Ahrefs is a search-marketing company, and Brand Radar is its tool for seeing where brands appear in AI answers. It works differently from an audit: it leans on a very large database, and you can add your own prompts. Facts about Ahrefs come from its own pages, read on 2026-10-15.
Two different ideas
Brand Radar starts from a huge pool of prompts. Ahrefs says its AI Visibility Index covers more than 481 million monthly prompts, modelled from real searches in its keyword database. You search the pool for a brand and see how it shows up. You can also set your own prompts to track.
AI Pick Check starts from you. We write 20 questions a buyer of your kind would ask, send each one twice to four assistants through their official APIs with web search, and report on the 160 answers.
One is wide and market-level. The other is narrow and about your business.
At a glance (checked 2026-10-15)
| AI Pick Check | Ahrefs Brand Radar | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $39 once | On its pricing page: an add-on starting at $199 a month, and custom-prompt packages from $50 a month for 2,500 checks. Its Brand Radar page showed euro figures (from €47 for custom prompts, €179 for the index). They may be the same plans in another currency, so check which applies to you |
| Platforms | 4 assistants | AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and ChatGPT. Claude is listed too, and uses 8 checks per update |
| Cadence | One audit, one free re-run within 60 days | Custom prompts can be tracked daily, weekly or monthly |
| Prompts | 20 questions, asked twice on each | The shared index, plus your own custom prompts. Each prompt uses one check per platform, location and update |
| Method | Official APIs with web search | Index prompts are modelled from its keyword data. The page we read does not say how live answers are fetched |
| Extras | A ranked fix plan | Competitor benchmarks, cited pages, and off-site sources including YouTube, TikTok and Reddit, per its page |
| Margin of error | Shown | Not described on the pages we read |
What Ahrefs does better
- Scale. Its index is far bigger than anything we run in one audit.
- More platforms. Including Copilot and both Google AI features.
- Off-site signals. Ahrefs' page describes views of YouTube, TikTok and Reddit content, which it marks as free to Ahrefs customers while in beta. We report which sources the assistants cite in our run, but we do not crawl those platforms.
- Flexible cadence. Daily, weekly or monthly, set per prompt.
- Fits an existing Ahrefs habit. If you already use it for links and keywords, the data sits in one place.
What AI Pick Check does better
- A low, one-off price with no check budget to watch.
- Questions tuned to your business, written without your name in them.
- Ranges. Two runs per assistant per question, with a margin of error.
- A short fix plan you can start on today.
- No learning curve. You read a report. You do not build a dashboard.
Understanding "checks"
Ahrefs sells usage in checks. A check is one prompt on one platform in one location for one update. So 10 prompts on 6 platforms updated daily uses 60 checks a day. This is useful to know before you compare prices, because the cheapest figure may cover fewer prompts than you expect.
A note on our own method. Three of our four assistants are asked through their own makers' APIs. The fourth, Google's Gemini model, is reached through Perplexity's API and searches with Perplexity's web search, not Google Search. Our methodology page explains this, and every Gemini answer in a report is labelled with that route.
A worked example
Take a fictional garden centre, Example Garden Supplies, at example.com. Its owner wants to know whether assistants name the shop when someone asks for a local place to buy fruit trees.
With Brand Radar, the owner or an SEO helper would add prompts like that one, pick the platforms and locations, and then watch the mentions over the weeks. Each update spends checks from the plan.
With AI Pick Check, the owner would get one report. It would show how often the shop was named across 160 answers, which garden centres were named instead, which pages the assistants cited, and a ranked list of fixes. Then the owner would use the free re-run after making the first changes.
Both are reasonable. The first is about watching over time. The second is about deciding what to do first.
Which should you pick?
Ahrefs Brand Radar suits an SEO professional or agency that wants to watch many brands or topics, over time, inside a tool they already use.
AI Pick Check suits a business owner who wants a clear first picture and a to-do list, and is not ready for a monthly tool.
How to check it worked
Whichever you use, write five buyer questions and ask them by hand in a fresh chat. Then compare. If the tool says you appear often but the by-hand test never names you, find out which prompts the tool used.
What this won't do
- No tool can promise that an assistant recommends your business.
- We have not tested Ahrefs Brand Radar and do not judge its accuracy.
- Ahrefs shows prices in different currencies on different pages, and they may change. This is a dated snapshot.
- This page is written by the makers of AI Pick Check.
Sources
- Ahrefs: Brand Radar Accessed
- Ahrefs: Pricing Accessed