Scrunch vs Ahrefs Brand Radar: Pricing Breakdown, Index Fees or Prompt Plans

Scrunch sells a tracked-prompt plan, $250 a month for 125 prompts, while Ahrefs Brand Radar sells access to a pre-collected prompt index at $199 a month per index, with custom prompts as a low-cost add-on. Scrunch suits teams following their own prompts and how AI reads their pages, and Ahrefs suits teams researching any brand without a prompt list. DeepSmith is the stronger alternative if you also want the articles written and published, since its plans include tracked prompts and a monthly allowance of publish-ready articles.

Scrunch vs Ahrefs Brand Radar is mostly a question about what you want to pay for, and the price tags only make sense once you see that. Scrunch gives you a fixed number of prompts to track each month. Ahrefs Brand Radar gives you a view into an index it has already collected, and you pay more or less depending on how many indexes you open and how many of your own prompts you add. Both are monitoring tools, and neither one finishes the job once you know where you're missing. DeepSmith covers that last step, and it comes up again below.

Scrunch vs Ahrefs Brand Radar: the short answer

• Choose DeepSmith if you want to track AI answers and also produce the articles that close the gaps, with plans from $99 to $399 a month that include tracked prompts and a monthly allowance of publish-ready articles.
• Choose Scrunch if you want a fixed tracked-prompt plan at $250 a month, with a 7-day trial, five page audits a month, and answer position and sentiment on the entry tier.
• Choose Ahrefs Brand Radar if you want to research how AI mentions any brand without building a prompt list, at $199 a month per index or $699 a month for all of them, and you can live with monthly refreshes on the index data.

Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.

Scrunch

Scrunch is an AI search visibility platform that tracks how brands appear and get cited in AI answers, audits sites for AI agents, and can serve AI-optimized page versions to agents at the edge. It was founded in 2023 and Sitecore acquired it in 2026. It is built for marketing, SEO and web teams, plus agencies, that want answer monitoring tied to work on how AI agents read their pages.

The standout is how much sits on the entry plan. Core is $250 a month and covers 125 prompts across four engines, five competitors, five site audits a month, brand position and sentiment in answers, and a limited view of the sub-queries engines run. Scrunch also goes past monitoring into the site layer, with Agent Traffic analytics that sort AI bot visits into training, indexing and retrieval, and the Agent Experience Platform for Enterprise.

The limits are mostly about where Core stops. It covers one country, one language and four engines, and Claude, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Meta AI and Grok are Enterprise only. Annual prices and overage rates aren't published. Scrunch's pricing grid lists basic content generation on Core, but its own comparison page has said it doesn't offer AI-generated content, so what that line produces isn't clear.

On reviews, G2 shows 4.6/5 from 73 reviews as of September 30, 2026. Reviewers praise ease of use and actionable recommendations, and some object to engines being held back for higher tiers. Capterra and TrustRadius had no reviews that day.

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 drawn from Ahrefs' keyword data, across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. Custom Prompts let you track your own questions on a schedule, and they add Claude. It's built for marketing and SEO teams, especially people who already use Ahrefs, who want to look up AI mentions and citations for any brand or topic.

The standout is that you can search a brand or category right away, with history back to 2025, and mentions are weighted by search volume, so you can see which visibility matters most. Reports cover mentions, citations, cited pages, AI share of voice and fan-out queries for ChatGPT and Perplexity, and there's an API and a Looker Studio connector.

The limits are about timing and scope. The broad indexes are re-tested monthly on a 90-day window, so daily data needs Custom Prompts. Ahrefs says it doesn't offer free trials, and the module describes no content briefs, writing, CMS publishing or native sentiment. Ahrefs also notes that its prompt sampling reflects its keyword sources, with an English-language lean, so the numbers are directional.

Review ratings here belong to the Ahrefs suite, not to Brand Radar alone: 4.5/5 on G2 from 717 reviews, and 4.7/5 on Capterra from 585, checked September 30, 2026. One Brand Radar reviewer reported that updates to the index changed historical numbers, which is a single report and not a pattern.

DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes

Scrunch and Ahrefs Brand Radar both stop at the report. Scrunch turns gaps into briefs and page recommendations, and Ahrefs Brand Radar surfaces mention and citation gaps through report filters, but neither one describes a path from the gap to a finished, published article. DeepSmith does, and that's the difference that matters if the point of tracking is to change what AI says about you.

DeepSmith is an AI search analytics and content production platform in one. The AEO module checks the questions you define on a schedule and reports mention rate, citation rate and share of voice, with a per-platform breakdown, a competitor leaderboard and the sources AI cites most. Its Pages view shows which of your own pages AI cites and the prompts driving them.

From there, Opportunity Agents read that data and return content ideas with the data point that justifies each one. The Writer turns a planned idea into a finished article, researched, internally and externally linked, with a cover image and publish-ready metadata, grounded in Deep IQ, which stores your brand, product, persona and voice context once. Autowrite can run the whole thing on a schedule, and Produced Content publishes straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks.

The pricing is published and fixed. Pro is $99 a month ($80 billed annually) with 50 tracked prompts and 20 articles a month. Grow is $199 ($160 annually) with 100 prompts and 40 articles. Scale is $399 ($299 annually) with 200 prompts and 90 articles. Pro tracks ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten engines. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial and there are no long-term contracts. DeepSmith's plans don't include crawler log analytics, and its tracking reports the pages AI actually cites so the Writer can produce the content that closes the gap. It has a 4.8/5 rating on G2 and is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified.

Pricing and value

On Scrunch vs Ahrefs Brand Radar pricing, Ahrefs Brand Radar is cheaper to start with and more complicated to total up, and Scrunch is more expensive to start with and easier to predict.

Scrunch has one public self-serve number, $250 a month for Core. That buys 125 unique prompts, 5,000 responses a month, five seats, one brand workspace, and the 7-day trial with a card on file. Enterprise is quote-based. Agency Core is listed at $500 a month. Annual pricing, overage rates and extra-seat prices aren't published, so a buyer who needs a firm yearly figure has to ask.

Ahrefs Brand Radar prices the index and the prompts separately. Each AI Visibility Index is $199 a month, which is a single index you choose from AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot or Gemini, and all of them are $699 a month. Custom prompt packages are $50 a month for 2,500 checks, $100 for 7,000 and $250 for 25,000. A check is one prompt on one engine in one location, so the count climbs quickly. At 125 prompts on four engines checked daily, that's about 15,000 checks a month by my math, which puts you in the $250 package, the same sticker price as Scrunch Core. The all-platform purchase includes 2,500 checks of its own, and extra checks cost $0.020 each on the Basic package. Claude uses 8 checks per update. Paid Ahrefs suite plans from Lite at $129 a month also carry a small custom prompt allowance of 150 to 2,500 checks, and there's no trial for any of it.

So the winner on price depends on the job. For researching other brands, Ahrefs Brand Radar's index is the better value, because Scrunch is built around prompts you choose. For tracking a fixed set of your own prompts across several engines, Scrunch at $250 is easier to budget, and Ahrefs lands in the same range once the checks add up. For a small tracked set, Ahrefs custom prompts from $50 are the cheapest way in.

What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith bundles the tracking and the production into one monthly price. Pro at $99 a month includes 50 tracked prompts and 20 articles, so the same budget that buys a tracking-only plan elsewhere also covers the writing and publishing that act on what the tracking finds.

Engine coverage

In Ahrefs Brand Radar vs Scrunch on engine coverage, Ahrefs has the wider choice on its broad indexes, and Scrunch has the wider list if you count its Enterprise plan.

Ahrefs lists six index platforms: Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. You choose them individually at $199 each or take all of them at $699. Custom Prompts add Claude, and Grok is listed in the help center but Ahrefs says it can't collect new data for the time being, so it doesn't count today. Scrunch Core covers four engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot, and Enterprise brings the list to nine by adding Claude, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Meta AI and Grok.

For a buyer comparing the entry plans, Ahrefs gives you more choice for $199 per index than Scrunch's fixed four does for $250. The catch is that each additional index adds to the bill.

What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks ten engines at the Enterprise level: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. Coverage rises by plan, from ChatGPT on Pro to Perplexity on Grow and Gemini on Scale, and the same plans include the articles written for the prompts being tracked.

