any individual user's personalized chats, and a deliberate choice not to filter hallucinated or malformed links out of citation data. That transparency is genuinely rare in this category and makes the numbers auditable in principle. The headline commercial claim deserves more skepticism. The statistic that AI-search visitors convert at 23 times the rate of organic traffic — 0.5% of visits driving 12.1% of signups — comes from a June 2025 Ahrefs study of its own website. It is vendor-reported, single-site data, not an independent benchmark, and this research found no named Brand Radar customer case studies on ahrefs.com — an apparent, though unverified, gap. Some third-party observations come from vendors in the same market, which cuts both ways. Profound's March 2026 review documented specific misses: topic suggestions that confused a competitor named Grin with the verb grin, a niche query that returned no results, and no way to view top topics across multiple AI platforms at once — though its no-sentiment claim looks stale, since another reviewer reported sentiment analysis arriving in early 2026. One independent review reported a large single-test ChatGPT mention undercount — 3 versus 123. Add the conflicting prompt-index figures across Ahrefs' own pages, and the fair summary is a transparent, directionally useful instrument whose absolute numbers should be paired with your own analytics rather than trusted alone.
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Frequently Asked Questions
>What is Ahrefs Brand Radar best for?
SEO teams already on Ahrefs
>What does Ahrefs Brand Radar cost?
From EUR 179/mo (standalone). First-party: standalone from EUR 179/mo; quota bundled in Ahrefs plans (Lite EUR 119/mo). Grok data collection temporarily paused as of 2026-07-23. Analyze AI (third-party) estimates $828-1,148/mo for full multi-surface setups. See the vendor's pricing page for current details.
>Which AI engines does Ahrefs Brand Radar cover?
Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot. Engine coverage can be tier-gated — see the pricing notes and editorial review for specifics.
Sources
- Ahrefs help: What is Brand Radar (supported platforms) — checked 2026-07-23
- Ahrefs pricing (Brand Radar standalone) — checked 2026-07-23
- Ahrefs Brand Radar review (Analyze AI) — checked 2026-07-23
- Ahrefs Brand Radar review (Dageno) — checked 2026-07-23
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