Ahrefs Brand Radar: Index Data or Your Own Prompts, Which Should You Trust?
Brand Radar offers a modeled prompt index and custom prompts. Here is when each fits, what the catalog says about pricing, and where Promptwatch adds the diagnosis.
If you already pay for Ahrefs, adding Brand Radar is tempting. It sits next to the keyword and link data your team knows. The less obvious question is what kind of AI visibility data you are buying, because the product has two modes that behave differently. This post covers both and what each is good for.
Everything about Ahrefs Brand Radar below comes from this site's catalog entry, last read on 24 October 2026. Check Ahrefs directly before you buy.
The two modes
Ahrefs Brand Radar offers two ways in.
Custom Prompts lets you track the exact questions your buyers ask. According to the catalog, it is free for every paid Ahrefs plan from Lite up, with a daily quota of 5 prompts on Lite, 10 on Standard and 20 on Advanced.
The AI Visibility Index is a pre-collected database of more than 496 million prompts, modeled from Ahrefs keyword data, covering AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. The catalog lists it from $199 a month, with $699 a month shown for all models. Claude is available for Custom Prompts only, and index question sets are retested monthly.
What each is good for
The index: breadth and research
A big modeled database is excellent for questions like "which topics in our category show AI answers at all" or "which brands appear most across many prompts." It gives you scale you could never build from your own panel. The catalog describes it as directional AI-mention research at index scale.
The limits are built into the design. The prompts are modeled from keyword data, not chosen by you. They are retested monthly, so changes inside a month are invisible. And a prompt that matters to your sales team may simply not be in the set.
Custom Prompts: your questions, small quota
Custom Prompts tracks what you choose to ask. With a daily quota of 5 to 20 prompts depending on plan, it suits a short list of money questions rather than a full program. It is a sensible first step for teams that want to see something without buying a new tool.
A decision guide
| Your situation | What fits |
|---|---|
| Want to explore a category and find topics | The index |
| Need to monitor a handful of key questions | Custom Prompts |
| Need weekly diagnosis of why visibility moved | Neither alone |
| Need crawler evidence, traffic attribution and publishing | A dedicated platform |
What a suite add-on does not replace
The catalog entry frames Brand Radar as best for loyal Ahrefs users who want directional research, not precise prompt-level tracking. That fits. Questions it does not settle on its own:
- Which of my pages were cited, in which prompts, and how often?
- Did the AI bots reach the page, and what errors did they get?
- Did AI-referred visitors arrive, and did they convert?
- What should we publish to close the gap?
Those are the diagnosis and action layers. The catalog says Brand Radar also reports on AI crawler activity, YouTube and Reddit sources, which is useful context. Whether it joins those to per-page citations and visits the way a dedicated platform does is not something the catalog establishes, so check it in a trial.
Where Promptwatch differs
Promptwatch tracks prompts you choose, with daily panels per model, country and language. It adds Agent Analytics with IP-verified crawler logs and a crawl-to-citation path, citation analytics down to page level, Page Tracker for specific URLs, visitor analytics with conversions, and publishing through WordPress, Webflow and Framer. Plans: Explore is free with 10 ChatGPT prompts; Essential is $95/mo with 50 prompts and 6,000 responses; Professional is $245/mo with 150 prompts and 18,000 responses, and is where crawler logs begin.
The trade is different from Ahrefs. You do not get a modeled index of hundreds of millions of prompts, and you pay for prompts you choose. In exchange you get depth on your own questions and the evidence to act on them.
Using both
Nothing says you must choose. A practical pattern for an SEO team:
- Use Ahrefs for research: find topics and competitors at scale.
- Turn the best topics into tracked prompts in a dedicated platform.
- Use crawler logs and citation data to diagnose and fix.
- Use visitor analytics to report outcomes.
Promptwatch's Prompt Explorer suggests prompts from Search Console, ranking keywords, People Also Ask or any page, which suits the handoff from keyword research to a tracked panel.
Questions to ask before buying either
- How many of my prompts can I run, and how often?
- Can I see cited URLs per response?
- Can I see whether AI bots reached those URLs?
- How are AI-referred visits attributed?
- What happens when I exceed the quota?
Recommendation
If you are an Ahrefs shop, try Custom Prompts first, since it costs nothing extra on paid plans per the catalog, and treat it as a research layer. When the question changes from "what is happening in my category" to "why did we lose this citation and what do we publish," you need crawler logs, per-page tracking and a content loop. That is where Promptwatch earns its place. Run a week on the free Explore plan or the 7-day Essential trial with your five most important prompts, and compare what each tool lets you do next.