This page is for marketers choosing between Ahrefs Brand Radar and Ripplix to track how their brand shows up in AI answers. Both tools measure AI visibility. But they collect data in very different ways, and that changes what each is good for.
The one-line answer: Brand Radar is built for market-level research on a huge, ready-made set of questions, inside a major SEO suite. Ripplix is built to track your own buyer questions every day and then help you work out why you lost an AI answer and what to fix.
The short answer
| Choose Ripplix if... | Choose Ahrefs Brand Radar if... |
|---|---|
| You want daily tracking of the exact questions your buyers ask AI, not a general sample. | You want to research any brand or market straight away, with no setup. |
| You want the tool to compare your page with the page AI cited instead, and give you a list of fixes. | You want AI visibility data next to deep SEO data such as keywords and backlinks. |
| You want to find the Reddit and forum threads that shape AI answers about you. | You need history from 2024 and an API, MCP or Looker Studio feed. |
Many SEO-heavy teams will reasonably use both. Ahrefs for the wide market view and SEO work. Ripplix for the daily "what changed and what do we do now" loop.
Ahrefs Brand Radar and Ripplix at a glance
As listed on each company's own pages on October 8, 2026.
| Feature | Ripplix | Ahrefs Brand Radar |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Tracking your own buyer questions daily and acting on the results | Market-wide AI visibility research next to Ahrefs' SEO tools |
| Built by / company | Bootstrapped team of growth and SEO practitioners, started as a consulting firm | Ahrefs, a large SEO software company; Brand Radar is "used by 3,000+ companies"1 |
| Starting price (monthly) | $95 (Starter)2 | Ahrefs plans from $29; the Brand Radar AI index starts at $199 a month on top3 |
| Prompts on entry plan | 100 tracked prompts, run daily | Pre-built index of 462M+ prompts; 5 custom prompts on Lite, more with paid check packs4 |
| AI engines on self-serve | 3 on Starter, 4 on Pro and Advanced, from ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI and Perplexity | AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot1 |
| All engines available | Enterprise adds Claude, Copilot, Grok and DeepSeek | Claude for custom prompts only, via API; Grok: Ahrefs is "temporarily unable to gather new data"5 |
| Tracking frequency | Daily on every plan | Chatbot index: monthly. AI Overviews: every few days. Custom prompts: daily, weekly or monthly5 |
| Prompt discovery | Yes (Pro and above) | Partial: a ready-made index, plus AI-generated custom prompt ideas4 |
| Citations and sources | Yes | Yes, including top cited pages and domains5 |
| Sentiment | Yes | Not listed for Brand Radar; "AI Brand Sentiment" is a skill in Ahrefs' Letaido workspace1 |
| Competitor benchmarking | Yes: 4 to 25 competitors by plan | Yes, any brand |
| Community discussions (Reddit etc.) | Yes: Discussions (Reddit, Hacker News, Quora, forums) | Partial: Reddit visibility in Google results and YouTube/TikTok (beta) |
| Page-level "why we lost" analysis | Yes: Win/Loss Analysis | Not listed |
| Content fixes / action plan | Yes: Content Optimization and Win/Loss action plans | Not listed as a dedicated feature; gap filters and fan-out queries help find gaps |
| AI crawler checks | Yes: Crawler Access (Pro and above) | Partial: bot visit tracking (free in beta)1 |
| AI referral traffic | Yes | Yes: AI traffic reporting through Ahrefs Web Analytics |
| Agency / multi-brand | 1, 3 or 10 brands by plan; unlimited on Enterprise | Yes: no cap on brands you research |
| API and integrations | Not listed | Yes: API, MCP and a Looker Studio connector |
| Human expert support | Email on Starter and Pro; on-call on Advanced; active consulting on Enterprise | Not listed on the Brand Radar pages |
What each tool is, and who built it
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Ahrefs is a large, well-established SEO company. SEO (search engine optimization) is the work of ranking your pages in Google. Brand Radar is Ahrefs' tool for tracking how brands, products and even authors appear in AI search.5
It launched in beta in March 2025, showing brand mentions in AI answers against competitors.6 Since then Ahrefs has added more AI platforms, citation reports, custom prompts, and video and Reddit tracking. Its help center sums up the pitch: "There's no setup time, and you can search anything: brands, products, regions, and authors."5
In August 2026 Ahrefs also launched Letaido, an AI agent workspace where AI agents run research, reporting and monitoring jobs. Its pricing was not disclosed at launch.7
Ripplix
Ripplix is newer and smaller. It is bootstrapped, which means it is funded by its founders rather than by investors. Its founders are Girish Kumar (18 years in digital marketing and growth), Reshav Singh (15 years in SEO) and Nikhil Singh (CTO).
