Ahrefs Brand Radar is a research and tracking module that your own team buys and runs, with public prices. Bluefish is a sales-led enterprise platform that comes with a managed strategy team and tracks Amazon's shopping assistants. DeepSmith suits teams that want to run the work themselves: it tracks AI answers and also writes and publishes the articles that close the gaps, on plans from $99 a month with a 7-day free trial.
The real decision here is who does the work. Ahrefs Brand Radar vs Bluefish comes down to software your own people operate, or software with a team of outside strategists who run the program alongside you. Ahrefs sells a module with public prices and Bluefish sells an enterprise program through sales. DeepSmith sits on the self-run side, and it adds the production step that neither of the other two describes.
Ahrefs Brand Radar vs Bluefish: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if your own team will run the program and you want tracking and publish-ready articles on one self-serve plan, from $99 a month with a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract.
- Choose Ahrefs Brand Radar if you already use Ahrefs or want to research AI mentions for any brand or topic without building a prompt list, and you are comfortable paying per index ($199 each) or per custom prompt package (from $50).
- Choose Bluefish if you are a large enterprise brand with several marketing teams, you want a managed strategy team, and you need Amazon Rufus and Alexa for Shopping tracked.
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Ahrefs Brand Radar | Bluefish |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | $50/mo (custom prompts), $199/mo per index | Not published, sales-led |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | About 83 prompts a day on 1 platform (2,500 checks/mo) | Not published |
| Engines at entry tier | ChatGPT | 1 index of your choice | Not published |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 6 index platforms, plus Claude for custom prompts | 10+ claimed, full list not published |
| Free trial | Yes, 7 days | Partial, no free trial | No, demo request only |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Competitor benchmarking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Amazon shopping assistant tracking | - | Not listed | Yes |
| Content generation | Yes | Not listed | No |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Not listed | Not listed |
| Brand-context grounding | Yes | Not listed | Yes (Brand Vault) |
| API | Yes (read-only) | Yes | Partial |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Partial | Yes (vendor badge) |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.5/5 on G2 (Ahrefs suite) | No G2 reviews |
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 is built for SEO and marketing teams, especially people who already use Ahrefs, and for established brands with real search demand. Its main feature is the AI Visibility Index, which holds pre-collected answers for 448M+ prompts taken from Ahrefs' keyword data, so you can look up any brand or topic without building a prompt list first. Custom Prompts add scheduled tracking of your own questions, daily, weekly or monthly, and that is the only place Claude is covered.
The standout is how much of the answer you can inspect. Reports show full answer text, cited domains and cited pages, mentions, AI share of voice, and fan-out queries for ChatGPT and Perplexity. There is also an API with 21 endpoints and a Looker Studio connector.
The real limit is scope. The broad indexes refresh monthly instead of live, and Brand Radar describes no content briefs, writing or CMS publishing, so the work ends at the report. Ahrefs sells AI Content Helper separately in its Content Kit. Review sentiment is hard to read for this module, and our Ahrefs Brand Radar review goes through it in more detail. The G2 rating of 4.5/5 from 717 reviews, checked in September 2026, covers the whole Ahrefs suite and not Brand Radar alone.
Bluefish
Bluefish comes from Bluefish Labs, a New York company founded in 2024 that reports $68 million in total funding after a $43 million Series B in April 2026. It targets Fortune 500 brands with several marketing teams to coordinate, and the agencies that serve them. The software has three suites, AI Monitoring, AI Optimization and AI Data, and most customers also buy strategy services. Bluefish's own site puts that share between 77% and 85%.
The standout is the breadth around the monitoring. It names ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Perplexity, Amazon Rufus and Alexa for Shopping, and its AI Accuracy feature checks what AI says about a brand against a stored set of brand facts called Brand Vault. Agentic Campaigns generate page-level tactics, and Collections tie dated actions to movement in the metrics.
The limits are access and proof. There is no public pricing, no trial and no self-serve signup, so every purchase starts with a demo. It also does not write articles, and its site says "Bluefish provides the direction. You stay the author." Independent reviews are missing as well, since its G2 listing had zero reviews in September 2026. The headline ROI of up to 446% comes from a Forrester study that Bluefish commissioned, built on six interviews and a modeled composite company.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and publishes in-house
The gap both tools leave for a team that wants to run its own program is the step after the report. Brand Radar tells you where you are mentioned and cited, and Bluefish tells you what to change and leaves the writing to you. Neither one describes writing the article or sending it to a CMS.
DeepSmith puts tracking and production on one self-serve plan. The AEO module tracks mention rate, citation rate and share of voice, shows which of your pages AI cites, and lists who wins the citations for each prompt you track.
Opportunity Agents read that data and return content ideas, each carrying the data point that justifies it. The Writer then turns a planned idea into a finished article, researched, linked, with a cover image and metadata, grounded in the brand context you store once in Deep IQ. Autowrite can take an article all the way to published on a scheduled date, and Produced Content publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks.
That loop is the part of a managed program that an in-house team can take over: finding the gap, planning the article and publishing the page that fills it. Plans run $99 (Pro), $199 (Grow) and $399 (Scale) a month, or $80, $160 and $299 a month billed annually, with 20, 40 and 90 articles a month. A custom Enterprise plan covers all ten engines and adds 1:1 expert onboarding and a dedicated account manager. There is a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract, and DeepSmith is rated 4.8/5 on G2.
Engine coverage
Ahrefs Brand Radar has the clearer engine list, and Bluefish is the only one of the two that tracks Amazon's shopping assistants.