Tracking depth and data method

Scrunch wins on depth for your own prompts, and Ahrefs Brand Radar wins on breadth of data to explore.

Scrunch collects new prompts daily for the first 14 days and then refreshes on a 72-hour default, with on-demand refresh. Each stored response keeps its text, citations, persona, platform, sentiment and competitor details. It reports where your brand sits in an answer as top, middle or bottom, and it shows sentiment on both plans. Scrunch says it collects with a mix of browser automation and official platform APIs, but it doesn't say which applies to which engine.

Ahrefs works differently. The index re-tests its question sets monthly on a 90-day window, so it shows what the market looked like over a long stretch, not what changed yesterday. Daily, weekly or monthly updates come from Custom Prompts, which draw down your checks. Its AI Responses report stores full answers you can filter by prompt, response and cited URL. The module describes no in-answer position metric and no native sentiment, and Ahrefs doesn't state how answers are collected. The Ahrefs methodology notes also say visibility estimates are not measured referral traffic.

Neither tool's numbers should be read as exact. Both sample answers that vary from run to run, so the direction over a few months tells you more than any single day.

What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith checks your tracked prompts on a schedule and reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice and sentiment, with a visibility trend that compares one period with the last. Each prompt keeps its full answer history, so you can read what an engine actually said and watch it change.

Competitor and citation analysis

Scrunch has the edge on citation analysis for tracked prompts, and Ahrefs Brand Radar has the edge on search-demand context.

Both record the sources AI cites and which of your own pages earn citations. Scrunch shows top cited domains and URLs, splits citations by owner type (your brand, competitors, third parties and social), lets you build up to three custom segments, and benchmarks five competitors on Core. Its Share of Voice view filters by platform, persona, funnel stage, country and competitor.

Ahrefs Brand Radar ranks Cited Domains and Cited Pages for any brand or topic, including third-party sources such as Reddit, and reports AI share of voice against the competitors you configure. It also links visibility back to search, with impressions weighted by Google search volume, and adds YouTube and Reddit visibility, which are free while in beta. The competitor limit for standalone Brand Radar reports isn't stated.

What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith's competitor citations view shows who wins citations for your prompts, on which exact pages, and how each competitor does by platform. The Content Map adds the other half, comparing your site and your competitors' sites topic by topic so coverage gaps and untapped topics are measured instead of guessed.

From insight to action

Scrunch gets closer to action than Ahrefs Brand Radar does, though neither writes and publishes articles in a way their records describe.

Scrunch's Insights and Recommendations turn data into suggested actions, Content Gaps detect missing content for tracked prompts and turn a gap into a content brief, and the Page Optimizer produces optimized page versions, one a month on Core. On Enterprise, those versions can be served to AI agents at the edge. Scrunch's content generation scope is unclear, as noted above, and no CMS connector is named.

Ahrefs Brand Radar surfaces mention and citation gaps through filters, and its academy walks through gap workflows by hand. It describes no automated recommendations, briefs, writing or publishing for the module. Ahrefs sells content tools such as AI Content Helper separately, as part of its Content Kit from $99 a month.

What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith closes the loop in one platform. Opportunity Agents turn tracked data into ideas with the evidence attached, the Writer produces the article in your stored brand voice, and Produced Content publishes it to your CMS. Repurpose and the Apps Library then turn each article into LinkedIn, X, newsletter and other channel versions, so distribution doesn't fall off after publishing.

Which should you choose

• Choose DeepSmith if you're a content or marketing team that wants to know where you're missing in AI answers and publish the articles that fix it, without pairing a tracker with a separate writing tool. It fits teams planning around a monthly article count and a published price, from $99 to $399 a month, with a free trial first.
• Choose Scrunch if you want steady tracking of your own prompts, and you also care about how AI agents read your site. A single-brand team testing four engines can start on Core at $250 a month, and larger teams or agencies can move to Enterprise for the wider engine list.
• Choose Ahrefs Brand Radar if you already use Ahrefs, or you need to look up any brand or topic without building a prompt list first. It's a good fit for established brands with real search demand, and the $50 custom prompt packages cover a small tracked set on top.

Try DeepSmith free for 7 days and see what tracking and writing look like in one workspace: start a free trial.