Ahrefs vs SEMrush for AI Search Reporting: 2026 Review from an AEO Consultant

Ahrefs is the stronger AI search report when you need the stored answer, a split between a mention and a citation, and Copilot in the same view as ChatGPT. Semrush is the better buy when the team already works in Semrush and the questions that matter are Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT. I would budget the Ahrefs index as an add-on, not as something a normal subscription includes.

Last updated - November 2026

I am Austin Heaton. Most of the reporting I set up is for fintech teams, with B2B SaaS and a few other industries when the buyer question looks the same. The useful comparison is not which suite has more charts. It is which screen I can defend in a Monday meeting.

Both products moved fast through 2026. Ahrefs Brand Radar now describes a public index of 525 million+ prompts, and Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is sold as its own subscription beside the SEO plans. The pages do not always agree with each other. Where they disagree, I say so below.

Key Takeaways

• Ahrefs Brand Radar stores AI responses and reports mentions and citations as separate metrics. The public index covers Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot.
• That index is a paid add-on. One index starts at $199 a month. All indexes are $699 a month. Lite, Standard, and Advanced already include 150, 300, and 600 custom-prompt checks a month.
• Semrush lists the AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 a month per domain, billed annually, with 25 prompts tracked daily. Semrush One Starter, which bundles SEO and AI visibility, is $199 a month, or $165.17 a month billed annually, with 50 prompts tracked daily.
• Semrush does not put every engine in every report. Its Semrush One help page limits Prompt Tracking to Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT. Perplexity and Gemini are listed on Brand Performance.
• Ahrefs' current help article says it cannot collect new Grok data. Claude is available on custom prompts and consumes 8 checks per update.
• I could not confirm, from Semrush's public help, that you can open the full AI answer behind a score. Ahrefs says it stores every response.

What Should an AI Search Report Show?

An AI search report should show four things a founder can act on: whether the brand was named, whether a URL was cited, which prompt produced that answer, and which competitor won when you did not. A single visibility score hides the split that changes the work.

I use the same four labels I use in a measurement walkthrough and in the longer guide to measuring AEO results.

• Mention: the model names the brand in the answer and does not link it. Useful for narrative, weak for traffic.
• Citation: the model links a domain or a page. This is the line that can become a session.
• Share of voice: how often you appear against a named competitor set on a fixed prompt list.
• Prompt coverage: which buyer questions surface you, and which surface only rivals.

Ahrefs publishes that split in its own words. On the Brand Radar page, mentions are how often the brand name appears in the answer text, and citations are how often AI links to your pages or domains. Estimated impressions are potential visibility weighted by the search volume behind the prompt. They are not clicks. If a vendor blends those into one score, read the definition before you put the number in a board deck. The difference is the same one I walk through in why B2B brands get named and still never cited.

How Do Ahrefs and Semrush Compare for AI Search Reporting?

Ahrefs and Semrush compare on three decisions that change the report: whether you are looking at your own prompts or a prebuilt index, which engines sit inside which report, and whether the number opens onto the answer. Price comes after those three, because a cheap report of the wrong engine is still the wrong report.

Figures below are from the vendor pages I read on 2 November 2026. They move. Check the linked page before you buy.

If you are choosing among dedicated AEO platforms rather than these two suites, the wider shortlist is in my comparison of Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, and Semrush AI Toolkit. This page stays on the reporting job inside Ahrefs and Semrush.

If you want a second pass on the prompt list before you add a subscription, book a discovery call and bring the engines you actually need in the deck.

What Does Ahrefs Brand Radar Track?

Ahrefs Brand Radar tracks AI visibility in two modes. Prompt Tracking follows questions you choose. The AI Visibility Index looks up a brand across prompts Ahrefs has already run. The product page says Prompt Tracking is included for every paid Lite plan and above, and that the index starts at $199 a month.

Where the data comes from

Ahrefs describes two indexes on the Brand Radar page. Prompt-based indexes cover ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews, and AI Mode. Ahrefs says it takes queries from its keyword database, expands them with People Also Ask and semantic fanout, runs the resulting prompts through each platform, and stores the responses. Search-query indexes exist only for AI Overviews and AI Mode: they track keywords that triggered an AI answer inside Google, and whether the brand appeared.

The same page says question sets are re-tested monthly on a 90-day reporting window, that search demand refreshes every few days, and that web visibility refreshes every few minutes. Custom prompts can be daily, weekly, or monthly, and the help center says a new prompt can take up to 24 hours to show an answer.

The product page's current index size is 525 million+ prompts. The custom-prompt help article still tells readers to use the AI platform purchase for visibility "across 350M+ prompts." Both sentences are on Ahrefs pages. I am using 525 million+ as the figure on the product page, and I would not quote the help article's 350 million as if it were the same number.

Mentions, citations, fanout, and sentiment

The metrics Ahrefs lists are mentions, citations, AI share of voice, and estimated impressions. Custom prompts and the index both include sentiment, buyer-journey stage, and tags for topic or campaign. For ChatGPT and the other custom-prompt engines, the product page also says you can see fanout queries, the extra searches an assistant generates while answering. That is the closest thing either suite publishes to "what the model looked up."

Custom prompts can target Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude. The help center also lists Grok, with this note: due to changes in Grok's policy, Ahrefs cannot collect any new data for the time being. Ahrefs announced Grok in Brand Radar in April 2026, included in the all-indexes add-on or sold at $199 a month on its own (Ahrefs, April 2026). I would not buy Grok coverage until that collection note is gone. Claude is real on custom prompts, and the product page says Claude consumes 8 checks per update, against 1 check for a normal run.

