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Semrush AI Visibility vs Ahrefs Brand Radar
Both track whether AI engines mention your brand. They differ sharply on price, engine coverage and whether they tell you what to do about it. Every figure below was read from each vendor's own pricing page on 26 September 2026 — blog roundups in this category get this wrong more often than they get it right.
Semrush AI Visibility
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Entry price
$99/mo
$129/mo
Free option
Semrush's own knowledge base says the AI Visibility Toolkit "does not currently offer a free trial". Its main SEO plans have a free plan and a trial; this toolkit does not. No free option
No free trial is mentioned on Ahrefs' pricing page. No free option
Engines
ChatGPT, Google AI Mode
ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude
Prompts
25
5 (Lite), 10 (Standard), 20 (Advanced), plus paid packs
Action layer
Part of the wider Semrush suite.
Part of the wider Ahrefs suite.
What the headline price hides
Semrush AI Visibility: $99 a month for 1 domain and 25 tracked prompts. Extra prompts cost $60/mo per 50, extra domains $99/mo each, and extra users $99 each.
Ahrefs Brand Radar: The cheapest way in is the $129/mo Lite plan, which includes 5 tracked AI prompts. The Brand Radar AI add-on, for market-wide AI visibility data, starts at $199/mo on top of a plan, and custom prompt packs cost $50, $100 or $250 a month.
Semrush AI Visibility
Strengths
- ✓If you already live in Semrush, the AI data sits next to your SEO work in one login.
- ✓Semrush One bundles SEO and AI search tracking for teams that want both.
Gaps
- ✕Priced per domain, so costs escalate fast for anyone tracking more than one brand.
- ✕25 prompts at $99 is one of the tightest prompt-per-dollar ratios in the category.
- ✕No free trial of the toolkit.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Strengths
- ✓Ahrefs' crawl index is one of the largest on the web: years of infrastructure a startup cannot replicate.
- ✓Sits alongside genuinely best-in-class backlink and keyword data.
- ✓Covers seven AI platforms, including Claude.
Gaps
- ✕You must be an Ahrefs customer: tracked AI prompts come with a plan, and the market-wide Brand Radar data is an add-on from $199/mo.
- ✕Only 5 tracked AI prompts on the $129 Lite plan.
- ✕Its large prompt database is modelled from Ahrefs' keyword data rather than captured AI conversations, a different thing from panel data, though it is often compared as if identical.
What neither of them will tell you
Both report AI visibility as a single confident number. But AI citations churn — SISTRIX measured 56% weekly source churn across 82,619 prompts. So a large share of the week-to-week movement in either dashboard is noise, and neither tool separates the noise from the signal, or tells you whether you hold a durable position or merely rotated through this week.
Where CoreCited is different
1. We tell you if you're in the core, or just the carousel
AI answers churn — SISTRIX measured 56% weekly source churn in Google AI Mode across 82,619 prompts. But the same study found that in AI Mode 86.5% of prompts keep a stable core of 1–5 domains that persist week after week, while 89% of the remaining domains rotate weekly. So "am I mentioned?" is close to a coin flip. The question that matters is whether you're in the durable core or the churn. No other tool distinguishes these.2. We show you the error bars, and grey out the noise
Share of voice is estimated from a finite sample, so it carries sampling error. On a realistic sample, brands sitting at 27%, 25% and 22% are statistically indistinguishable — their confidence ranges overlap completely. Every other dashboard renders that as a confident 1–2–3 ranking. We mark it as a tie and tell you not to act on it.3. We tell you when the fix didn't work
Mark a content brief published and we snapshot where you stand, then measure whether it actually moved you — and we'll say "no movement" or "you slipped" when that's the truth. A loop that can only report success is marketing, not measurement.Compare something else
How we sourced this: every price and limit above was read from the vendor's own website on 26 September 2026 — not from a roundup article. We checked, and blog roundups in this category get it wrong more often than not. Vendors change pricing frequently, so verify before you buy: semrush.com · ahrefs.com. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we'll fix it.