Ahrefs Brand Radar measures how often AI answers mention and cite a brand and publishes its prices, while Adobe Brand Visibility (LLM Optimizer) adds fixes pushed at the CDN edge or into Adobe Experience Manager, plus revenue reporting, inside a sales-led Adobe contract. Ahrefs fits teams that want to monitor on public terms, and Adobe fits large teams already on Adobe's stack. DeepSmith is the strong alternative for teams that want to act through new content, since it tracks AI visibility and also writes and publishes the articles that close the gaps, on a self-serve plan.
If you are weighing Ahrefs Brand Radar vs Adobe Brand Visibility, the real question is whether you want a tool that measures AI answers or one that also changes your site in response. Ahrefs Brand Radar is the first kind, with public pricing and no content workflow inside the module. Adobe Brand Visibility is the second kind, and it comes with an Adobe sales process and, for many setups, some IT work. DeepSmith takes a third route, tracking AI answers and then producing the articles that fill the gaps. This page compares the two on pricing, data, and what each one does after it finds a gap.
Ahrefs Brand Radar vs Adobe Brand Visibility: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking and the articles that close the gaps on one self-serve plan, from $99 a month with a 7-day free trial and no AEM or CDN setup.
- Choose Ahrefs Brand Radar if you want to monitor mentions and citations on public prices, from $199 a month per index or $50 a month for custom prompts, and you do not need a content workflow inside the tool.
- Choose Adobe Brand Visibility if you are a large enterprise on Adobe Experience Manager or Adobe Analytics and want fixes at the CDN edge and revenue reporting, inside a sales-led contract.
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Ahrefs Brand Radar | Adobe Brand Visibility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | $199/mo per index (custom prompts from $50/mo) | Not public, contact sales |
| Annual price | $80/mo (Pro) | Not listed | Not public |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 448M+ index prompts; custom prompts from 2,500 checks/mo | Not published, licensed per year |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT) | Chosen individually from 6 platforms | Not published |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 6 index platforms, plus Claude for custom prompts | Up to 10 LLM families, 5 named |
| Free trial | 7-day free trial | No free trial | Existing Adobe customers only |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Competitor benchmarking | Yes | Yes | Yes, up to 5 competitors |
| Site audit for AI readability | - | Partial | Yes |
| Revenue attribution from AI traffic | - | Yes, separate Ahrefs tool | Yes, Adobe Analytics |
| Content generation | Yes | Not listed | Partial, off-site content |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Not listed | Partial, AEM or CDN edge |
| Security certifications | SOC 2, GDPR, ISO | Partial, ISO 27001 documented | Not listed |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.5/5 on G2 (Ahrefs suite) | 3.7/5 on G2 |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
Ahrefs Brand Radar is the AI visibility module of the Ahrefs marketing platform. It pairs a pre-collected AI Visibility Index of 448M+ prompts, drawn from Ahrefs' keyword data, with Custom Prompts that you choose and track daily, weekly, or monthly. You can search any brand or topic without building a prompt list first, and the reports cover mentions, citations, cited pages, search-volume-weighted impressions, and AI share of voice. It suits SEO and marketing teams, especially ones already inside Ahrefs, who want to research how AI engines treat a brand and its competitors.
The standout is the index and its link to search demand data. The real limitation is on Ahrefs' own pages, where the module is monitoring only, with no content briefs, writing, or CMS publishing. Ahrefs sells its AI Content Helper separately in a Content Kit add-on. The broad indexes are also priced per index and refreshed monthly, so daily data means paying for Custom Prompts.
The ratings you can find are for the Ahrefs suite, not for Brand Radar itself, and they stand at 4.5/5 on G2 from 717 reviews as of September 2026. One Brand Radar reviewer praised finding citation sources across languages and AI systems, and the same reviewer reported that index updates can change historical numbers. That is one report, so treat it as something to test during a trial of the reports rather than a pattern.
Adobe Brand Visibility
Adobe Brand Visibility is Adobe's enterprise product for generative engine optimization. It launched as Adobe LLM Optimizer in June 2025. Since 31 July 2026 only Brand Visibility is sold, with Semrush prompt and market data added, so Ahrefs Brand Radar vs Adobe LLM Optimizer is now this same comparison. It tracks mentions, citations, sentiment, and share of voice, benchmarks up to five competitors, reads AI crawler traffic from CDN logs, and deploys fixes at the CDN edge or in Adobe Experience Manager. Revenue reporting runs through Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics. It suits large enterprises, especially ones on Adobe products, that can involve IT in CDN setup.
