Brand Radar Ahrefs: Track & Grow Your AI Search Visibility

Key Takeaway:

Brand Radar Ahrefs is a powerful tool that tracks brand mentions across AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot, analysing over 200 million prompts to show exactly how your brand appears in AI-generated responses. Malaysian businesses can use Brand Radar to identify content gaps, discover new topic opportunities, and understand which pages AI systems cite most frequently. Learning how to use Brand Radar Ahrefs is essential for any brand serious about visibility in the AI search era, with Brand Radar 2.0 now including Topics reports, Entities tracking, and cited domains/pages analysis for significantly more actionable insights.

Traditional SEO tools weren’t built for tracking how AI talks about your brand. You could monitor backlinks, keywords, and rankings—but what happens when ChatGPT recommends your competitor instead of you? Until recently, that was a complete blind spot.

Brand Radar Ahrefs changes that equation entirely. Launched in March 2025 and upgraded to version 2.0 in August 2025, it’s one of the first comprehensive tools designed specifically to track brand mentions across multiple AI platforms, giving Malaysian businesses unprecedented insights into how they appear in AI-generated responses. Let’s get into what you should know about it.

What is Brand Radar Ahrefs?

Brand Radar Ahrefs is an AI visibility tracking tool that lets you analyse brand mentions across over 200 million prompts. Unlike traditional brand monitoring tools that focus solely on web content, Brand Radar ventures into AI-generated responses to track how your brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini.

Think of it as a Site Explorer for the AI era. Instead of showing which websites link to you, it shows which AI responses mention you.

The tool works by aggregating thousands of prompts and responses across multiple AI search platforms. Rather than only monitoring what you already know, it gives you a database of potential opportunities and ideas, helping you spot new growth angles as they emerge.

What Brand Radar Tracks

• AI Mentions. How often your brand appears in AI-generated responses across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot.
• Citations. When AI platforms link back to your website as a source.
• Search Demand. Total search volume for all brand-related terms, useful for tracking brand awareness over time.
• Web Visibility. Brand mentions across traditional web sources that influence AI responses.
• Competitive Share. Your percentage of mentions compared to competitors.

Why AI Search Visibility Matters in 2026

Here’s the uncomfortable reality: AI referrals to websites surged 357% year-over-year between June 2024 and June 2025. Meanwhile, traditional click-through rates from Google AI Overviews dropped by 34.5% for top-ranking content.

Users aren’t abandoning search, but rather changing how they search. When someone asks ChatGPT “which marketing agencies in Malaysia specialise in AI SEO?”, the brands mentioned in that response capture attention. The brands NOT mentioned? Invisible.

For Malaysian businesses, this shift is particularly significant. With 28.2 million social media users and internet penetration exceeding 97%, Malaysians are early adopters of new technology. AI-assisted search is already mainstream here, and brands that don’t track their AI visibility are flying blind.

Key Features of Brand Radar Ahrefs

AI Mentions Overview

The Overview dashboard shows your brand’s presence across all tracked AI platforms at a glance. You’ll see total mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot; trend lines showing how visibility changes over time; and Share of Voice compared to competitors you specify.

Cited Domains and Pages

Two dedicated reports help you trace influence back to the source:

• Cited Domains. Shows how often tracked brands are cited in AI responses that link to specific domains. This reveals which websites AI systems trust enough to cite.
• Cited Pages. A URL-level view of those citations. Discover exactly which pages AI platforms reference most, helping you understand what content format and structure performs best.

Topics Report

Brand Radar 2.0 introduced Topics reporting. Queries are grouped by parent topics from Keywords Explorer, helping you uncover new angles where your brand is (or isn’t) visible in AI, identify content gaps at the topic level rather than individual query level, and prioritise content creation based on topic-level opportunity.

Competitive Analysis

Enter competitor brand names to see the percentage share of mentions among specified competitors. Want to see where competitors are being featured while your brand isn’t? Simply filter by competitor mentions and exclude your brand to instantly reveal opportunities.

Custom Prompts

Create custom prompts and track how AI responds to them. This is invaluable for understanding your brand’s visibility within specific niches or for particular use cases.

How to Use Brand Radar Ahrefs: Step-by-Step Guide

Learning how to use Brand Radar Ahrefs is straightforward once you understand the interface. Here’s a practical walkthrough:

Step 1: Access Brand Radar

Brand Radar is available as a standalone tool to all free and paid Ahrefs users. Navigate to Brand Radar in your Ahrefs dashboard or visit it directly at ahrefs.com/brand-radar.

Step 2: Enter Your Brand Name

Start by entering your brand name exactly as you want to track it. For Malaysian businesses with multiple variations (English and Malay names, for instance), you may want to track both.

Step 3: Add Competitors

Enter competitor brand names to benchmark your performance. Brand Radar will show you competitive share across all AI platforms.

 Step 4: Review the Overview

The Overview dashboard displays four statistics to track:

• Mentions: Number of AI responses mentioning your brand
• Citations: AI responses that cite your website as a source
• Search Demand: Total search volume for brand-related terms
• AI Share of Voice: Your percentage versus competitors

Step 5: Drill Down Into Reports

Use the secondary reports in the left column to explore individual AI responses mentioning your brand, specific pages being cited, and topics where you appear (or don’t appear).

Step 6: Filter and Analyse

Apply filters to find specific opportunities: filter by platform (ChatGPT only, Perplexity only, etc.), filter by competitor mentions to find gaps, and filter by cited domains to understand source influence.

5 Practical Ways to Use Ahrefs’ Brand Radar for Growth

1. Audit Your Current AI Visibility

Before optimising, understand your baseline. Use Brand Radar to benchmark current mentions, citations, impressions, and AI Share of Voice. Document this as your starting point.

