Ahrefs Brand Radar alternatives in 2026: 7 tools for tracking your own AI prompts
Ahrefs Brand Radar is a strong research index, but its custom prompt quotas are small and it stops at the dashboard. Seven alternatives compared on prompts, crawler data, traffic and price.
Ahrefs Brand Radar is the AI visibility part of Ahrefs, and it gives you two ways in. The AI Visibility Index is a pre-collected database: Ahrefs takes real queries from its keyword database, expands them into natural questions through People Also Ask and semantic fanout, and runs the result (538 million+ prompts, per the Brand Radar page captured today) through AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. Custom Prompts is the other door. You write the buyer questions yourself and Brand Radar checks them on the platforms you pick.
So why do people go looking for something else? The reasons we see most often come straight from how the product is built.
Ahrefs Brand Radar's product page, captured November 6, 2026.
The index is built from search demand. Ahrefs says so plainly in its own FAQ: the index works best for established brands or topics with meaningful search volume, and coverage may be thin for brands with little or none. Its question sets are re-tested monthly on a 90-day reporting window. That makes it a good research tool for a category, and a weak fit if you need to know what ChatGPT said about you this week.
Custom Prompts fixes the freshness problem, but the included quota is small. Every paid Ahrefs plan includes a daily Custom Prompts allowance of 5 prompts on Lite, 10 on Standard and 20 on Advanced. Each prompt is checked on every platform you select, and Claude consumes 8 checks per update. Past that, you buy check-based packages. On the page shown to a visitor in the Netherlands, those started at €46.7 a month for a Basic package (the example given is 80 prompts daily on one platform).
Ahrefs' pricing page, captured November 6, 2026. Prices shown in euros for a visitor in the Netherlands.
Then there is the base plan. The free Custom Prompts quota comes with a paid Ahrefs subscription, and Ahrefs' FAQ also says Brand Radar can be bought standalone. Our catalog lists the AI Visibility Index from $199 a month; the same page showed it from €179 a month to our Netherlands visitor. If you already pay for Ahrefs for SEO, the math is friendly. If you only want AI visibility, you are buying into a suite.
Last, the follow-through. Ahrefs lists Bot Analytics (free while in beta) and Web Analytics for AI traffic next to Brand Radar, which is more than many SEO suites offer. What we could not find documented is a page-level path from an AI crawl to a citation, or an agent that writes and publishes content against the gaps Brand Radar finds.
Quick verdict
If you want one tool that tracks your own prompts daily, shows which AI crawlers read which pages, attributes AI-referred visits to conversions, and can publish content to close the gaps, start with Promptwatch. AthenaHQ and Scrunch AI are the strongest dedicated alternatives after it. Stay on Brand Radar, or pair it with one of these, if category-level research inside Ahrefs is what you value most.
Comparison table
Starting prices come from our catalog unless a price captured today says otherwise. Euro figures are as shown to a visitor in the Netherlands.
| Tool | Best for | Starting price | What it doesn't do (or doesn't document) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Promptwatch | Tracking, crawler logs, traffic and content in one workspace | Essential $95/mo, 7-day free trial | Crawler logs start on Professional ($245/mo); the automated Content Agent starts on Business ($579/mo) |
| AthenaHQ | Teams that want an action queue | Free Essential tier; Starter $295/mo | API access is a paid add-on on Starter; multi-region is Enterprise |
| Scrunch AI | Serving AI-optimized pages to agents | Core $250/mo | Core covers 4 LLMs and 1 country; AXP and API access are Enterprise |
| Profound | Enterprise marketing agents | Free 7-day trial; Enterprise custom | No self-serve paid plan on the brand pricing page |
| Rankshift | Agencies that want unlimited seats | Starter €69/mo billed annually | Crawler analytics and MCP/API access are greyed out on Starter |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | Teams already in Semrush | SEO + AI Search Starter €158.40/mo billed annually | GA4 traffic reporting is marked "coming soon"; crawler logs not documented |
| Similarweb | Market-level AI referral traffic | From $125/mo annual (catalog, not confirmed on the current pricing page) | Modeled panel data; directional for small sites |
1. Promptwatch
Promptwatch's homepage, captured November 6, 2026.
