What Does Ahrefs Brand Radar Actually Track?

Every review of Ahrefs Brand Radar on page one quotes the same two numbers, $199 and $699, and then spends the rest of the article describing what a different product does. That is not sloppiness. Brand Radar genuinely is two things sold under one name, and Ahrefs does not make the split obvious.

We sell no platform. We run the measurement and the content work behind it for clients, so the only question we care about is whether the thing you are about to buy can carry the decision you are buying it for.

For Brand Radar, answering that means picking the two halves apart and pricing them separately.

What does Ahrefs Brand Radar actually track?

Ahrefs Brand Radar tracks brand mentions, citations, estimated impressions and AI share of voice across six AI surfaces. It does this two separate ways: an index of prompts Ahrefs wrote and runs itself, sold per platform, and a custom prompt tracker sold by the check. The first cannot see your prompts. The second cannot see the market.

That last sentence is the whole post.

One half tells you what the market asks. The other tells you how you do on what you asked. Nobody sells them as one thing except in a headline.

The two halves are sold in units that do not compare

Here is why every published comparison lands somewhere strange: the two products inside Brand Radar are metered on different things, and only one of them maps onto an AI answer.

The AI Index is a corpus you query, not a tracker you point

The Index is built from Ahrefs' own keyword database, expanded through People Also Ask and semantic fanout, then run against the AI platforms. Ahrefs' product page puts the corpus at more than 473 million monthly prompts and lists AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, alongside YouTube, Reddit and TikTok.

You look your brand up inside that corpus. You do not add to it, and you do not choose how often any prompt inside it is re-run.

Custom Prompts are sold by the check, and a check is one AI answer

This is the half that matters for measurement, and it has its own price list. Ahrefs' help centre defines the unit plainly: "1 check is calculated as: 1 prompt execution x 1 LLM x 1 location."

Packages run $50 for 2,500 checks, $100 for 7,000 and $250 for 25,000, with overage at $0.020, $0.015 and $0.010 respectively. Paid Ahrefs plans include 150, 300 or 600 checks a month on Lite, Standard and Advanced before you buy any package at all.

Seven engines are selectable here: AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Grok, with Grok currently unavailable for new collection.

The published index size disagrees with itself across sources

Ahrefs' own page says 473 million monthly prompts. Ahrefs' pricing page says 475 million organic prompts. Third-party reviews published this month variously report 400 million, 271 million and 260 million.

Those cannot all describe the same corpus in the same month. Treat the scale as large and the exact figure as unsettled, and do not put any of them in a business case without asking on the call which number is current and what it counts.

What every Brand Radar review asks:

• •What does it cost per month?
• •Which AI platforms are included?
• •Does it show competitor share of voice?
• •Is the base Ahrefs plan required?

What the purchase actually turns on:

• •Which of the two products am I buying?
• •How many answers does each dollar buy in that product?
• •Can I point it at the fifteen prompts my sales team argues about?
• •Was the number on the dashboard ever the thing holding the program back?

Every review answers the first list. The second list decides whether the subscription does anything.

6 things every Ahrefs Brand Radar review gets wrong

None of these are defects in the product. Each one follows from treating a two-product bundle as a single line item.

Mistake #1: Pricing the Index as though it were a prompt tracker

The $199 and $699 figures buy access to a corpus. They do not buy the ability to track a prompt you wrote, which is a separate purchase with a separate price list starting at $50.

Reviews that lead with $699 and then explain custom prompt tracking have quoted the price of one product against the capability of another.

Mistake #2: Reporting $199 as the cost of 2,500 checks

We made this one ourselves. In our read of the wider bracket we priced Brand Radar at $79.60 per thousand answers by dividing $199 by the 2,500 checks bundled alongside the Index.

That is defensible if you need the Index anyway. It is wrong as a price for checks. Bought as checks, the same vendor charges $20.00 per thousand on Basic and $10.00 on Scale.

Ahrefs holds the cheapest row and the dearest row in this category, eight times apart, and both figures come off the same pricing page.

Mistake #3: Reading 473 million prompts as coverage of your category

A corpus that size is a genuine asset and it is not the same thing as depth on your questions. Ahrefs generates the prompts from search demand, which means a category with thin search volume behind it is thin in the index too.

Large is not the same as representative, and neither is the same as yours.

Mistake #4: Assuming checks let you buy sampling depth

They do not, and this corrects a second thing we implied earlier. Cadence options are monthly, weekly or daily, and daily is the ceiling.

