TechRadar reviews Surfer and Ahrefs tools for tracking brands in AI answers

Surfer AI Tracker sits inside Surfer and is designed to show how often AI engines mention a brand when people ask about its industry, and which sources the engines cite instead, according to the review. It tracks mention rate, average position, an overall visibility score, top sources, sentiment and competitor data.

The review said the tool runs buyer-style prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. It scrapes the actual answer a user sees rather than a stripped-down API response, and re-runs prompts on a schedule, daily on the Pro plan.

TechRadar's reviewer tested Surfer AI Tracker with Zoho, loading 40 prompts real buyers type into AI, such as "best [category] tool for [use case]," rather than searches for the brand name. The reviewer let Surfer build the competitor set from the Zoho domain name; the tool generated the business type, industry, a description of what Zoho sells, its customer base, a competitor list and topics worth tracking, and named Salesforce and HubSpot as rivals. The prompts ran across all five engines, and the reviewer compared the results with answers seen by asking ChatGPT directly. The review said the setup required little manual input.

Ahrefs Brand Radar earned attention by making AI visibility something a user could investigate rather than simply score, TechRadar said. In its test, the reviewer compared Saily eSIM with Airalo and Holafly, moving from combined-platform reports to ChatGPT-specific checks. The review said comparing a brand with competitors led from an overview to individual answers and the pages behind them, a depth useful for regular competitor research. The tool provides historical AI visibility data, lets users inspect individual AI answers and brand mentions, compare competitors across AI platforms, identify frequently cited pages and visibility gaps, and track brand sentiment and visibility trends.

Brand Radar is sold separately from the wider Ahrefs SEO suite. The full AI index costs $699 a month, while one AI index costs $199 a month. The $699 plan includes 2,500 custom checks; Custom Prompts plans cost $50 for 2,500 additional monthly checks, $100 for 7,000 and $250 for 25,000. Lite, Standard and Advanced Ahrefs subscribers receive 150, 300 and 600 custom checks a month, respectively. The review said checks are not interchangeable with prompts: each platform, location and scheduled run consumes allowance, and 20 prompts checked daily across three platforms and two countries use 3,600 checks over 30 days. Claude consumes eight checks per execution, the review said.

The review also flagged limits. It said estimated impressions do not measure real audience reach, some reports require manual verification, and imperfect classifications and occasional messy response formatting demand judgment. Ahrefs' methodology combines search-informed questions, including Google's People Also Ask, with semantic expansion; these are not private conversations gathered from ChatGPT users, and its AI-adjusted volume applies platform-specific usage estimates to a parent keyword's Google search volume, according to the review. The review said a rising line is not proof that more customers saw a brand, and dataset changes can affect comparisons; AI Share of Voice also depends on the brands and filters selected.

For a handful of questions, custom tracking is the more sensible starting point than buying the entire archive, the review concluded. It said isolating ChatGPT answers that mentioned competitors but excluded Saily turned an intimidating report into a reading list, allowing the reviewer to investigate individual answers.