Ahrefs Brand Radar: What It Tracks, Costs, and Misses

Ahrefs Brand Radar is Ahrefs' AI visibility product. It counts how often AI answers mention or cite a brand, for any brand you type in, with no setup. As of October 2026 it lists at $199 a month per index, $699 for all platforms, and $50 a month for tracking your own prompts. It is strong on scale and weak on your specific buyer questions.

This guide is based on public documentation as of October 2026; we have not tested the product hands-on. Prices and limits come from Ahrefs' own pages, fetched on 2026-10-03.

What is Ahrefs Brand Radar?

It is a search-and-tracking tool built on two separate modes. The Brand Radar page calls them the AI Visibility Index and Custom Prompts, and they answer different questions.

• AI Visibility Index. Pre-collected AI responses you can search instantly, including history back to 2025. It suits established brands and topics with real search demand.
• Custom Prompts. Questions you define, checked daily, weekly or monthly from the day you add them. Ahrefs positions them for brands that are not well known or have unusual queries.

Ahrefs says the index prompts come from People Also Ask questions in its keyword database. It enters them into the web version of each chatbot using the default model, with no stored user data, personalization or pre-prompting.

That is a sound method for "what would a typical user see". It is also why index data reflects Ahrefs' keyword database, not your buyers' wording.

How big is the index?

Ahrefs quotes three different sizes. The help article says 405+ million prompts, the Brand Radar page says 448M+, and the pricing page says 475M+. The figures are probably from different dates, but none of the pages says so, so treat "400 million-plus" as the claim and ignore the decimals.

What does it track?

It tracks mentions, citations, AI share of voice and estimated impressions across six AI surfaces in the index, plus Claude and Grok in custom prompts. The Brand Radar page defines the four metrics this way:

• Mentions: how often your brand name appears in AI answer text.
• Citations: how often AI links to your pages or domains.
• AI share of voice: the share of responses in your topic set that mention or cite you versus competitors.
• Estimated impressions: visibility weighted by the search volume behind each prompt.

Claude is tracked through the API as Claude Sonnet 4.6 with web search, per the help article. Note that this is a different surface from the free Claude app a buyer opens.

Brand Radar also tracks YouTube, Reddit and TikTok. These are labeled beta and free on paid plans for now. Ahrefs says that once an index leaves beta it becomes a chargeable add-on.

What does it cost?

Brand Radar has no single price: you buy index access, a custom-prompt package, or both. All figures are USD from Ahrefs' pricing page and help article, and may vary by region.

The pricing page also offers annual billing that saves up to 17%, and the page text does not make clear which cadence the headline figures show. The help article's plan table lists the Brand Radar AI add-on as needed for the AI indexes on "any paid plan", so confirm whether a standalone sign-up needs a base plan.

For a worked budget, see our Ahrefs Brand Radar pricing guide.

How do checks add up?

A check is one prompt on one platform in one location for one update. Ahrefs gives the example that 5 prompts on 1 platform checked daily equals 150 checks a month, which is 30 per prompt.

Using only those rules:

1. 25 prompts on 5 platforms daily is 25 × 5 × 30 = 3,750 checks a month.
2. On Basic that is $50 plus 1,250 overage checks at $0.020, or $75. That beats Growth's flat $100.
3. Claude changes the picture. 25 prompts on Claude daily is 25 × 30 × 8 = 6,000 checks, more than the whole five-platform set.

So the model you track matters more than the number of prompts.

What does it do well, and what not?

It does scale, competitor lookups and source discovery well. It does your own buyer questions, freshness and Claude coverage less well. Both lists come from Ahrefs' stated design, not our testing.

What it does well:

• No setup for any brand. You can look up a competitor, a product or a category without configuring anything. There is no cap on the brands or domains you analyze.
• A shared index. Everyone queries the same pre-collected responses, so comparisons are consistent.
• Sources next to answers. It tracks cited pages and the YouTube and Reddit threads that feed answers.
• Data export. Ahrefs lists API access, an MCP server, Report Builder widgets and a Looker Studio connector.

Where it is thinner:

• Monthly chatbot refresh in the index. ChatGPT and Gemini data update once a month, so a fix you ship today will not show quickly.
• Index coverage depends on search demand. Ahrefs itself says the index may have limited coverage for brands with little or no search volume. That is the case where Custom Prompts, and their metered checks, are needed.
• Mentions without rank. Share of voice counts presence. In AEOeye's audit records (127 audits, 892 answers, self-selected brands), when a brand was named and ranked it was first in 71.4% of 147 ranked mentions. Being named at all is the hard part, and position still matters. See how we measure recommendations.
• No Claude in the index and an 8x check cost. If Claude is important to your buyers, you pay for it per check.

What are the alternatives?

Start with the free options, then pick a tracker by the job. Prices are from each vendor's page, checked 2026-10-03.

For dedicated daily trackers, see our AI visibility tracker roundup and the wider best AI visibility tools comparison. AEOeye is not a daily tracker, and we do not claim it replaces one.

Our position: if you already pay for Ahrefs, use the free Custom Prompts quota on your 5 to 20 most important buyer questions before buying anything more. If your question is "what does AI say about us right now", a $199 index is the wrong first purchase.