Both tools put AI visibility inside an SEO suite. Ahrefs Brand Radar sells its broad indexes separately at $199 per index and adds query fan-out and AI referral data, while SE Ranking includes AI tracking in its $129 Core plan, with a 14-day no-card trial and API and MCP access on every plan. DeepSmith is the stronger option when an agency wants to turn each client's visibility data into published client content, because tracking, brand grounding and the Writer sit in one workspace per client.
An SEO agency adding AI visibility for clients has to decide whether the new reporting should live in the suite it already pays for, and which suite does it in a way that scales across a client roster. Ahrefs Brand Radar vs SE Ranking AI Visibility is a close call on engines and a clearer one on packaging, trials and data type. DeepSmith belongs in the decision too, for agencies that want to act on the data and not only report it.
Ahrefs Brand Radar vs SE Ranking AI Visibility: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want each client's tracking, sentiment, article production and CMS publishing in one workspace, starting at $99 a month with a 7-day free trial.
- Choose Ahrefs Brand Radar if you research brands and topics across a big pre-collected index, need query fan-out or AI referral data, and already work inside Ahrefs.
- Choose SE Ranking AI Visibility if you want AI tracking bundled into a $129 suite plan, a 14-day trial without a card, and API and MCP access on every plan.
Ahrefs Brand Radar and SE Ranking AI Visibility at a glance
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Ahrefs Brand Radar | SE Ranking AI Visibility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | $199/mo per index | $129/mo (Core, suite) |
| Annual price (per month) | $80/mo | Not listed | $103.20/mo |
| Engines at entry tier | ChatGPT | One index of your choice | 5 engines |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 6 indexes, plus Claude for custom prompts | 5 |
| Free trial | Yes, 7 days | No | Yes, 14 days, no card |
| Query fan-out | - | Yes, ChatGPT and Perplexity | No |
| AI referral traffic | - | Yes, via Ahrefs Web Analytics | No |
| Multiple clients in one account | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| White-label reporting | - | Not listed | Partial, Agency Pack add-on |
| Sentiment | Yes | Partial | Partial |
| Writes full articles | Yes | Not listed | Partial, suite-level |
| Publishes to a CMS | Yes | Not listed | Partial, suite-level |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Partial | Not listed |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.5/5 on G2 | 4.7/5 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 two datasets. The AI Visibility Index holds pre-collected answers for 448M+ prompts that Ahrefs derives from its keyword data, across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. Custom Prompts let you track your own questions daily, weekly or monthly, and they add Claude. It suits existing Ahrefs teams and established brands with real search demand that want to look up any brand or topic without building a prompt list first.
The standout is that instant research. You can search a brand and see its mentions, cited pages and AI share of voice right away, with search demand and web visibility next to it. Ahrefs also shows fan-out queries for ChatGPT and Perplexity.
The main limit is packaging. Each broad index costs $199 a month, all of them cost $699, and the suite plans only include a small custom prompt allowance (5 daily prompts on Lite). The index refreshes monthly on a 90-day window, and the module has no content workflow.
On reviews, Ahrefs holds 4.5/5 on G2 from 717 reviews checked in September 2026, but that rating is for the whole suite. One Brand Radar reviewer reported that index updates changed historical numbers.
SE Ranking AI Visibility
SE Ranking is an SEO platform founded in 2013, and its AI Results Tracker covers Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. It captures answers through the interface once a day and reports mentions, links, positions inside the answer, cited sources and competitors. It is built for SEO teams and agencies that want AI tracking next to rank tracking and audits.
The standout is the entry price. Core at $129 a month ($103.20 billed annually) includes 100 prompts tracked daily, 10 projects and 5 AI competitor research domains, and the 14-day trial needs no card. SE Ranking also adds recommendations, ad tracking for ChatGPT and AI Mode, and API and MCP access in every plan.
The limits are scope and splitting. Claude and Copilot are not tracked. Sentiment sits in SE Visible, a separate product, and query fan-out and GA4-based AI traffic analytics are marked as coming soon. Full answer text is kept 30 days, and the AI add-on and SE Visible make the packaging hard to compare.
SE Ranking holds 4.7/5 on G2 from 1,606 reviews, again for the whole suite. AI-specific reviewers asked for more flexible ways to organize prompts and sources by client or market.
DeepSmith: the alternative that turns client insight into client content
Ahrefs and SE Ranking both do a solid job of measuring. Neither record gives a full yes on the steps after that: sentiment, writing full articles, grounding output in stored brand context, publishing to a CMS, repurposing and SOC 2. SE Ranking offers an AI Writer with 25 articles on Core, and Ahrefs sells a Content Kit from $99 a month, but both sit apart from the AI tracking data. For an agency, that gap is where each client's report turns into another round of briefs and drafts.
DeepSmith tracks and produces in one platform. Each client gets a workspace through Multi-Workspace, fully isolated, with its own Deep IQ (company, products, personas, brand voice and content types), its own content and its own plan. The AI Visibility module reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice and sentiment, shows which of the client's pages AI cites, and lists who wins the citations you are missing. Opportunity Agents turn that data into ideas, each carrying the data point that justifies it. The Writer then turns a planned idea into a finished, brand-grounded article with research, internal and external links, a cover image and metadata, and Autowrite can do it on a set date without anyone in the app.
Articles publish straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks, and Repurpose and the Apps Library turn each one into LinkedIn, X, newsletter and other channel versions. Plans run $99 for Pro, $199 for Grow and $399 for Scale per workspace (20, 40 and 90 articles a month), with a 7-day free trial and no long-term contracts. DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified and rated 4.8/5 on G2.