The standout is that it acts on its own findings. Adobe says the edge optimizations are served to AI agents only, do not change what human visitors see, and can be rolled back right away. The limitations are mostly about access. There is no public price, the only free access is a trial for existing Adobe Experience Manager Cloud Service or Adobe Analytics customers, and a G2 reviewer called CDN log forwarding an onboarding barrier.
On G2 the listing shows 3.7/5 from five reviews as of September 2026, and four of those were incentivized. Capterra has no reviews. Reviewers liked the interface, the prompt suggestions, and the edge deployment, and some questioned how mature the content recommendations are. With a sample this small, none of it tells you much about how the product performs for a typical buyer.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes
Both tools stop short of one step that a lot of teams need, which is a new page that fills the gap the tracking found. Ahrefs Brand Radar describes no writing or publishing in the module. Adobe Brand Visibility recommends pages, produces briefs, and changes existing pages at the edge, and it also generates content for off-site channels such as Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit, but writing full on-site articles is not described for it.
DeepSmith is built for that step. Its AI search visibility area tracks mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, and sentiment, and its Pages view shows which of your pages AI actually cites. Opportunity Agents read that data and return content ideas, each with the data point that justifies it. The Writer then turns a planned idea into a finished article, researched, linked, and grounded in Deep IQ, which stores your brand voice, personas, and product facts. Autowrite can run that on a schedule, and Produced Content publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity, Contentful, or your own webhooks.
None of this needs AEM or IT edge setup. Onboarding starts from your website, and you get a 7-day free trial with no long-term contract. Plans run from $99 a month for Pro (20 articles, 50 tracked prompts, ChatGPT) to $199 for Grow (40 articles, 100 prompts, adds Perplexity) and $399 for Scale (90 articles, 200 prompts, adds Gemini), or $80, $160, and $299 billed annually. Enterprise is custom and covers all ten engines. DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR, and ISO certified, and it is rated 4.8/5 on G2. DeepSmith doesn't do CDN log analysis or edge deployment, so its approach is to publish new pages that earn citations, with the tracking showing which pages AI cites and the Writer producing the ones that close the gap.
Engine coverage
Ahrefs Brand Radar has the clearer engine coverage of the two. Its index covers six platforms: Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. Claude is available for Custom Prompts only, and it uses eight checks per update. Grok shows up in the help center, but Ahrefs says it cannot collect new Grok data for now, so it does not count as covered.
Adobe says it covers up to ten LLM families, but its pages name only five: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot. Release notes add Grok, DeepSeek, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews in specific modules, and no matrix shows which engines come with which license or trial. You would need to ask Adobe for that list before you sign.
What DeepSmith does: It tracks ten named engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot, and DeepSeek. Pro covers ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten, so the published tier tells you what you get before you start.
Tracking depth and data method
Ahrefs Brand Radar wins on how much of the data you can inspect. The AI Responses report stores full answer text, which you can filter by prompt, response, and cited URL, and fan-out queries show the sub-queries ChatGPT and Perplexity ran. Index question sets are re-tested monthly on a 90-day window, and Custom Prompts add daily tracking. Ahrefs also says its prompt sampling reflects its keyword sources, with an English-language skew, and that its visibility numbers are directional and not measured AI referral traffic.
Adobe Brand Visibility refreshes weekly by default, and daily refresh can be requested during onboarding and may cost extra. Its prompt corpus is nearly 300 million prompts, it has sentiment monitoring and fan-out analysis, and it claims more than 25 languages with state and city breakdowns. Whether it stores the full text of each answer is not described, and Adobe does not publish how much of its data comes from API calls, interface crawling, or approximation. How answers are collected changes what the numbers mean, because API and chat interface citations can differ.
What DeepSmith does: The AI search visibility area reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, sentiment, and the change over time, with a per-engine breakdown. Each tracked prompt keeps its answer history, and the Pages view shows which of your own pages are cited and what share of your citations each one earns.
Pricing and trial terms
In an Adobe Brand Visibility vs Ahrefs Brand Radar decision, the clearest gap is that one of them tells you what it costs. Ahrefs publishes its prices. A broad AI Visibility Index is $199 a month per selected index, and all indexes together are $699 a month. Custom prompt packages run $50 a month for 2,500 checks, $100 for 7,000, and $250 for 25,000. The Ahrefs suite plans start at $129 a month for Lite and include only a small Custom Prompts allowance, from 150 checks a month. Ahrefs states that it offers no free trials, and annual prices for Brand Radar were not published.
