Brand Radar measures mentions across six AI surfaces using Ahrefs’ own index of observed prompts, rather than tracking a prompt set you choose. That makes it a research instrument first and a tracker second.
It is also a separately priced add-on rather than something included with an Ahrefs subscription, which is the detail most comparisons of it get wrong.
What is the actual difference?
The two products answer different questions, and the pricing comparison only makes sense once that is clear.
Built on an index of observed prompts, reported at 475 million or more monthly. You query that index rather than defining what gets asked.
You fix a prompt set, we run it repeatedly, and the answer is a rate over your own questions rather than over the market’s.
That distinction matters more than any feature row. If you do not yet know which questions to track, an index is genuinely more useful than a tracker, because a tracker will faithfully measure the wrong prompt set for a quarter.
What do they cost?
| Rivarise | Ahrefs Brand Radar | |
|---|---|---|
| Sold as | Standalone product | A separate paid add-on, not included with an Ahrefs subscription |
| Entry price | $69/mo | $398/mo, Select Platforms |
| Top self-serve | $349/mo, 9 engines, 80 prompts a day | $699/mo, All Platforms, including 2,500 custom prompt checks a month |
| Surfaces covered | 9 engines at the top tier | AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok |
| Primary object | Your prompt set | An index of observed prompts |
| Custom prompts | 30 to 250 a day depending on tier | 2,500 checks a month, on the $699 tier |
| Run frequency | 5 runs per prompt per engine per day, published | Not applicable in the same way, since the index is the product |
| Free plan | Yes, permanent, no card | Firehose brand-mention tool is free; Brand Radar itself is not |
The row that surprises people is the first. Brand Radar is frequently described elsewhere as bundled into Ahrefs, and it is not. If you already pay for Ahrefs, adding it starts at $398 a month on top of what you pay now.
Where is Brand Radar genuinely better?
An index of hundreds of millions of observed prompts answers what buyers actually ask. No prompt set you write can tell you that, including ours.
Analyse any domain’s AI visibility, not just your own. Useful for competitive research and for agencies pitching.
If you already run your SEO on it, the backlink and keyword data sitting alongside is a real workflow advantage.
Where is Rivarise better?
$69 against $398. If you want to find out whether this matters before committing a budget, that gap is the whole conversation.
Answers vary between identical runs. Five runs per prompt per engine per day is what turns a sample into a rate.
Kept for your plan’s history window, so you can ask a question of old data that you had not thought of at the time.
Nine engines including Claude, DeepSeek and Meta AI, which are outside Brand Radar’s six.
Which surfaces does each cover?
Brand Radar’s six are the ones most B2B buyers use, and the gap is at the edges rather than in the middle.
Its coverage spans both retrieval families that matter: Google’s grounded surfaces, where a page qualifies when it is “indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet”, and the live-search engines with their own crawlers, documented by OpenAI and Perplexity. Missing from its list are Claude, DeepSeek and Meta AI.
Whether that matters is a question about your buyers rather than about either product. Six engines covering where your market actually is beats ten covering places it is not.
What does an index measure that a prompt set cannot?
Demand, essentially. And it is the one thing no tracker can give you, ours included.
A prompt set is a hypothesis. Somebody sat down and wrote thirty questions they believed buyers ask, and everything measured afterwards is conditional on that guess being right. If the guess is wrong, a tracker will measure the wrong questions with great precision for as long as you pay it.
An index of observed prompts is not a hypothesis. It is a record of what was actually asked, at a volume no individual account could generate. That answers a question you cannot otherwise answer: not “how do we do on these questions” but “which questions exist”.
It will report faithfully on whatever you wrote. Precision on a badly chosen set looks identical to precision on a good one.
Without a held-constant prompt set and a known run count, you cannot attribute a movement to anything you did.
Does either help with the underlying work?
Neither, and it is worth saying because both are sometimes sold as though measurement were the intervention.
Whatever the number says, the work that changes it is mostly off your own domain: independent coverage, review platform presence, consistent description across sources. Google’s own helpful content guidance still asks whether it is self-evident who authored your content and whether it demonstrates first-hand expertise, and both are questions about verifiable provenance rather than about dashboards.
A tool tells you where you stand. It does not get you written about, and any vendor implying otherwise is selling the map as the journey.
Can you use both?
Sensibly, yes, and it is the one pairing in this category we would actually recommend, because the two do not overlap much.
Use the index to work out which questions your market asks, then fix a prompt set from what you find and track that set repeatedly. That sequence solves the biggest weakness of any tracker, which is that it will faithfully measure a prompt set somebody invented in a meeting.
The most common failure in this discipline is not choosing the wrong tool. It is tracking the wrong questions perfectly for a quarter.
What do buyers usually ask about the two?
One practical caution about running both. Their figures will not agree, and neither will be wrong. An index reports across observed prompts at whatever frequency the index refreshes; a tracker reports across your prompts at a frequency you chose. Those are different denominators, so reconcile the story rather than the numbers, and never put both in the same chart.
The wider category, with every published price dated and linked, is in the twelve-tool comparison, which groups tools by shape so the index-versus-tracker distinction is visible across the whole market rather than just this pairing.