VisibilyRanking vs Ahrefs Brand Radar (2026): index research or tracking your own prompts?
Ahrefs Brand Radar pairs a large pre-collected AI prompt index with small daily custom prompt quotas. VisibilyRanking tracks your own prompt set end to end. Here's when each makes sense.
Ahrefs Brand Radar and VisibilyRanking answer slightly different questions. Brand Radar is strongest as research: a huge pre-collected index of AI prompts you can search for brand and competitor mentions. VisibilyRanking is built for operating a program: tracking the specific prompts your buyers ask, explaining why you win or lose them, and fixing the gaps.
Both are useful. They just belong at different stages. Ahrefs details below come from its published pricing as recorded in our tool notes.
The quick verdict
If you already pay for Ahrefs and want directional research on how often AI engines mention your brand across a large sample, Brand Radar is a good fit. If you need precise tracking of your own prompt list across engines, plus the crawler and traffic data to act on it, VisibilyRanking is the better tool.
How Brand Radar is packaged
Brand Radar has two parts:
- Custom Prompts are included with paid Ahrefs plans (Lite and up), with a daily quota of 5 prompts on Lite, 10 on Standard, and 20 on Advanced. They run across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Claude.
- AI Visibility Index starts at $199/mo. It's a pre-collected index of 496M+ prompts, retested monthly on a 90-day window. Access across all models costs $699/mo.
You need an Ahrefs base plan for either. The index is the headline feature, and for research it's impressive: you can see how your brand shows up across a sample far larger than anyone would track by hand.
Where index data and tracked prompts differ
An index tells you how you appear across prompts somebody else chose. That's great for discovering where you show up at all, and for sizing a category. It's less helpful when your CMO asks why you dropped out of the answer to "best payroll software for remote teams in Germany" last week. That prompt may not be in the index, and monthly retesting won't show when the change happened.
Custom Prompts fill that gap, but a daily quota of 5 to 20 prompts is a small sample for most brands. A typical prompt set covers several topics, personas, and markets, and quickly runs past 20.
VisibilyRanking starts from that set. We build it with you on the demo, grouped by topic, persona, and country, and track it across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, and Google AI Overviews. You see which brands each engine names, in what order, and how that moves week to week.
Beyond the mention
Brand Radar's strength is that it sits inside Ahrefs, next to backlinks and content data. If an AI answer cites a competitor's page, you can jump straight into its link profile. That's a real workflow advantage for SEO teams.
VisibilyRanking covers the parts of the loop that a mention index doesn't:
- Citation analytics per answer, showing the exact pages and domains each engine relied on, including Reddit, YouTube, and review sites.
- AI crawler logs from your CDN or host, so you can see GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot fetching your pages and catch the 404s and blocked paths.
- Traffic attribution that tags AI-referred visits and follows them to signups and sales.
- A content agent that drafts pages for the prompts you're losing and holds them in a review inbox.
Ahrefs doesn't publish crawler logs for AI bots or attribution of AI visits to conversions.
Side by side
| VisibilyRanking | Ahrefs Brand Radar | |
|---|---|---|
| Best at | Operating an AI search program | Research across a large prompt index |
| Pricing | Quoted after demo | Custom Prompts in paid Ahrefs plans; index from $199/mo, $699/mo all models |
| Your own prompts | Full prompt set by topic, persona, country | 5, 10, or 20 per day by plan |
| Engines | 8 | 7 for Custom Prompts |
| Refresh | Weekly trends on tracked prompts | Index retested monthly |
| Link data | Not a backlink tool | Full Ahrefs link index |
| AI crawler logs | Yes | Not published |
| AI traffic to conversions | Yes | Not published |
Who should pick which
Keep Brand Radar if you're an Ahrefs team doing category research and want AI mention data next to your link data. Running both is a reasonable setup: Ahrefs for research, a dedicated platform for the prompts that matter to pipeline.
If you're at the point where specific prompts have owners and targets, book a VisibilyRanking demo. We'll track your shortlist live across all eight engines.