The team started as a growth consulting business. Clients began asking questions about their visibility in AI answers. The founders answered by hand. They studied AI answers, examined cited pages and tested changes. Some of those changes produced measurable improvements. Ripplix turns that work into software. Ripplix Consulting still runs, and every operator there has 10+ years of experience.8
The product follows a simple path: Monitor, Compare, Understand, Diagnose, Act. Or, in the homepage's words, "From knowing where you stand to knowing what to do next."9
The big difference: how each tool gets its data
Almost every other difference flows from this one. First, some quick terms. AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) both mean the work of getting your brand mentioned and cited in AI answers. A prompt is a question typed into an AI tool. A citation is a link the AI shows as a source for its answer.
Brand Radar: a huge, ready-made index
Brand Radar's core is a pre-built index of AI answers. Ahrefs takes People Also Ask questions (the "People also ask" boxes in Google) from its keyword database. It then types those questions into the web version of each AI chatbot, using the default model and no stored user data.5
On October 8, 2026, the Brand Radar page listed 462M+ monthly prompts, split like this:1
| AI platform | Monthly prompts in the index |
|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | 325,024,563 |
| ChatGPT | 30,152,890 |
| Gemini | 30,126,903 |
| Perplexity | 29,875,421 |
| Copilot | 29,845,090 |
| Google AI Mode | 17,779,436 |
By our arithmetic, AI Overviews alone is about 70% of that total. So the index leans heavily toward Google's AI features.
This model has real strengths. You can look up any brand, including a competitor you have never tracked. You get history straight away: AI Overviews data goes back to August 2024 and chatbot data to May 2025.5
It also has trade-offs, which Ahrefs states openly. The chatbot part of the index refreshes "once a month," while AI Overviews refresh "every few days."5 Chatbot reports use a 90-day window.10 Ahrefs also says coverage is strongest in English, that "long-tail or niche prompts may not always be included," and that metrics are "directional indicators, not exact traffic counts."10 In other words, the index shows the big picture well. It may not include the exact, specific questions your buyers ask.
Brand Radar custom prompts
Ahrefs added custom prompts in its December 2025 update, published in January 2026.11 A press release on January 20, 2026 said usage is billed by "checks."12 One check is "tracking one prompt on one platform in one location."3
With custom prompts you can add your own questions, get AI-suggested prompts, see fan-out queries, and tag prompts by topic.4 Fan-out queries are the smaller searches an AI runs behind the scenes while it builds an answer. You can set daily, weekly or monthly tracking.1 Claude is available here through the API, and each Claude check uses 8 checks.5 Data starts the day you add a prompt.5
Ripplix: your own questions, every day
Ripplix has no giant pre-built index. It tracks prompts you choose, running each one daily on every engine in your plan.2 The pricing page explains why daily matters: "a single prompt gives you a continuous trend line rather than a one-off answer."2
The hard part is choosing the right prompts. That is what Prompt Discovery is for. It finds real questions from discussions (Reddit, Quora), search behaviour (People Also Ask) and AI fan-out queries, then groups them into themes.9 You can also upload your own prompts or keyword themes. The homepage puts it simply: "Track the questions buyers actually ask... Not the ones you guessed".9 More in our guide to finding the prompts your buyers actually ask.