Brand Radar's index covers Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. Claude is available for custom prompts only. Grok appears in the help center, but Ahrefs says it cannot collect new Grok data for now, so it should not count. Bluefish names ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Amazon Rufus and Alexa for Shopping, and says it tracks more than 10 AI systems. It does not publish the full list or which engines come with which contract. Existing enterprise customers request Alexa for Shopping through support.
What DeepSmith does: it tracks ten engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek), and the plan tiers are published. Pro covers ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten. DeepSmith tracks chat and search engines and does not cover Amazon's shopping assistants.
Tracking depth and data method
Bluefish goes deeper on how AI describes a brand, and Ahrefs Brand Radar goes deeper on the raw answers, so neither wins outright.
Brand Radar stores full answer text, keeps history back to 2025, shows fan-out queries and ranks cited pages at the URL level. It has no native sentiment metric, and Ahrefs says its prompts reflect its keyword sources, which skew toward English, so the numbers are directional. Bluefish tracks sentiment, favorability and AI Safety, breaks results out by customer audience, and runs a static prompt baseline daily to separate its own actions from model drift. Its AI Accuracy scoring is validated by 6+ frontier models with 91% agreement with human review, which is a vendor figure. Bluefish does not say whether answers come from official APIs or consumer interfaces, how long it keeps them, or which countries it covers.
What DeepSmith does: it reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, sentiment and trend, keeps the full answer history for every tracked prompt, and shows the pages AI cites for each one. Tracking runs 50, 100 or 200 prompts on Pro, Grow and Scale.
Pricing and buying process
Ahrefs Brand Radar wins this one on openness, because you can see what it costs before you talk to anyone.
Each broad AI Visibility Index is $199 a month, and all indexes are $699 a month. Custom prompt packages are $50 for 2,500 checks, $100 for 7,000 and $250 for 25,000, and the suite plans from Lite at $129 a month include a small allowance of 150 to 2,500 checks. Ahrefs says it offers no free trials, and a Brand Radar annual price is not published. Bluefish has no pricing page. Access starts with a demo and a negotiated order form, and no tiers, prompt limits or engine allowances are public. One third-party reading of its enterprise terms says the order form controls and renews unless you give notice 30 days before expiry. Bluefish's own terms page returned a 404 when checked, so confirm that with sales. If the per-index price is the sticking point, the list of Ahrefs Brand Radar alternatives covers other trackers. A separate piece on Ahrefs Brand Radar vs Profound compares it with a dedicated tracker.
What DeepSmith does: it publishes every plan price. Each plan includes a monthly article allowance, and there is a 7-day free trial with no long-term contracts or cancellation fees. You can see the cost of tracking plus production before you talk to anyone.
Managed service and team load
Bluefish wins this one, because it is the only one of the two that sells a team, which is the main thing that separates Bluefish vs Ahrefs Brand Radar for most enterprise buyers.
Its Marketing Strategy and Services offering provides dedicated AI strategists and analysts for onboarding, program operations, a performance diagnostic, custom brand audits, execution plans, executive briefings and measurement recaps. The services price is not published. Ahrefs describes chat support, documentation, webinars and Enterprise onboarding, and a dedicated Brand Radar managed service was not confirmed, so your own people do the analysis and decide what to act on. That is a fair fit for a team with SEO staff, and a heavy lift for one without. If you are weighing a platform against an outside agency more broadly, the AEO platform vs hiring an AEO agency guide covers that.
What DeepSmith does: Opportunity Agents do the analysis step, reading your visibility data and returning ideas with the evidence attached, so a small team is not starting from raw reports. Enterprise adds 1:1 expert onboarding and a dedicated account manager, and multi-workspace support lets an agency run several clients from one account.
From insight to action
Bluefish is ahead of Ahrefs Brand Radar here, because it turns monitoring into ranked actions and tracks what each one did.
Bluefish generates optimizations ranked by impact with an owning team, produces briefs, and records every tactic with a milestone so results tie back to it. Brand Radar surfaces gaps through report filters, and gap analysis there is manual or comes through Letaido, a separate Ahrefs product. Neither tool writes the article. Bluefish says the marketer stays the author, and Ahrefs sells writing help separately in the Content Kit from $99 a month. Neither lists CMS publishing, so the page still has to be produced and published somewhere else.
What DeepSmith does: it closes the loop in one workspace. A gap found in tracking becomes an idea with its evidence, then a planned article, then a finished article with a cover image and publish-ready metadata, and then a live page through your CMS. Every finished article also arrives with social posts written, and the same tracking shows whether the page started getting cited.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits a content or marketing team, or an agency, that wants to track AI answers and publish the content that responds to them without hiring a strategy partner. It is the broadest fit when you want one plan, public prices and a free trial before you commit.
- Ahrefs Brand Radar fits a team that already lives in Ahrefs, or one that mainly wants to research how AI answers treat a brand or topic and pull the data into its own reports. In an Ahrefs Brand Radar or Bluefish choice for a team that runs its own analysis, it is the lower-cost and more transparent one.
- Bluefish fits a Fortune 500 style brand with several teams, a budget for a managed program and a retail or ecommerce business that sells through Amazon's assistants. It sits among the enterprise AI visibility tools that bundle services with software. In a Bluefish vs Ahrefs Brand Radar choice for that buyer, it is the one that includes people.
Try DeepSmith free for 7 days at app.deepsmith.ai and see tracking and publish-ready articles in one workspace.
