Xtrusio vs Ahrefs Brand Radar: An Index of AI Mentions, or Your Buyer Question Tracked to a Cited Page

What is Ahrefs Brand Radar?

Brand Radar has two parts that are easy to mix up.

The AI Visibility Index. Ahrefs takes real queries from its keyword database, expands them into natural questions using Google's People Also Ask and related variations, and runs them through AI platforms. Its pricing page describes the result as more than 470 million organic prompts. On the Brand Radar page, the index covers Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, and its question sets are re-tested monthly on a 90-day reporting window.

Custom prompts. These are questions you write and track yourself. Every paid Ahrefs plan includes some: 5 tracked AI prompts (150 checks a month) on Lite ($129/month), 10 on Standard ($249) and 20 on Advanced ($449). More checks come in custom prompt packages from $50/month for 2,500 checks. One check is one prompt on one platform in one location for one update, and you can run prompts daily, weekly or monthly. Claude is available for custom prompts and, per the Brand Radar page, uses 8 checks per update.

Brand Radar reports mentions (your brand name in the answer text), citations (links to your pages or domains), AI share of voice and estimated impressions, plus cited pages and domains and YouTube, TikTok and Reddit visibility. The full index is the Brand Radar AI add-on, from $199/month on Ahrefs' pricing page. In short, it is a market-wide mention and citation index inside an SEO suite.

Xtrusio vs Ahrefs Brand Radar, job by job

Ahrefs cells come from its pricing page, Brand Radar page and help center, read on October 9, 2026; prices and limits come only from the pricing page.

What the top pages on Brand Radar leave out

Search "ahrefs brand radar" and most of the first page is Ahrefs itself: the product page, its methodology post, its free checker and its use-case list. The one outside review near the top comes from a rival tracker. They argue about the size and source of the prompt set. Four things a buyer needs are missing.

1. The index is not your buyer's question. Index prompts come from People Also Ask questions in Ahrefs' keyword data, and Ahrefs notes coverage may be limited for brands with little search volume. The question a buyer types into ChatGPT before shortlisting you may never appear in it.

2. Custom prompts are a budget you spend per platform. Lite's 5 tracked AI prompts (150 checks a month) on Lite cover 5 prompts checked daily on one platform. Track 20 buyer questions daily on six platforms and you need 3,600. Do this sum with your own questions before you buy.

3. Most cited pages are not on your website. Ahrefs' Brand Radar page tells you to find valuable AI citations and secure new mentions. The work of writing the piece, getting it onto the site AI already quotes and following it to a live URL is left to your team.

4. A share-of-voice chart is not proof for a page. A rising citation count does not tell you whether the guest post you placed last month for one buyer question is the page that engine now cites on that question.

Xtrusio: your own questions, with the writing and placing included

Xtrusio is our product. These are the parts of the job that sit outside an index.

Questions you choose, in your buyers' words. Instead of sampling People Also Ask phrasing, Xtrusio puts the questions your buyers ask before a shortlist to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. It reports visibility, share of voice, sentiment, average position and citations for those questions, by engine, topic and buyer persona.

The searches, question by question. In Xtrusio's checks, ChatGPT and Claude search the web on every answer; Gemini and Grok decide when to search. Xtrusio drafts the content plan from the searches the AI engines actually run. Xtrusio saves what those four engines search for on each of your questions, so the phrase that sent an engine to a rival's page sits in front of you.

One plan per question. Each question gets its own content plan, drawn from those searches and the sites the engines cite, with a channel chosen per piece: your blog, Medium, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, guest posts or PR. A strategist signs it off, and so do you.

Writing in the same product. Brand Radar leaves writing to a separate add-on. In Xtrusio it is part of the job. Xtrusio coined the term Citation-Grade Content for pages an engine can quote as a complete first answer. Each CGC piece passes 78 checks in seven families, and before it ships, independent AI judges read it alongside the pages engines cite today and say which they would use.

Getting onto the most-cited sites. Ahrefs lists the pages AI cites and leaves the outreach to your team. Xtrusio does that part: guest posts go out through a network of about 2,000 publisher websites, a journalist team answers PR requests on Connectively, Featured, HARO and SourceBottle, and Link Strategy follows each placement and published piece until it is live at its URL.

One page, one question, one answer. Each piece is bound to a single target question, and Xtrusio marks it verified only once a later scan shows the engine's answer to that question citing the exact URL. That result feeds the next plan.

Where Brand Radar fits

An SEO suite such as Ahrefs covers backlink research, keyword research, rank tracking and site audits, and Brand Radar adds a market-wide count of AI mentions and citations on top of that keyword data. Being the source an engine quotes on one buyer's question is a separate job. If that is the result your team reports, from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode or Gemini, Xtrusio does it.

More tools that track at the prompt level are in Ahrefs Brand Radar alternatives with prompt-level tracking.

A test to run before you buy

Try this with any tool, Ahrefs included:

1. Write 10 questions exactly as your buyers phrase them, and check whether each one is in the tool's prompt set at all.
2. For each, look at the full answer and the pages every engine cites right now.
3. Ask who will produce the page for that question and who will get it onto the sites the engines quote.
4. Ask how you will confirm, on that question, that the engine later cites that exact page.

Ahrefs Brand Radar gives you the first two in aggregate, and the last two only in part: writing comes from the separate Content Kit add-on, and its reports show cited pages and citations. Xtrusio covers all four, one question at a time.

Review Xtrusio's service plan inclusions and start from questions your buyers type, not an index.