Daily runs also matter because AI answers change from one run to the next (see how many checks it takes to trust an AI visibility number).
The trade-off is the mirror image of Brand Radar's. Ripplix only knows the prompts you track, and history starts when you start tracking.
What happens after the dashboard
Most tools in this space are good at measurement. They show share of voice, which is the percentage of AI answers that mention you compared with your competitors. (Our guide on how to read share of voice goes deeper.) The harder question is what to do next. Here the two tools differ most.
What Brand Radar gives you
Brand Radar's pages focus on data and gap filters. Its "Contains / Does not contain" filters help you find questions where a competitor is mentioned and you are not.6 It also helps you "identify top cited pages and domains."5 Ahrefs says fan-out queries help you "find content gaps."4 You can also find the pages AI search already sends traffic to.1
We found no dedicated recommendations or page-level fix feature listed on Ahrefs' Brand Radar, custom prompts or help pages. The Brand Radar page does list Letaido skills such as "AI Mention Gap Analysis" and "AI Citation Freshness Audit," which run in Letaido.1 So with Brand Radar, the data is strong. Turning it into page changes is mostly up to your team. For experienced SEOs, that can be fine.
What Ripplix gives you
Ripplix was built around the "now what?" step, because that is the work its founders did by hand for clients. Four features carry it:
- Why visibility changed. A timeline that explains turning points, such as a guide that gained citations or outdated pricing that weakened recommendations.9
- Win/Loss Analysis. It puts your page next to the page AI cited instead. It scores both on signals like structured data, freshness, depth, authority and answer clarity. Then it explains why you lost and gives an action plan. The site says "Analysis includes deterministic checks and model-assisted scoring."9 See our complete guide to Win/Loss Analysis.
- Content Optimization. An AI-readiness score for each page. It checks page copy, HTML, schema (labels in your code that tell machines what the page is about) and robots.txt together, and lists fixes with evidence. Crawler Access checks whether the AI crawlers that matter can reach your site.9
- Discussions. Finds Reddit, Hacker News, Quora and forum threads that shape AI answers, with sentiment, and flags high-impact threads worth joining.9
One customer, Harsh Kishore (GTM, Whatfix), described it like this on our site: "The biggest difference is that Ripplix connects the measurement to the next step."9
A worked example: from "visibility dropped" to "here's the fix"
This example is illustrative. PipeTrack and Optra are invented brands, not real clients.
PipeTrack sells CRM software. ChatGPT stops recommending it for "best CRM for a 10-person agency." Optra gets the mention instead.
| Step | With Ahrefs Brand Radar | With Ripplix |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Spot the drop | In the index, after the monthly chatbot refresh. As a daily custom prompt, the next day. | The prompt is tracked daily, so the next day. |
| 2. See who won | Gap filters and cited pages data show Optra's comparison guide is the cited URL. | Citations show Optra's guide is now cited. The "why visibility changed" timeline marks the date. |
| 3. Work out why | An SEO compares both pages by hand. Site Explorer adds backlink and keyword data, a real strength here. | Win/Loss Analysis scores both pages. It flags that Optra's guide is fresh, has a clear pricing table and uses structured data. PipeTrack's page is a year old. |
| 4. Decide what to do | The team writes its own fix list, perhaps helped by Letaido skills. | The action plan lists fixes: refresh the page, add a pricing table, add schema. Discussions shows a Reddit thread praising Optra worth joining. |
Both paths can reach a good fix. The difference is how much of steps 3 and 4 the tool does.
Pricing and value, with the per-prompt maths
All prices below are monthly, in USD, as listed on each company's pricing page on October 8, 2026. All totals are our own arithmetic. We assume a 30-day month.
