We make Limecube, which competes with Ahrefs. Every figure below came from ahrefs.com/pricing and ahrefs.com/brand-radar on 17 August 2026, not from a review site, and we say plainly where Ahrefs is the better buy. For the whole category rather than this one comparison, see the nine-tool roundup.
What Brand Radar is, and why this page is about it
Ahrefs is a suite rather than one product. Sixteen named tools sit under a single subscription, including Site Explorer for backlinks and traffic, Keywords Explorer, Rank Tracker, Site Audit, Content Explorer and GSC Insights. Brand Radar is the AI visibility one. In Ahrefs’ own words it tracks “brand mentions, citations, and sentiment across AI chatbots”, which in practice means it asks the answer engines a question and records whether you were named and your page linked.
This page is about that one tool, and it is worth saying why. Every comparison in this section is about AI visibility, so the fair question is how a tool handles that job, not whether the rest of a suite is any good. Judging Ahrefs on Brand Radar alone would be unfair as a verdict on Ahrefs, and we are not offering one. Its link data is the best in the category.
So: if you are weighing Ahrefs for backlink research, keyword data or site audits, this is the wrong page and the answer is almost certainly that you should keep it. If you are weighing it as the thing that tells you whether ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews cite your clients, read on, because that is where the allowances bite.
What Ahrefs does better
Worth saying at length, because it is true and because a comparison that concedes nothing is worth nothing.
- The backlink index. This is not a close contest. Ahrefs runs the second most active crawler on the web after Google, and its link data is the reason most agencies keep the subscription. Nothing in our roundup replaces it, including us. If link research is load-bearing for your work, that alone settles the question.
- Site Explorer. The depth of historical data on any domain, yours or a competitor’s, is the other thing people are really paying for.
- The widest range of surfaces here. Brand Radar tracks Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Gemini, plus YouTube, TikTok and Reddit mentions while those are in beta. On answer engines alone Profound lists more, nine on its Enterprise tier, but nothing else here reaches into social mentions as well.
- A genuinely large prompt database. Brand Radar reports 463 million monthly prompts to research against, which is a different and useful thing from tracking your own.
If any of those is the job, buy Ahrefs. The rest of this page is about the case where you are running client work rather than one brand.
What the plans are sized for
All figures below are the month-to-month rates. Annual billing is cheaper, and Ahrefs displays the annual figure prominently, which is worth knowing before you compare it against anything else.
| Plan | Monthly | Projects | Users | Tracked AI prompts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lite | $129 | 5 | 1 | 5 |
| Standard | $249 | 20 | 1 | 10 |
| Advanced | $449 | 50 | 1 | 20 |
| Enterprise | $1,499 | Unlimited | Custom | Custom |
Read the users column twice. Every tier below Enterprise includes one user. Additional seats are a separate line item, so a three-person team is buying seats on top of a plan before anyone has tracked anything. That is the single biggest difference in shape between a tool built for one brand and a tool built for a client list.
The projects column is kinder. Twenty projects on Standard at $249 covers fifteen clients comfortably, where SE Ranking caps Core at ten and Semrush caps its entry plans at five websites. On project count alone, Ahrefs is the most generous of the three.
The prompt allowance
This is the number that matters and the one no advertised price tells you. A tracked AI prompt is one question you are watching across the engines. Ahrefs includes five on Lite, ten on Standard and twenty on Advanced.
Fifteen clients on Standard at $249 gives you twenty projects and ten tracked prompts. That is less than one question per client. Move to Advanced at $449 and it is twenty prompts, so barely one each, for a single question per client and no room to watch a second.
For one brand, five to twenty prompts is a reasonable start. You pick your most valuable questions and watch them properly. Across fifteen clients the same allowance stops being a starting point and becomes the constraint, because every client wants more than one question watched and the number does not divide.
Buying more is where it gets hard to quote, and the difficulty is on Ahrefs’ own site rather than in our reading of it.
- The pricing page says Brand Radar AI starts from $199 a month, with custom prompt packages at $50 for 2,500 checks, $100 for 7,000 and $250 for 25,000.
- The Brand Radar page quotes €358 a month for selected platforms and €654 for all of them.
Both are published by Ahrefs, in different currencies, and we cannot reconcile them into one number. We are not going to convert one and present it as the other. Confirm what your own account is quoted before you budget, and treat any comparison article that states a single confident dollar figure for Brand Radar with suspicion.
For comparison, and this is the reason the page exists: Limecube Professional is $99 a month for fifteen clients, with AI visibility across six surfaces included and no separate prompt purchase.
Engine coverage
Brand Radar covers Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Gemini, plus YouTube, TikTok and Reddit mentions free while in beta. That spread across answer engines and social is the broadest here, though on answer engines by themselves Profound lists nine at Enterprise.
Claude is not on that list. That is not specific to Ahrefs: neither Semrush nor SE Ranking lists it either, so among the big SEO suites it is simply not covered. Otterly sells it as a $29 to $439 add-on depending on tier, and Limecube tracks it as standard.
Whether the gap matters depends entirely on your clients. It is a real omission for technical and B2B audiences, where Claude use is concentrated, and close to irrelevant for a local trades business. Worth checking before it becomes a deciding factor rather than after.
Which to choose
Stay with Ahrefs if link research is central to your work, if you lean on deep historical domain data, or if you are one brand with one seat. The backlink index has no equivalent in this comparison and we are not going to pretend it does.
Stay and buy prompt capacity if Ahrefs is settled, the seat count suits you and the only gap is how many questions you can watch. Get the quote in writing first, given the two published prices.
Look at a dedicated AI visibility tool if AI citations are the only gap and your SEO tooling is fine as it is. Otterly starts at $29, Peec at $95, and Profound at $99. The roundup covers all of them, and the pricing page does the arithmetic across the category.
Look at Limecube if the prompt allowance and the seat count are what keep pushing you up a tier, and you would rather the client list were the unit the plan is built around. Fifteen clients on one $99 plan, six surfaces including Claude, from $35 a month, with a 7-day trial and no card at signup. We do not replace the backlink index, so if you need both, budget for both.
Fix the free things first whichever you choose. If your robots.txt blocks the AI crawlers, no tool on this page can help, because the engines cannot read you in the first place. Controlling AI crawler access takes ten minutes and costs nothing.