Promptwatch is the alternative that changes the most about your workflow, because it covers the steps Brand Radar leaves to you. You define the prompts (50 on Essential, 150 on Professional, 350 on Business), and monitors run them daily across the engines you choose. Every paid plan can track any of the supported engines, which include ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot through their real interfaces, plus Claude, DeepSeek, Mistral and Grok through the API.
The research side is not an afterthought either. Prompt Volumes gives monthly volumes, difficulty scores and citation rates, and Prompt Explorer suggests prompts from your Search Console data, your ranking keywords, People Also Ask, or any page on your site. That covers much of what Ahrefs users like about the index, but pointed at your own prompt set.
Where it pulls ahead is after the dashboard. Agent Analytics logs AI crawler visits that are IP-verified against each operator's published ranges, and it shows a citation rate per page, so you can tell whether a page is not being read or is read and not cited. Visitor Analytics tracks AI-referred visits and conversions. The Content Agent plans, writes and publishes to WordPress, Webflow or Framer, and the Action Board turns findings into a prioritized to-do list.
Limits: crawler logs start on Professional ($245/mo), and the automated Content Agent starts on Business ($579/mo). Essential ($95/mo) covers tracking, Agent Chat, site audits and visitor analytics, but not crawler logs. Seats are unlimited on every paid plan.
Who it suits: teams that want to measure and act in one place, and agencies (agency plans start at $199/mo with unlimited projects and prompts).
2. AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ's pricing page, captured November 6, 2026.
AthenaHQ is built around doing something with the data. Its Starter plan ($295 a month) includes 3,600 credits, where one credit is one AI response, visibility across 11 models, unlimited topics, prompts and competitors, on-page and off-page actions, and a content optimization agent. The feature table also lists smart robots.txt and llms.txt management for AI crawler access, citation intelligence, and GA4 and Search Console integrations. There is a free Essential tier with 300 credits across five engines.
Limits: Starter is country-level with single-region support, and API access and extra credits are paid add-ons priced on request. Persona targeting, multi-region and the Athena Citation Engine sit on Enterprise. Our catalog does not document an AI crawler-log product with page-level crawl-to-citation data.
Who it suits: execution-focused teams that will work an action list every week and can budget for credit usage.
3. Scrunch AI
Scrunch's pricing page, captured November 6, 2026.
Scrunch AI has the most unusual idea on this list. Its Agent Experience Platform (AXP) serves AI-optimized versions of your pages to AI agents without changing what humans see. Around that sits monitoring: Core is $250 a month for 125 unique prompts, 5,000 responses, five site audits, one brand workspace and five user licenses, with a 7-day free trial. Core includes AI agent and bot traffic reporting and sentiment analysis.
Limits: Core tracks four LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot), one country, one language and one persona. AXP, API access, Looker Studio and the nine-model coverage are Enterprise.
Who it suits: content-heavy sites where the real problem is how agents read the page, and who can justify an Enterprise conversation to unlock AXP.
4. Profound
Profound now sells itself as an AI Marketer: agents for research, content, reporting and workflows, with Answer Engine Insights, Prompt Volumes and Agent Analytics alongside. The pricing page lists a free Trial (50 prompts run daily for 7 days across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews) and a custom Enterprise plan that tracks up to nine answer engines. Agent Analytics there tracks AI-sourced traffic with integrations including Cloudflare, Fastly, Vercel, Netlify, AWS and WordPress.
Limits: there is no self-serve paid brand plan on the page, so the product most people mean is an Enterprise contract. Our catalog's earlier estimate puts that at about $40k a year; the page itself shows no price. It is a broad marketing platform, not a focused AI-search tracker.
Who it suits: enterprise marketing teams buying a full agent program, with AI search as one channel.
5. Rankshift
Rankshift is a Dutch AI search platform with a 30-day trial and unlimited projects and seats on every paid plan. The pricing page showed Starter at €69, Professional at €159 and Business at €359 a month billed annually, with 150, 350 and 850 prompts a day. Every plan tracks all supported LLMs and includes a content brief generator and an AI content writer. Its homepage shows an Agent Analytics view with GPTBot, ClaudeBot, ChatGPT-User and PerplexityBot visits.
Limits: in the captured pricing screenshot, crawler analytics, Looker Studio and MCP and API access are greyed out on Starter and ticked from Professional. How deep the crawler analytics go is not documented.
Who it suits: agencies and in-house teams that want a seat-unlimited tracker at a lower entry price.
