Brand Radar is "$199/month per AI engine". That is on top of the Ahrefs plan you already pay for. Full coverage across the major engines runs £700 to £900 a month. For a one-person business, that is not a tool budget. That is a salary line.
I want to be fair to Ahrefs. The classic Ahrefs product is solid. Brand Radar is a different story.
Brand Radar watches AI engines and tracks when your brand name shows up. It ties mentions to sources. It plots trends. It builds a dashboard.
In agency terms, that is monitoring. Useful if you have ten clients and need to justify a retainer with weekly reports. Useful if you are a publicly traded brand and the comms team needs to know when a bad citation lands.
Monitoring is not doing. That is the trap.
A reviewer on Trakkr puts it well. Brand Radar is "less opinionated about what to do next". That phrase is the whole review.
A small business owner does not need a dashboard. They need a prioritised list. "This week, add FAQ schema to your boiler servicing page. Next week, post a service breakdown in the Leeds trades subreddit. Week after, ask your three happiest customers to review you on Trustpilot."
Brand Radar shows you that ChatGPT cites a Reddit thread and not your website. It does not tell you which Reddit thread, what to post, or how to get in. That is the "opinionated about what to do next" gap.
There is a second problem. Reviewers report that Brand Radar struggles to tell a brand mention from a real citation. A competitor's blog mentions your name in a comparison table, and the dashboard counts it. That is not visibility, that is noise.
Three things, in order.
1. A baseline. Does ChatGPT cite me when a customer asks about my category and town.
2. A gap analysis. If not, what is the cited competitor doing that I am not.
3. A plan. Three to five concrete actions I can do in a weekend, in order of leverage.
No dashboard required. A PDF will do. In fact a PDF does it better, because you can read it on the train, tick things off, and stop paying when the work is done.
Brand Radar, one engine, one month. £160.
Brand Radar, four engines, one month. Roughly £640.
Our audit. One-off £197. Covers Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Includes the prioritised plan. Human-reviewed. 48-hour turnaround.
Our workbook. One-off £15. The DIY version of the same method.
The audit is cheaper than one month of one Brand Radar engine, and it is the thing a small business owner actually needs.
Start with the free version.
Run the 20 questions PDF against ChatGPT, log the results in a spreadsheet, and you have most of what Brand Radar shows, for nothing. If the results make you want the schema fixes, grab the free schema pack next.
If you run marketing for a brand that spends six figures a year on PR, Brand Radar is a fine buy. The dashboard justifies the retainer. The team can point at a trendline.
If you run a plumbing business in Leeds with three vans and a website, Brand Radar is the wrong shape. You do not need a trendline. You need one good action this month and another one next month.
Brand Radar will get better. Ahrefs is a serious engineering shop. The current product is a v1 with v1 problems. In a year it may be the default tool for AI visibility monitoring.
Even then, monitoring is not doing. A small business with limited hours wins by doing, not watching. The audit and the workbook are doing.
Brand Radar is a monitoring tool priced for agencies. A small business needs a plan, not a dashboard. £197 one-off gets you a plan. That is most of the work.
One payment, no monthly subscription, no cancellation fight.
Happy to answer anything. [email protected]
Bob