Engine coverage
Ahrefs Brand Radar has the wider coverage of the two. It offers six index platforms (AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot) and adds Claude for Custom Prompts, which Ahrefs began supporting in July 2026. Grok shows up in Ahrefs' help center, but Ahrefs says it cannot collect new Grok data for now, so it does not count.
In a SE Ranking AI Visibility vs Ahrefs Brand Radar check on engines, SE Ranking tracks five: AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. It has no Claude or Copilot tracking, and SE Visible says Claude is coming soon. In its favor, country, location and language are set per engine, and region targeting applies to the Google engines. Ahrefs also runs custom prompts by location, so this is a small edge at most.
The tier matters as much as the list. SE Ranking gives all five engines from Core. On Ahrefs you choose individual platforms at $199 each or pay $699 for all of them.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks ten 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 an agency can start a client on one engine and widen coverage as the account grows.
Tracking depth and data method
The two tools collect data in different ways, and the better one depends on the job. SE Ranking is the better fit for repeatable client tracking, because it captures real answers through the interface daily for a set list of prompts (100 a day on Core, 250 on Growth) and keeps a history. Ahrefs is the better fit for open-ended research, because the index lets you look up any brand without setting anything up.
Ahrefs adds two data types SE Ranking does not have. It shows fan-out queries, the sub-searches an engine runs, for ChatGPT and Perplexity, usually about two per prompt. And Ahrefs Web Analytics, a separate free tool, shows which pages AI search sends visits to. SE Ranking lists both of these as no: its AI Traffic Analytics page is marked coming soon, and it offers only an estimate of traffic potential.
Both have limits to keep in mind. Ahrefs' methodology notes that prompt sampling reflects its keyword sources and skews toward English, and that visibility estimates are not measured referral traffic. SE Ranking keeps full answer text for 30 days and presence metrics for a year. Either way, AI answers vary from run to run, so a single week of numbers is not much to report to a client. A few months of the same prompts is more reliable.
Pricing and value
For the entry price, SE Ranking is the lower cost. Core is $129 a month and already includes AI tracking, while Ahrefs Brand Radar AI starts at $199 a month for one index. On Ahrefs, the paid suite plans start at Lite for $129, but they only carry 5 tracked prompts a day and no broad index, so the two $129 numbers are not equivalent. Custom prompt packages run $50, $100 and $250 a month for 2,500, 7,000 and 25,000 checks.
Per client, SE Ranking Core covers 10 projects and Growth ($279 a month) covers 30, which works out to roughly $12.90 and $9.30 a project if you fill every slot, though the prompt pool is shared across the account. Ahrefs says index research allows unlimited projects, but its record gives no agency pricing. The Agency Pack on SE Ranking adds 30 client seats and white label for $69 a month, billed annually only.
Neither is clearly cheaper once you add what an agency needs. The Ahrefs Looker Studio connector starts on Advanced at $449, and SE Ranking's AI Search add-on runs $89 to $345 a month for 200 to 1,000 checks.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes one price per plan. Pro is $99 a month with 50 tracked prompts, 20 articles and 5 seats, Grow is $199 with 100 prompts and 40 articles, and Scale is $399 with 200 prompts and 90 articles. Each client workspace is billed and limited on its own, so cost per client is a plan price and not a share of a pool, and the articles are part of that price.
Agency features and reporting
SE Ranking wins this axis for agencies. Both tools support multiple clients, but SE Ranking adds partial white-label reporting through the Agency Pack, Data Studio, GA4 and Search Console integrations on Core and Growth, and routing of AI data to AgencyAnalytics and Whatagraph. Ahrefs lists no white-label option for Brand Radar. It does offer saved reports, each with its own brand, competitors and market, and a Brand Radar Looker Studio connector from the Advanced plan.
Developer access is closer than it looks. SE Ranking includes API and MCP access on every plan, with a hosted MCP server of 180+ tools. Ahrefs offers its Brand Radar API on paid plans from Lite and a hosted MCP server that covers Brand Radar only partly, because its MCP page does not say which Brand Radar data it exposes.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith gives each client a separate workspace with its own context, content and plan, and teammates join as owners or members. A read-only REST API and a read-only MCP server with 23 tools let you pull a client's visibility data, Content Map and content library into your own reporting or an AI assistant.
From insight to action
Neither tool turns the data into finished pages inside the AI module. SE Ranking comes closer: it gives recommendations in its Rankings and Sources views, such as sources that mention competitors but not you, and it has suite-level content tools. Ahrefs surfaces gaps through report filters and expects you to find the action yourself, with content tools in a separate product.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith closes the loop. Opportunity Agents read a client's visibility data and return ideas with the evidence attached. Those ideas move through New Ideas and Planned Content to the Writer, which produces a publish-ready article grounded in that client's Deep IQ, internally linked through the Content Map. You review in Produced Content and publish to the client's CMS, and Repurpose creates the social and email versions. The agency's time goes to judgment and not to briefs and formatting.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits agencies that want one platform for tracking and production, with a workspace and Deep IQ for each client, publish-ready articles on a published monthly allowance, and security certifications to show procurement teams.
- Ahrefs Brand Radar fits agencies already on Ahrefs that need research on any brand, query fan-out or AI referral data, and can accept paying per index.
- SE Ranking AI Visibility fits agencies that want AI tracking inside a lower-priced suite, a card-free trial, white-label options and API and MCP access on every plan.
Ahrefs Brand Radar vs SE Ranking AI Visibility for agencies usually comes down to price per client and whether you need fan-out and referral data. If you want the next step after reporting, DeepSmith covers it.
Start a DeepSmith free trial and run a client workspace for 7 days to see tracking and production working from the same data.