Ahrefs' listed prices
| Item | Monthly price |
|---|---|
| Ahrefs Starter / Lite / Standard / Advanced | $29 / $129 / $249 / $4493 |
| Ahrefs Enterprise | $1,499 (annual commitment required)3 |
| Brand Radar AI, one platform | $199 per index5 |
| Brand Radar AI, all platforms | $699, includes 2,500 custom prompt checks a month5 |
| Custom prompt pack: Basic | $50 for 2,500 checks; extra checks $0.020 each3 |
| Custom prompt pack: Growth | $100 for 7,000 checks; extra checks $0.015 each3 |
| Custom prompt pack: Scale | $250 for 25,000 checks; extra checks $0.010 each3 |
Ahrefs' help center says the AI indexes need the Brand Radar AI add-on on any paid plan.5 Lite and above also include a small custom prompt allowance: 150 checks (5 prompts) on Lite, up to 600 checks (20 prompts) on Advanced.4 Ahrefs' pricing page also says Brand Radar "is available as a standalone tool," so ask Ahrefs which setup fits you.3
Ripplix's listed prices
| Plan | Monthly | Prompts (daily) | Engines | Brands | History |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $95 | 100 | 3 | 1 | 3 months |
| Pro | $295 | 300 | 4 | 3 | 12 months |
| Advanced | $495 | 500 | 4 | 10 | 24 months |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | 7+ | Unlimited | Custom |
Annual billing gives two months free.2 By our arithmetic, monthly billing works out to about $0.95 to $0.99 per tracked prompt per month.
Example 1: market research only
For the pre-built index only, example stacks are:
- Ahrefs Lite + one AI index: $129 + $199 = $328 a month
- Ahrefs Lite + all AI platforms: $129 + $699 = $828 a month
Ripplix has no equivalent of this market-wide index. If this is your main need, Brand Radar is the natural pick.
Example 2: tracking your own prompts daily
Say you want to track 100 of your own prompts, daily, on 3 engines, in 1 location. In Ahrefs checks, that is:
100 prompts × 3 engines × 30 days = 9,000 checks a month
- Ahrefs: Lite includes 150 checks. Add the Growth pack for 7,000 more. That leaves 1,850 checks at $0.015 each, which is $27.75. Total: $129 + $100 + $27.75 = about $257 a month.
- Ripplix: Starter covers 100 prompts on 3 engines, daily. Total: $95 a month.
Now scale up to 300 prompts, daily, on 4 engines:
300 prompts × 4 engines × 30 days = 36,000 checks a month
- Ahrefs: Lite (150) plus the Scale pack (25,000) covers 25,150 checks. The other 10,850 checks at $0.010 each cost $108.50. Total: $129 + $250 + $108.50 = about $488 a month.
- Ripplix: Pro covers 300 prompts on 4 engines, daily. Total: $295 a month.
Two fair notes. First, the Ahrefs total also includes the Lite SEO toolset, which Ripplix does not offer. Second, Ahrefs lets you track weekly or monthly to save checks, while Ripplix runs every prompt daily. So the right answer depends on how fresh your data needs to be, and on what you already pay for. Full plan details are on Ripplix pricing.
Agency and team fit
Brand Radar suits teams already living in Ahrefs. It has no cap on the brands or domains you research.5 Data flows into Ahrefs' Report Builder, API, MCP and a Looker Studio connector.5 (MCP is a standard way for AI assistants to pull data from other tools.) For an agency that builds client reports in Looker Studio, that matters.
Ripplix suits teams that want a working loop for a set number of brands. Starter covers 1 brand and 2 team members. Pro covers 3 brands and unlimited team members. Advanced covers 10 brands, and Enterprise is unlimited.2 Enterprise adds active consulting and custom onboarding.2
Some honest gaps on our side. Ripplix does not list a public API, BI connectors or SOC 2, and SSO is only mentioned as an Enterprise option. Claude, Copilot, Grok and DeepSeek are Enterprise only. Prompt Discovery and Crawler Access start on Pro.
Where Ahrefs Brand Radar is stronger
Ahrefs is ahead in several clear areas:
- SEO data. Brand Radar sits next to Ahrefs' keyword database, backlink data and Site Explorer. Ripplix is not an SEO suite. It has no keyword database, backlink index or rank tracker.
- Market-wide research. You can look up any brand, product or author with no setup.5 Ripplix only shows prompts you track.