One prompt, on one engine, in one location, still tops out near 30 answers a month, which is exactly where every other vendor in the bracket sits. What 25,000 checks buys is roughly 833 prompt-engine-location cells at daily cadence, which is breadth you allocate yourself rather than resolution you can raise.

The location dimension does not rescue it either. Running the same question in five markets gives you five different questions, not five samples of one.

Mistake #5: Leaving the base subscription out of the total

Brand Radar sits on top of an Ahrefs plan rather than replacing one. AEO Labs put the realistic all-in figure at roughly $828 a month for full platform coverage on the entry Ahrefs tier, and was candid that the review was desk research rather than hands-on.

If Ahrefs is already in your stack, the marginal cost is the add-on alone, which is the strongest argument anyone can make for this product and almost nobody makes it.

Mistake #6: Changing instruments when the reading was never the bottleneck

Our concluded CITE Index study ran 500 buyer prompts nightly through ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode for 63 days, collecting 90,132 answers across 10 consumer categories.

Across those 63 days the category leader flipped on only 18.7% of day pairs, and in four of the ten categories it never changed once. The average category leader held 78.2% of its own category's answers. The full corpus sits in the final report.

That is incumbency, not instrumentation. A better dashboard pointed at a standing that holds for weeks produces a better chart of the same result.

What the Index does that no prompt tracker can

Fit is more useful to you than a verdict, and the Index half deserves a fairer hearing than the reviews give it.

Every self-serve tracker in this category runs a prompt list you wrote. Sami Akkawi of Petra Labs, quoted by Mi3 in August, described the consequence bluntly: brands "self-select their own set of prompts that they want to track" and end up "looking at a synthetic view of the world in their AI visibility trackers."

The Index is the only product on the self-serve shelf that answers the other question. Because Ahrefs generates its prompts from search demand rather than from your growth team's imagination, estimated impressions are weighted by how much demand actually sits behind each prompt.

That surfaces the prompts nobody on your side thought to write down. Our post on how to select prompts for LLM tracking covers why that gap is usually the expensive one.

The source attribution is the second genuine strength. When an answer names your brand, Brand Radar shows which URL the model pulled it from, which turns a visibility number into an off-page target list.

One honest limit to carry alongside all of that: Ahrefs describes visibility, impressions, citations and share of voice as modeled or comparative metrics, and published teardowns note they do not evidence views, traffic, conversions or causal impact. Sentiment is not a core metric here either.

Read what a vendor says about the limits of its own numbers before you read what a competitor says about them.

Sizing an Ahrefs Brand Radar setup before you buy

The diagnostic half is done. Here is the sequence we run with clients evaluating this product specifically.

Step 1: Decide which of the two products you are actually shopping for

Write one sentence naming the decision the tool has to inform. If it is "which prompts exist in my category that we are absent from," that is the Index. If it is "how are we doing on these fifteen shortlist questions," that is Custom Prompts.

Buying the wrong half is the most expensive mistake available here, and it costs $649 a month in the wrong direction.

Step 2: Run your ten highest-intent prompts by hand across every engine

Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude and ask the same ten shortlist-stage questions your buyers ask. Record where you appear, which competitors appear instead, and every domain cited.

Two hours of this tells you which engines carry your category. Note that Claude appears on neither half of Brand Radar, so if step 2 puts weight there, no configuration reaches it.

Step 3: Size the check package from your prompt set, not from the tier names

Multiply your prompt count by the engines you need, by the locations you need, by 30 for daily or roughly 4 for weekly. That product is your monthly check requirement.

Twenty prompts on three engines in one location, run daily, is 1,800 checks, which fits inside the $50 package. Most teams shopping the $250 tier have not done this multiplication.

Step 4: Trade cadence for breadth deliberately, in writing

This is the lever Ahrefs gives you that nobody else does. The same 7,000 checks buys 78 prompt-engine cells at daily cadence or roughly 583 at weekly.

Decide which of your prompts genuinely need a daily read and drop the rest to weekly. We costed out that trade in how many prompts are enough.

Step 5: Establish your noise band before you set a single alert

Freeze the prompt set and run it for four to six weeks with no content or off-page changes, then record the spread. That spread is your category's noise band, and every threshold should sit outside it.

In July 2026 Ronald Sielinski published From Stochastic to Stable, which found rankings needed between 33 and 94 answers to settle across 30 platform-topic combinations, with three never settling at all. It is an unreviewed preprint and the exact numbers will not transfer, but 30 answers a month sits on the floor of that band whichever vendor you pick.