6. Semrush AI Toolkit
Semrush's pricing page, captured November 6, 2026. Prices shown in euros for a visitor in the Netherlands.
For Ahrefs users weighing the other big suite, Semrush AI Toolkit is the like-for-like swap. The pricing page captured today no longer shows a separate $99 add-on, which is the figure in our catalog. Instead, AI visibility is bundled into "SEO + AI Search" plans: Starter at €190 a month (€158.40 billed annually) includes 50 prompts tracked daily and one domain for AI brand performance, and Pro+ raises that to 100 prompts. The toolkit page lists prompt tracking, prompt research, perception and narrative drivers.
Limits: the toolkit page marks GA4-based traffic and conversion reporting as "coming soon". We found no crawler-log product in the pages we captured.
Who it suits: teams that would rather keep rankings and AI visibility in one Semrush login than buy a separate tool.
7. Similarweb
Similarweb comes at AI search from the traffic side. Its AI Search Intelligence suite covers AI brand visibility, citation analysis, prompt analysis, sentiment, and AI traffic trackers for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Gemini and DeepSeek, plus an MCP server and API. Our catalog lists self-serve from $125 a month billed annually, which the pricing page read in October neither showed nor contradicted, and the AI suite sits on custom packages.
Limits: the data is modeled, and our catalog notes Similarweb itself treats small-site figures as directional. It measures markets, not your own server logs.
Who it suits: large sites that want to benchmark AI referral traffic across competitors.
Who should pick which
- You want to stop stitching tools together: Promptwatch. Tracking, crawler logs, traffic attribution and content live in one workspace.
- You want a weekly action queue and can manage credits: AthenaHQ.
- Your problem is how agents read your pages: Scrunch AI, with AXP on Enterprise.
- You are an enterprise buying marketing agents: Profound.
- You run an agency on a tight budget and need unlimited seats: Rankshift, from Professional if you want crawler analytics.
- You live in Semrush already: Semrush AI Toolkit.
- You need market-level AI traffic numbers for a big site: Similarweb, read directionally.
Keeping Brand Radar is also a fair choice. Plenty of teams use the index for category research and a dedicated platform for the prompts they report on.
Our recommendation
Brand Radar tells you how often your brand appears. The question that comes next is why, and that is where we would put Promptwatch first. Its Agent Analytics ties AI crawler visits to citations page by page, with a citation rate for each URL. A page with plenty of GPTBot or ChatGPT-User visits and no citations is a content problem. A page the crawlers never reach is an access problem. Ahrefs' Bot Analytics shows you bot visits; the crawl-to-citation view is what turns that into a fix list, and Visitor Analytics then shows whether the fix brought in visits that convert.
The simplest way to check this against your own site is the 7-day free trial. Put your 20 most important Brand Radar prompts into a monitor and connect your CDN logs on a Professional trial; after a week you will know whether the crawler data changes your priorities. Our roundup of GEO tools with AI crawler log tracking and the AI visibility pricing comparison are useful background, and the full list of options is on the Brand Radar alternatives page.
FAQ
Is Ahrefs Brand Radar included in an Ahrefs subscription?
Partly. Every paid Ahrefs plan includes a daily Custom Prompts quota (5, 10 or 20 prompts on Lite, Standard and Advanced). The AI Visibility Index and larger custom prompt packages cost extra, and Ahrefs says Brand Radar can also be bought as a standalone tool.
How fresh is Brand Radar data?
It depends on which half you use. Ahrefs says the AI Visibility Index re-tests its question sets monthly on a 90-day reporting window. Custom Prompts can be checked daily, weekly or monthly per platform.
Which alternative is closest to Brand Radar's research index?
None of them replicate a 538-million-prompt database. The closest substitutes are prompt research features: Promptwatch's Prompt Volumes and Prompt Explorer, Profound's Prompt Volumes, and AthenaHQ's prompt volume estimation. They help you choose prompts to track rather than browse a pre-built index.
Does Ahrefs track AI crawlers?
Ahrefs lists Bot Analytics, free while in beta, which shows when AI crawlers read your pages. Our catalog does not document a page-level crawl-to-citation view for it, which is what Promptwatch's Agent Analytics adds.
Can I use Brand Radar and another tool together?
Yes, and many teams do. The index is good for category research and competitor benchmarking. A dedicated platform is better for the prompts you report on and for the crawler and traffic data that explain the numbers.