- History. AI Overviews data from August 2024 and chatbot data from May 2025, available on day one.5 Ripplix history starts when you start tracking.
- Data access. API, MCP and Looker Studio.5 Ripplix lists none of these.
- Wider sources. Web mentions, search demand, YouTube, TikTok and Reddit in Google results sit in the same tool.5
- Scale and track record. Ahrefs is a large company, and Brand Radar is "used by 3,000+ companies."1
Which should you choose?
Choose Ahrefs Brand Radar if...
- You already pay for Ahrefs and want AI data next to your SEO data.
- You need market-level research across many brands, or quick looks at competitors.
- You need history, or an API, MCP or Looker Studio feed.
- Your team has strong SEOs who are happy to turn data into fixes themselves.
Choose Ripplix if...
- You care most about the specific questions your buyers ask, tracked every day.
- You want the tool to explain why a competitor's page won and what to change.
- You want to find the community threads shaping AI answers about you.
- You want simple pricing per prompt, with daily runs included.
Or use both
For SEO-heavy teams, using both is reasonable. Use Brand Radar for wide market research, history and SEO context. Use Ripplix for daily tracking of your priority prompts and the diagnosis and fix work. For other options, see our guide to the best AEO and GEO tools in 2026 or Ripplix vs Semrush.
Frequently asked questions
What is the main difference between Ripplix and Ahrefs Brand Radar?
Brand Radar's core is a huge pre-built index of prompts drawn from People Also Ask questions, refreshed monthly for chatbots. Ripplix tracks your own chosen and discovered prompts daily, then helps you diagnose losses and plan fixes.
Does Ahrefs Brand Radar track my own prompts?
Yes, since its December 2025 update. Custom prompts are billed in checks, where one check is one prompt on one platform in one location. Lite includes 5 prompts, and paid packs add more.4
Does Brand Radar tell you what to fix?
Brand Radar's pages focus on data and gap filters. We found no dedicated recommendations or page-level fix feature listed. Some analysis skills run in Ahrefs' Letaido workspace.
Is Ripplix cheaper than Ahrefs Brand Radar?
For daily tracking of your own prompts, our arithmetic from listed prices shows Ripplix costs less (for example, $95 vs about $257 a month for 100 prompts on 3 engines). For market research on the pre-built index, Ripplix has no equivalent, and Ahrefs also includes SEO tools.
Can I use both tools together?
Yes. SEO-heavy teams can use Brand Radar for market research and SEO data, and Ripplix for daily tracking, diagnosis and fixes.
See which buyer questions you are losing, and why
Brand Radar shows you the market. Our free AI Visibility Report starts with your own brand. It shows where you appear in AI answers, benchmarks up to four competitors and lists your priority opportunities. No credit card needed.
Get your free AI Visibility Report →
Sources:
- Ahrefs: Brand Radar, See any brand's AI visibility (accessed October 8, 2026)
- Ripplix: Pricing (accessed October 8, 2026)
- Ahrefs: Pricing (accessed October 8, 2026)
- Ahrefs: Custom Prompts (accessed October 8, 2026)
- Ahrefs Help Center: What is Brand Radar and how do you use it? (accessed October 8, 2026)
- Ahrefs Blog: Brand Radar, Ahrefs certification, and more (March 2025) (April 4, 2025)
- SiliconANGLE: Ahrefs launches AI agent workspace Letaido for marketers and agencies (August 12, 2026)
- Ripplix: Ripplix Consulting (accessed October 8, 2026)
- Ripplix: AI search visibility platform, homepage (accessed October 8, 2026)
- Ahrefs Blog: Ahrefs Brand Radar Methodology: How we collect and model AI visibility data, by Rebekah Bek (October 29, 2025, updated February 26, 2026)
- Ahrefs Blog: Track your brand in Reddit and TikTok, custom AI prompts, and more (December 2025) (January 15, 2026)
- Business Wire: Ahrefs Launches Custom AI Prompt Tracking for Brand Visibility (January 20, 2026)
