Attensira vs Ahrefs Brand Radar

Who do AI engines send people to for a free AI visibility check?

We track "free AI visibility checker" for our own site. On 3 October 2026 one ChatGPT answer named four tools and a clear favourite: "For a quick free check, I'd start with Ahrefs." The others were Rank.ai, Semrush and isvisible.ai. Attensira, which runs a free audit of its own, was not named.

From 21 September to 4 October 2026, ChatGPT and Perplexity gave 3,534 answers to the 61 questions we track. Ahrefs was named or linked in 702 of the 3,666 competitor readings in that window. Attensira was named in 197 answers, every one on the three questions that already contain our name. Ahrefs has spent a decade being the answer to SEO questions, and AI engines have learned that. We are new; this page says so before it says anything else.

What is Ahrefs Brand Radar?

Brand Radar is the AI visibility part of the Ahrefs suite. Ahrefs describes it as a way to "track and grow your brand's visibility across AI answers, YouTube, and Reddit". On 4 October 2026 its page described two ways in.

• AI Visibility Index. A map of who gets mentioned across more than 449 million prompts modelled from real searches, covering AI Overviews, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and AI Mode, with Claude available. As served to us in pounds, it was £159 a month for 83 prompts a day and 2,500 checks a month, with overage per check, and £560 a month for all models.
• Custom Prompts. Your own questions, refreshed daily, for a niche too specific to show up in any index. These started at £40 a month and were free for every paid Ahrefs plan from Lite up.

Ahrefs also offers a free AI visibility checker that needs no signup, which is the tool ChatGPT recommended in the answer above.

What Brand Radar is not, on its own page, is a service that changes your site. It measures and it helps you grow, inside a suite whose other tools give your team the backlink, keyword and audit data to act. The acting is your team's.

When is Ahrefs the better choice?

You want to see a whole market. No set of tracked questions, ours included, can match an index of hundreds of millions of modelled prompts for seeing who dominates a category. If your question is "who owns AI answers in my market, and where are the gaps?", Brand Radar's index answers it in one view.

You already pay for Ahrefs. Custom Prompts come free with any paid Ahrefs plan. For an existing customer, the cheapest possible way to start watching AI answers is the tool you already have.

You need Reddit and YouTube visibility alongside AI answers. Brand Radar reports all three in one place. Attensira works Reddit threads that answers cite, but it does not report your YouTube presence the way Brand Radar does.

Your team does SEO in Ahrefs every day. Backlinks, keyword research and site audits are the core of Ahrefs and nothing in Attensira replaces them.

When is Attensira the better choice?

Attensira is software that does your AI-search visibility work: whatever it takes to win the answer. It is the better choice when you already know roughly where you stand and the problem is getting the work done.

Each morning the crew reads the questions you are losing and does up to three pieces of work toward them:

• It rewrites the page an answer should have quoted. On a site in a Git repository that becomes a pull request, opened as a draft by default; on Webflow or WordPress, an unpublished draft in your own editor.
• It writes the missing page for a question nothing on your site answers.
• It goes after the sources the answer trusts. Off-site work starts with pages an engine already cites for your question that name a competitor and not you.
• It drafts your reply on the Reddit or Hacker News thread an answer cites, with a disclosure line, for you to post from your own account.

Everything waits for your yes. A new workspace starts in Draft, and anything that states a claim, a price, a number, a competitor's name, waits in every mode. When a change ships, the crew re-reads the same questions at +7, +14 and +30 days and tells you, with the sample size, whether anything moved.

Why does an answer name a competitor instead of you?

Brand Radar and Attensira both report whether answers mention you. The harder question is why an answer names a competitor instead, and that usually comes down to which pages the engine read before it answered. Our page on mention rate vs citation rate explains the difference between being named and being linked.

Ahrefs is strong on the inputs to that question: who links to whom, which pages rank, which domains carry authority. Attensira works from the outputs: the answer text and the sources it cited, read daily for your questions. The crew's first move on a lost question is to look at the pages the engine cited and decide whether to fix your page, join theirs, or publish something better. That is the step a report leaves to you.

Is a free checker enough?

For a first look, yes. Ahrefs' free checker and our free audit both answer the question a founder asks first: does an AI assistant mention us at all? Our audit asks four engines eight buying questions about your category and shows who gets named instead of you, with every count carrying its sample size. Ahrefs' checker shows how a brand appears across the AI platforms it covers.

A checker stops being enough the week after you run it. Answers change daily, they differ by engine and by how a question is phrased, and a single reading cannot tell you whether a change you made did anything. At that point you need either a team with a tracking tool, or a crew that tracks and works. That is the real choice this page is about.

How did we check this page?

Ahrefs facts come from ahrefs.com/brand-radar, fetched on 4 October 2026. The page was served to us in pounds, so the prices are quoted as shown; Ahrefs may show a different currency to you. Attensira's facts come from docs.attensira.com, with our prices, credits and engines rendered from the same source as our pricing page. Answer counts and the ChatGPT and Perplexity readings come from our own Attensira workspace for attensira.com, read through the Attensira MCP.

Related reading: Ahrefs alternatives, ranked, GEO vs SEO, and how the crew does the work.