Adobe sells through a sales consultation. Licenses are set per prompts per year in the sales order, and the older LLM Optimizer pricing page now redirects. The paid entitlement includes Semrush Enterprise AIO, with 40 full users, 150 projects, and 800 credits a month, according to Adobe's product description. The trial covers 100 prompts, one domain, and up to 50 URLs for one opportunity type, and only for eligible Adobe customers. Ahrefs wins on price transparency, and Adobe is the more open-ended purchase.
What DeepSmith does: The plans are published. Pro is $99 a month, Grow is $199, and Scale is $399, with lower annual rates, and every plan includes both tracking and article production. The 7-day free trial is open to anyone, and there are no cancellation fees. You can see the whole price list on the DeepSmith pricing page.
Security and data access
Ahrefs has the stronger documented data access. The Brand Radar API has 21 endpoints, a Looker Studio connector pulls Brand Radar data into reports, and the hosted Ahrefs MCP server is available on paid plans from Lite. On security, ISO 27001 is documented and SOC 2 appears on its trust center without a stated type, and SSO is on the Enterprise plan only, at $1,499 a month on an annual commitment.
Adobe describes native Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics integrations, a Google Analytics integration for paid customers, and CSV exports, but no public API is described. Its January 2026 security overview names AWS US East hosting, TLS 1.2 or higher, and AES-256 encryption at rest, and says customer data is not used for model training. SOC 2, ISO 27001, and SSO terms are not stated for this product specifically, so a buyer with a procurement checklist should ask for them in writing.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR, and ISO certified. It has a read-only REST API and a read-only MCP server with 23 tools that works with Claude, Cursor, Microsoft Copilot, and other assistants, so your own tools can pull visibility data, competitors, and the content library.
From insight to action
On Adobe Brand Visibility vs Ahrefs Brand Radar for acting on findings, Adobe wins by a wide margin. It gives a prioritized action plan, briefs that show where one piece of content helps a whole topic cluster, and technical fixes for blocked crawlers, missing structured data, and 404s. It can deploy optimizations at the CDN edge or in Adobe Experience Manager, up to 1,000 deployments a year, and it ties AI referral traffic to conversions and revenue in Adobe Analytics. Teams without Adobe Analytics can still measure AI search traffic in GA4. The cost of Adobe's route is setup. CDN log forwarding needs IT and security work, and the impact of a change can need about a two-week baseline.
Ahrefs Brand Radar shows you the gaps and leaves the next step to you. Teams that want the crawler view on their own can analyze server logs for AI crawlers. Its reports surface mention and citation gaps through filters, and Ahrefs' academy walks through manual gap workflows, but no automated recommended actions are described. Bot Analytics, a separate free tool in beta, monitors AI crawler visits, and Ahrefs Web Analytics shows pages that AI search sends traffic to.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith turns the tracking into new articles inside one platform. Opportunity Agents return ideas with the evidence attached, so tracked prompts become a content plan. The Writer produces a publish-ready article grounded in Deep IQ, with internal and external links, a cover image, and metadata, and Autowrite can run it hands-off on a set date. Finished pieces go to your CMS from Produced Content.
Which should you choose
Whether it is Ahrefs Brand Radar or Adobe Brand Visibility, the choice turns on who owns the next step after a gap is found.
- DeepSmith: for marketing and content teams that want to see where they are missing in AI answers and publish the articles that close the gaps, with tracking and writing on one self-serve plan. It fits teams that want to start this week, since the trial is 7 days and the plans are published, and it holds up as volume grows because every draft is grounded in the stored Deep IQ context.
- Ahrefs Brand Radar: for SEO and AEO teams, especially ones already on Ahrefs, who want to research mentions and citations for any brand or topic and who have a separate way to make content. The Basic custom prompt package at $50 a month is the lowest published way to start scheduled tracking.
- Adobe Brand Visibility: for large enterprises already running Adobe Experience Manager or Adobe Analytics, with IT able to handle CDN log forwarding and a budget for a sales-led license, that want fixes deployed on the site and revenue reporting in one contract.
If you are building a shortlist, the roundup of AI visibility tools for enterprise covers more of the field. Ahrefs Brand Radar has a head-to-head with Profound, which makes a useful third comparison. Adobe Brand Visibility has its own pricing and fit comparison against Profound.
Start a DeepSmith free trial to see tracking and article production on your own site, with 7 days free and no contract.
