CoreCited · Compare
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 — 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
$398/mo
Free option
7-day trial. Trial only
No free tier. No free option
Engines
Multiple (daily AI rankings)
Multiple
Prompts
25
Up to 2,500 custom prompt checks/mo ($398 tier)
Action layer
Part of the wider Semrush suite.
Part of the wider Ahrefs suite.
What the headline price hides
Semrush AI Visibility: $99/mo PER DOMAIN (annual), for 25 tracked prompts and 1 domain. Extra prompts are $60/mo per 50; extra domains are $99 each; extra users $45/mo.
Ahrefs Brand Radar: $398/mo for selected platforms or $699/mo for all — and it's an ADD-ON that requires an Ahrefs base plan (~$129/mo), so realistically ~$527–$828/mo all-in.
Semrush AI Visibility
Strengths
- ✓If you already live in Semrush, the data sits next to your SEO work.
- ✓A 261M-prompt dataset across 32 countries.
Gaps
- ✕Priced per domain — costs escalate fast for anyone tracking more than one brand.
- ✕25 prompts at $99 is the tightest prompt-per-dollar ratio in the category.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Strengths
- ✓Ahrefs' crawl index is one of the largest on the web — 15 years of infrastructure a startup cannot replicate.
- ✓Sits alongside genuinely best-in-class backlink and keyword data.
Gaps
- ✕By far the most expensive way into AI visibility, and you must already be an Ahrefs customer.
- ✕Their '405M+ search-backed prompts' are MODELLED from their keyword database, not captured AI conversations — a different thing from Profound's panel data, though it's 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 86.5% of prompts keep a stable core of 1–5 names that persist week after week, while ~89% of everything else rotates. 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 pricing page in July 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.