In AI era, visibility means more than showing up in traditional search engine results. With generative AI interfaces reshaping discovery, brands are left asking a new question:
Where does my brand appear when people ask AI systems directly?
To navigate this new era of AI-level visibility, two platforms stand out: Ahrefs Brand Radar and Profound. Both claim to track brand presence in AI responses, but they do so with different philosophies, data approaches, and use cases.
At a high level, Ahrefs Brand Radar extends a well‑known SEO ecosystem into AI visibility, while Profound is built around AI search shift. Below, we break down how each stacks up for teams measuring how brands show up in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and other AI search interfaces.
How Each Platform Tracks AI Brand Visibility
They’re chasing the same goal: tracking where your brand pops up in AI-generated answers. But while Ahrefs and Profound may be asking the same question, they’re using very different maps to find the answer.
Ahrefs Brand Radar: Data‑Driven AI Monitoring
Ahrefs Brand Radar is built on the broader Ahrefs ecosystem, a massive database of search‑backed prompts and historical visibility signals. Its AI visibility tracking is part of a suite that already captures search demand, web mentions, and other factors that influence AI visibility like YouTube and Reddit.
At its core, Brand Radar monitors brand presence in AI responses by tapping into:
- Search‑backed prompts: With over 250 million prompts drawn from Ahrefs’ keyword database, Brand Radar shows any brand’s AI visibility instantly across the full AI funnel in six different indexes (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, etc.). Custom prompting is available too.
- Citation and mention tracking: Brand Radar isn’t just detecting brand mentions — but also where mentions came from, including the underlying web pages or sources feeding AI responses.
- Cross‑platform visibility signals: The tool places AI mentions in the context of traditional web presence, historical search volume demand, YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit mentions, giving a multi‑layered picture of discoverability.
The advantage here is data depth. Because Ahrefs has tracked search behavior for years, Brand Radar can link AI visibility to broader trends in how humans query brands online.
For example, seeing how often a query that triggers an AI overview also correlates with increasing search demand gives teams a signal score, not just a mention count.
Profound: AI‑First Visibility and Conversation Tracking
Profound takes a different path. It treats AI visibility as a standalone discipline. Instead of starting from search data and extending into AI, Profound starts with how AI engines themselves behave. Its brand tracking centers on conversational search: how brands show up inside the outputs of AI assistants and answer engines.
Profound’s core capabilities include:
- Conversation Explorer: A module that analyzes user‑level prompts, showing which phrases, questions, and AI interactions contain mentions of your brand.
- Agent Analytics: Tracking how various AI crawlers, not just web crawlers, interpret and surface your content. This goes beyond search engine bots into AI index models.
- Citations and sentiment: Profound does not just count mentions. It examines how AI content talks about your brand, highlighting sentiment and context.
From a practical standpoint, that means Profound is engineered to answer questions like:
Which user prompts lead to my brand being recommended in ChatGPT?
or
How do AI assistants frame my product versus competitors?
Questions that go beyond raw visibility into meaning and influence within AI answers.
Coverage and Prompt Tracking
Ahrefs Brand Radar shines with scale. Its database includes 250 million plus search-backed prompts derived from real keyword data across major models, providing a broad spectrum of where brands might appear in generative AI results. It also allows custom prompts, meaning teams can monitor specific questions relevant to their category.
Profound, by contrast, is focusing on prompt tracking solely. Its prompt coverage may be narrower, but what it tracks is closely tied to how AI engines actually answer user queries. This means richer insights at the prompt and response level, including conversational patterns and sentiment shifts based on phrasing. Beware the queries search volumes though; they might be overinflated due to using AI-generated prompts (and not search-backed ones like Ahrefs).
If your priority is mass coverage of AI systems with historical context and visibility across YouTube and Reddit, Brand Radar has the edge. If your priority is prompt‑level insight and conversational nuance, Profound is perfect for that.
Pricing Realities
Pricing is another key differentiator.
Ahrefs Brand Radar is available as a standalone tool. It starts at $199/month for ChatGPT or Google AI Mode + AI Overviews. But you also get YouTube and Reddit visibility as a bonus. And if you’re an existing Ahrefs user, you can gauge your brand’s web presence and historical search demand for free. For those who aim for a broader coverage across all AI indexes, the full package costs $699/mo.
Profound starts at a lower base price at $99/month but scales quickly depending on the number of prompts and AI engines you want to monitor. Higher coverage tiers, especially for enterprise use, can push into high pricing territory with expanded analytics and workflow features.
In plain terms, Brand Radar becomes more cost‑effective if you already use Ahrefs and want wide coverage with SEO integration. Profound is more adaptable if you need specialized AI conversation tracking and are willing to pay for deep insights.
Verdict: Which One Fits Your Strategy?
Neither tool is strictly better. They serve different strategic needs in the AI visibility landscape.
Choose Ahrefs Brand Radar if you want broad, data‑backed coverage of how your brand shows up across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and more, with the added context of search demand,web presence, YouTube, and Reddit.
Choose Profound if your focus is on deep conversational insight into how AI answers mention your brand, including sentiment and prompt‑level mapping that.
