Ahrefs Brand Radar pricing and review

Ahrefs Brand Radar sits inside an SEO platform, but it measures a different layer. Brand Radar tracks how often a brand appears in AI answers and how often AI systems link to its pages or domains. That makes it useful for checking visibility, provided you understand the plan access, the counting method and the coverage behind the dashboard.

Which Ahrefs plan do you need for Brand Radar?

On 2 Oct 2026, Ahrefs’ Brand Radar page said Custom Prompts are free for every paid Ahrefs Lite plan and above, with daily quotas of 5 prompts on Lite, 10 on Standard and 20 on Advanced. Beyond that quota, check-based packages and the AI Visibility Index are paid extras, priced below.

So the custom prompt quota comes with paid Ahrefs access, and Ahrefs’ pricing page adds that Brand Radar is also available as a standalone tool, which comes with an Ahrefs Free account.

On 2 Oct 2026, from a UK session, the Brand Radar page showed custom prompts from £40 a month and the AI Visibility Index from £159 a month. The pricing page lists custom prompt packages from £40 a month (Basic, 2,500 checks a month, with overage billed monthly) and Brand Radar AI from £159 a month. Ahrefs shows prices in your local currency, so check the figure from where you are.

The quota matters more than the tier label. A daily Custom Prompts allowance tells you how many questions you can submit under that allowance, but it does not tell you how many markets, brands or answer variants you can review over a month.

There is also a difference between the pre-collected index and your own questions. Ahrefs says its AI Visibility Index maps brands across millions of pre-collected AI responses with no setup. That is broad coverage, not proof that every niche query receives equal treatment.

The starting prices are clear. The package you need depends on your prompt count.

What will Brand Radar count when it reports on you?

Brand Radar separates two outcomes that often end up as one dashboard number. Ahrefs defines “Mentions” as how often your brand name appears in AI answer text. It defines “Citations” as how often AI links to your pages or domains as a source. A mention can occur without a link, while a citation can appear without the answer presenting your brand as the preferred choice.

A name is not a link.

Ahrefs says question sets are re-tested monthly on a 90-day reporting window. That gives the report a defined time frame, but the result remains a record of appearances within the questions and answers included in the measurement system.

Take a product page where the comparison table only loads after a click. Before the change, the page presents the product details first and hides the comparison evidence. After the change, put the table directly in the page body beside the headings that explain the alternatives and use cases. That gives an AI system clearer page content to read, while leaving the Brand Radar result as an empirical question rather than a guaranteed outcome.

The page change improves the evidence available to a model.

Ahrefs says its index works best for established brands or topics with meaningful search demand because it is built on the Ahrefs keyword database. It also says coverage may be limited for brands with little or no search volume. For that case, Ahrefs says Custom Prompts are useful “if your brand is not well-known, or you have uncommon queries to track”, which is the case the pre-collected index is least likely to cover.

Your prompt set determines what the number can mean.

When will a Brand Radar mention count help you?

A mention count helps when it answers a defined question. You can compare a fixed set of buyer questions over the reporting window, find prompts where competitors appear and you do not, and inspect the wording around each appearance. The count becomes weak evidence when you compare different prompt sets or ignore where the brand appears in the answer.

The useful unit is the prompt, not the headline number.

Citations add source context. In our weekly research on who owns AI answers, listicles and roundups account for 67.5% of recorded citations, while competitor product pages account for 24.4%. Together, those page types account for 91.9% of citations in the sample, while the product’s own site accounts for 1.5%.

That pattern changes where you inspect visibility. A roundup may name your product, a competitor page may frame the comparison and your own site may explain the product accurately while receiving a smaller share of citations in this sample.

Use the count as a signal only while its prompt and source context remain visible.

What can’t you tell from Ahrefs Brand Radar?

You cannot tell from the published Brand Radar definitions whether an answer was favourable, whether someone clicked a cited page or whether the appearance changed revenue. Those definitions describe what the system records, not what happened after the answer was shown. We also cannot generalise from our sample to answers, industries or prompts we did not measure.

That is the limit of the data.

You also cannot use Ahrefs’ starting prices to calculate your exact bill. Each prompt uses one check per platform, location and update, so the bill depends on how many prompts you track, where and how often. This review can report the published starting prices and quotas, not the bill for your workload.

Our CiteGraph research data records citations across listicles, competitor product pages, community threads and other page types. Adding those reported categories gives the full sample represented in the research, but it does not represent every AI answer or market.

The separate free AI readiness check measures fifteen technical checks and shows the fix for each. It does not fill the coverage gap in Brand Radar.

A Brand Radar mention count measures appearances, not preference.