Ahrefs Brand Radar is the AI-visibility feature set that Ahrefs, the long-established SEO software company, has added to its existing platform. Rather than building a prompt-tracking product from scratch, Ahrefs leans on an asset most AI-visibility startups don't have: a keyword database built over more than a decade of crawling and search data, which it uses to model hundreds of millions of the actual questions people ask AI systems.

Who makes it

Ahrefs was founded in 2011 by Dmitry Gerasimenko and is headquartered in Singapore, according to the company's own about page and independent coverage of its growth. Unlike every other vendor in this review, Ahrefs built its business — bootstrapped, without external venture funding — as a backlink and keyword-research platform long before AI-visibility tracking existed as a category, and Brand Radar is a newer addition layered onto that existing SEO suite rather than a standalone company's core product.

Engines it covers

Brand Radar's AI Visibility Index covers 6 platforms: Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. Custom Prompts covers the same 6 plus Claude, for 7 total. Ahrefs also tracks YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok as sources that influence what AI systems cite, though those are treated as supporting "AI sources" data rather than answer engines in their own right.

How it collects data

Ahrefs documents two distinct collection methods, which is more granular than most competitors publish. Prompt-based indexes (covering ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews, and AI Mode) start from real queries in Ahrefs' keyword database, expand them into natural-language questions using People Also Ask data and semantic fan-out, then run the resulting prompt set — more than 449 million of them — through each AI platform and store the responses. Search-query-based indexes, which exist only for AI Overviews and AI Mode, instead track the ordinary Google search keywords that happen to trigger an AI answer inside Google's own results, and check whether a brand appears in that answer. Question sets are re-tested monthly on a 90-day reporting window; Custom Prompts, by contrast, can be checked daily, weekly, or monthly per platform, at the customer's choice.

Core features

The AI Visibility Index lets anyone search a brand, product, or category and immediately see mention and citation history with no setup, useful for benchmarking a competitor as easily as your own brand. Custom Prompts lets a customer define specific buyer questions — useful for brands not yet well-known enough to appear in the pre-built index — and track them on a chosen cadence, with AI-suggested prompts drawn from competitor and pricing data Ahrefs already collects. Ahrefs defines four core metrics: Mentions (brand name appears in answer text), Citations (AI links to the brand's pages as a source), AI Share of Voice (percentage of responses in a topic set that mention or cite the brand versus competitors), and Estimated Impressions (visibility weighted by the real search volume behind each prompt). Bot-traffic analytics, tracking which AI crawlers visit which pages, is offered free while in beta.

Pricing, checked September 2026

Reading ahrefs.com/brand-radar directly on 2026-09-25:

  • Custom Prompts: starts at $50/month; $699/month covers all six models in bulk
  • AI Visibility Index: starts at $199/month, including 83 prompts/day and 2,500 checks/month, with $0.02 per additional check; Claude is available as part of the "all platforms" tier
  • Ahrefs' paid base plans include a small daily Custom Prompts quota at no extra cost: Lite gets 5 prompts/day (150 checks/month), Standard 10, Advanced 20, Enterprise from 83

One inconsistency worth flagging for buyers: other pages in Ahrefs' own site have advertised Brand Radar bundle pricing at $398/month for "select platforms" and $699/month for "all platforms," alongside the $199/month figure quoted as the Index's starting price elsewhere. The products these prices refer to are not identical — bundle pricing appears to cover broader multi-platform packages while $199/month is an entry point — but the overlap makes it hard to know, from the public pages alone, exactly what a mid-sized order would cost without signing up or contacting sales.

Strengths

Brand Radar's methodology documentation is more specific than most of the category: it distinguishes prompt-based indexes from search-query-based indexes, states its refresh cadence, and explains exactly how its 449-million-prompt figure was built from real keyword-search demand rather than an assumed list of questions. The AI Visibility Index's no-setup, any-brand lookup is also a genuinely different product shape than competitors that require a customer to configure prompts before they see any data. For existing Ahrefs customers, a small amount of AI-visibility tracking essentially comes free with a plan they may already pay for.

Limitations

Pricing clarity is the clearest weak point: the existence of two different published starting prices for what reads as overlapping coverage is the kind of inconsistency our review framework flags as a transparency issue, not a minor typo. The AI Visibility Index's monthly, 90-day-window refresh is also slower than the daily tracking several competitors offer as their standard, which matters for brands trying to catch a fast-moving change in how they're described. And while Custom Prompts can be bought with a small paid Ahrefs plan, a buyer who wants Brand Radar as a true standalone product, unconnected to the rest of Ahrefs' SEO suite, will find the purchase path less direct than dedicated AI-visibility vendors offer.

Who it's best for

Ahrefs Brand Radar is best suited to existing Ahrefs customers who want AI-visibility data layered onto tools they already use, and to SEO teams who value a visibility index grounded in real search-demand data over a from-scratch prompt-writing exercise. Buyers with no existing Ahrefs relationship who want the simplest possible pricing page should expect to spend some time reconciling the site's different published numbers before signing up.

Verdict

Brand Radar's methodology write-up is genuinely more transparent than most of this category, and building on Ahrefs' keyword database is a real structural advantage for the pre-built Index. The rough edge is commercial, not technical: two different starting prices published across Ahrefs' own site make it harder than it should be to know what a given brand will actually pay before talking to sales.