2. Identify Content Gaps

Run a blank search with competitor filters to find prompts where competitors appear but you don’t. These represent immediate content opportunities. If ChatGPT consistently mentions three competitors but not you for “digital marketing agency KL” queries, you know where to focus.

3. Analyse Which Pages Get Cited

Use the Cited Pages report to understand what content structure AI platforms prefer. If your comprehensive guides get cited more than your short blog posts, that tells you something about AI’s content preferences.

4. Track Brand Visibility Over Time

Add Brand Radar data to your monthly reports. If your share of AI mentions isn’t growing, your brand’s visibility pipeline is fading, even if traditional SEO metrics look healthy.

5. Discover Emerging Topics

The Topics report reveals what questions people ask AI about your industry. Use this to identify trending topics before they become competitive, letting you create content that AI will cite as the primary source.

Brand Radar Pricing and Plans

Brand Radar is available across different tiers:

• Free Access. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools users get limited access to Brand Radar without a paid subscription. Search Demand and Web Visibility indexes are excluded for free users.
• Paid Plans. All paid Ahrefs subscribers (starting at US$129/month for Lite) get access to basic Brand Radar features, including Search Demand.
• AI Indexes Add-On. Full access to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot indexes costs US$99/month per index, or US$699/month for all indexes bundled.
• Custom Prompts. Higher-tier plans include custom prompt tracking. More expensive plans have cheaper overage rates if you exceed base prompt limits.

For Malaysian businesses, the investment decision depends on how critical AI visibility is to your approach. Agencies and competitive industries where AI search drives significant discovery may find the premium indexes essential. Smaller businesses might start with the included Search Demand features.

Limitations to Be Aware Of

Brand Radar is pioneering this space, but no tool is perfect. Here’s what to keep in mind:

• Sampling Limitations. Current data sampling captures a fraction of actual AI conversations. The tool shows directional trends rather than comprehensive coverage.
• Platform Coverage. While ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot are covered, other AI platforms like Claude aren’t tracked yet.
• Non-Deterministic Responses. AI answers change from query to query—the same prompt can return different citations each time. Brand Radar aggregates trends rather than showing real-time accuracy.
• Learning Curve. Brand Radar functions as a research database rather than a simple rank tracker. Use it without the expectation of it being a straightforward “position tracking” tool like other tools.

Despite these limitations, Brand Radar Ahrefs provides insights that were impossible to obtain at scale before its launch. It’s a starting point for understanding AI visibility, not a complete solution.

Turning Ahrefs’ Brand Radar Insights into Action

Data without action is just interesting noise. Here’s how to convert Brand Radar insights into tangible outcomes:

• For Content Gaps: Create comprehensive content addressing queries where competitors appear but you don’t. Ensure this content follows E-E-A-T principles, demonstrating expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness.
• For Low Citations: Analyse pages that competitors get cited for. What structure do they use? What data do they include? Adapt your content to match what AI systems clearly prefer.
• For Declining Visibility: If your Share of Voice is dropping, investigate why. Have competitors published stronger content? Has your content become outdated? Refresh and strengthen accordingly.

Leverage Brand Radar on Ahrefs and Stay on Top of Brand Mentions

The brands winning AI visibility track metrics and make use of those insights to create content that AI wants to cite. It can be complex, but working with a specialist SEO agency Malaysia can help you translate these insights into actionable approaches.

At Primal, our team uses Brand Radar as part of our comprehensive AI SEO approach. We combine visibility tracking with content optimisation to ensure our partners’ brands appear where Malaysian consumers are searching, whether that’s Google, ChatGPT, or Perplexity.

Stay ahead of the competition and contact our SEO agency Kuala Lumpur team today to discuss how we can build your AI search presence.

References:

1. Ahrefs Brand Radar: Win brand visibility in AI search & beyond. (date n/a). Ahrefs. Retrieved on 28th January 2026 from https://ahrefs.com/brand-radar
2. AI Discovery Surges: Similarweb’s 2025 Generative AI Report Says. December 2, 2025. Similarweb. Retrieved on 28th January 2026 from https://ir.similarweb.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/138/ai-discovery-surges-similarwebs-2025-generative-ai-report-says
3. AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5%. April 17, 2025. Ahrefs. Retrieved on 28th January 2026 from https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks/

FAQ

What is Brand Radar Ahrefs used for?

Brand Radar Ahrefs tracks how your brand appears across AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot. It helps you understand AI Share of Voice, identify content gaps where competitors appear but you don’t, and discover which of your pages AI systems cite most frequently.

Is Brand Radar Ahrefs free to use?

Brand Radar has a free tier through Ahrefs Webmaster Tools with limited features. Full access to AI platform indexes (ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.) requires paid add-ons starting at US$99/month per index or US$699/month for all indexes.

How accurate is Brand Radar for tracking AI mentions?

Brand Radar provides directional trends rather than real-time accuracy. AI responses are non-deterministic, meaning that the same prompt can return different outcomes each time. Brand Radar aggregates thousands of prompts to show patterns and opportunities rather than precise rankings.

Can Brand Radar track competitors?

Yes. You can enter competitor brand names and Brand Radar will show competitive share across all AI platforms. You can also filter to see prompts where competitors are mentioned but your brand isn’t to reveal immediate content opportunities.

How often does Brand Radar update its data?

Brand Radar updates its AI indexes regularly, with most platforms showing data from the past 2-3 months. Search Demand data updates more frequently. Custom prompt tracking updates based on your configured refresh schedule.