Step 6: Fund the earned half from the same budget line

Whatever the licence costs, hold back a matching share for the work that puts you inside other people's pages: earned mentions, comparison placements, review-site position, community presence.

In our corpus, four of the twelve most-cited domains were brand-owned, which means eight were not. Reddit alone drew 14,698 citations and appeared in 13.6% of all 90,132 answers. Split the budget when you sign rather than after the first flat quarter. That split is the reason a managed GEO agency sits beside tooling rather than inside it.

Where Brand Radar fits, by what each option constrains

Option	What it constrains	Right when
Brand Radar AI Index	Prompt control. You cannot add a prompt or change a cadence at any price	You want to find the demand-weighted questions your own prompt list never contained, and Ahrefs is already paid for.
Brand Radar Custom Prompts	Cadence, at daily. Cost per answer is the lowest in the bracket at $10.00 on Scale	You know your prompts, you want seven engines and multiple locations, and you want to allocate checks yourself.
Peec AI	Three of six engines included on every self-serve tier	Your buyers cluster on three engines and you need unlimited seats. What Peec actually tracks prices the fourth.
Profound	Price. Depth is negotiable only inside an Enterprise contract	You need more than four engines or the prompt-volume index informs your roadmap.
Otterly	Engine mix. Claude, AI Mode and Gemini are paid extras	Cost per answer binds and multi-country coverage matters.
A managed program	Nothing, if scoped right. It costs a retainer	The measurement was never the bottleneck and nobody owns the weekly loop.

The six jobs to score any of these against sit in the AI visibility platform buyer's guide, and the rest of the field is mapped in our survey of GEO tooling for 2026.

FAQ

What is Ahrefs Brand Radar?

Ahrefs Brand Radar is an AI visibility product that reports brand mentions, citations, estimated impressions and share of voice across AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, plus YouTube, Reddit and TikTok. It ships in two parts. The AI Index lets you search a large corpus of prompts Ahrefs generates from its own keyword data and runs itself. Custom Prompts let you track questions you write, metered by the check.

How much does Ahrefs Brand Radar cost?

The AI Index is $199 a month for a single platform or $699 a month for all six, on top of an active Ahrefs subscription starting around $129. Custom prompt checks are sold separately at $50 for 2,500, $100 for 7,000 and $250 for 25,000, with overage from $0.010 to $0.020 per check. Paid Ahrefs plans include 150 to 600 checks a month before any package. Published all-in figures for full coverage land near $828 a month. Confirm on a quote, because limits in this category move often.

Is Ahrefs Brand Radar worth it?

It depends which half you need. Priced by the check, Custom Prompts is the cheapest measurement in this bracket at $10.00 per thousand answers on the Scale package, and the cadence control is genuinely unique. The Index is the only self-serve product that reports against demand-weighted prompts you did not write, which is worth real money if your prompt list is guesswork. If you are not already an Ahrefs customer, the required base subscription makes the entry cost higher than most dedicated trackers.

What are the best Ahrefs Brand Radar alternatives?

The names that come up most are Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, Scrunch AI and Semrush AI Visibility. None of them sell a demand-weighted prompt index, so on that job Brand Radar has no direct substitute on the self-serve shelf. On custom prompt tracking the comparison is cost per answer and engine mix, where Ahrefs Scale at $10.00 per thousand sits at the cheap end alongside Otterly Premium at $10.19, against Peec Starter at $21.11 and Profound Growth at $44.33.

Does Ahrefs Brand Radar track AI visibility on every engine?

No. The Index covers six surfaces and custom prompts cover seven, including Grok, which is currently unavailable for new collection. Claude appears on neither, and Meta AI and DeepSeek are absent as well. If your buyers ask questions inside Claude, which is common for developer and research audiences, Brand Radar cannot see those answers at any tier and no add-on changes that.

The bottom line

Brand Radar is better than its reviews and priced more strangely than its reviews admit. The custom prompt product is the cheapest per answer in the category and gives you a cadence lever nobody else offers. The index product answers a question no competitor answers at all. Bundled under one name and one headline price, both get described badly.

Do step 1 before you take a demo. Name which of the two problems you have, then price only that half. Teams that skip it buy $699 of corpus access to answer a question that fifteen custom prompts and $50 would have answered better.

Then go do the work no licence covers. Nothing in the software writes the answer block, fixes the passage the model could not extract, or earns the third-party mention that puts you in the source pool. An AI visibility audit will show you which half your gap sits in before you sign for another year of anything.