A check is one prompt, times one model, times one location. Five prompts, daily, on one platform, are 150 checks a month. That is why the product page can say "Lite 5, Standard 10, Advanced 20" daily prompts and the help center can say 150, 300, and 600 checks a month. Same allowance, two ways of printing it.

Pricing and what the SEO plan does not include

Ahrefs' pricing page, read on 2 November 2026, lists Lite at $129 a month, Standard at $249, Advanced at $449, and Enterprise at $1,499 a month with an annual commitment. Annual billing is described as up to 17% off, and Ahrefs' own plan guide says you pay for 10 months and receive 12. The same guide lists Starter at $29 a month with no tracked AI prompts.

AI prompt checks on that pricing page are 150 on Lite, 300 on Standard, and 600 on Advanced. Standard adds "Brand Radar: Web visibility." That line is the web module, not the AI index. The AI index prices live on the Brand Radar page and in the help center:

• One AI index: $199 a month.
• All indexes: $699 a month, including 2,500 custom checks, then $0.020 per extra check.
• Custom prompt packs: $50 a month for 2,500 checks, $100 for 7,000, $250 for 25,000. Overages are $0.020, $0.015, and $0.010 per check.

The index can be searched with no setup, including historical responses back to 2025, and Ahrefs says there is no domain cap. Ahrefs also says the index works best when the brand already has search demand, and that custom prompts are the right tool when the brand is not well known or the query is unusual. That sentence matters for early fintech. A payments or payroll brand with a thin keyword footprint will look invisible in a search-backed index even when buyers are asking ChatGPT about it by category.

Reporting and exports

The help center documents an API button on AI visibility reports. Pulling custom-prompt data that way does not consume API units. New prompts show up in Overview and AI Visibility, with a filter for Ahrefs prompts, tracked prompts, or both. A customer quote on the Brand Radar page, from Laura Lancu at Octopus Energy, describes exporting responses. I am treating that as evidence that export exists, not as a published row limit. I did not find a Brand Radar-specific CSV cap.

Suite reporting is separate. The pricing page lists a Report Builder add-on at $99 a month for 50 reports, 500 widgets, and scheduling. Looker Studio integration is on the Advanced plan. Account-level export row caps in Ahrefs' plan comparison are large (the help table lists 500,000 export rows a month on Lite). Those caps are for the subscription, and I would not assume they are the Brand Radar limit.

What Does Semrush Track for AI Search?

Semrush tracks AI search inside the AI Visibility Toolkit, and inside Semrush One, which bundles that toolkit with the SEO toolkit. The standalone pricing page lists mentions from ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, and Perplexity, 25 custom prompts with daily rankings, one domain for Brand Performance, competitor analysis, prompt research, an AI-readiness site audit, and daily, weekly, and monthly updates. The price on that page is $99 a month per domain, billed annually. I did not see a separate month-to-month rate there.

The toolkit knowledge base adds the limits behind that price: one project, 300 daily queries in AI Analysis reports, 1,000 daily queries in Prompt Research, 25 prompts in Prompt Tracking, AI search checks in Site Audit for up to 100 pages, and 10 CSV exports a day. It also says there is no free trial of the toolkit. An extra Brand Performance domain is $99 a month. An extra 50 prompts are $60 a month. An extra user license is $99. CSV export is capped at 1,000 rows per export.

Which report covers which engine

This is the part I would print and tape to the monitor. Semrush's own articles do not use one engine list.

• Semrush One help (What is Semrush One?): AI Analysis reports cover Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT. Brand Performance covers Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Prompt Tracking covers Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT.
• Features article (Semrush features for AI visibility): Visibility Overview covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews, from the Semrush Prompt Database. The Brand Performance section on that same page says responses are analyzed across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. That adds AI Overviews to Brand Performance, which the Semrush One article does not list there.
• Toolkit FAQ: Brand Performance "gathers a vast collection of common queries and runs them through LLMs like ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode." Those prompts are generated from your domain and location. Semrush calls them out as a mix of branded and non-branded queries in the features article, and says the reports update weekly.

So Perplexity and Gemini are in the product, and they are not in the Prompt Tracking list on the Semrush One page. If your board asks "are we in Perplexity for this exact question, every day," the page I would trust says that job is not Prompt Tracking. It is Brand Performance, which is weekly and built from prompts Semrush generates. Copilot does not appear as a tracked answer engine on any of these pages. Site Audit does check whether you block Claude and Perplexity crawlers. A crawler check is not a citation report.

Semrush One prices on the live pricing page

The English SEO and AI Search pricing page, read on 2 November 2026, shows:

• SEO: $139 a month, or $117.33 a month billed annually. Five sites, 500 keywords a day, AI performance tracking, AI sentiment, AI visibility reports, and custom prompt monitoring. The card does not state a prompt count. The features article still says SEO starts at $139.95 a month. I am using the pricing page.
• Starter (SEO + AI Search): $199 a month, or $165.17 billed annually. Five sites, 500 keywords, 50 prompts tracked daily, one AI brand-performance domain, 300 AI visibility reports a day, and an AI-ready site audit.
• Pro+: $299 a month, or $248.17 billed annually. Fifteen sites, 1,500 keywords, 100 prompts tracked daily, plus historical SEO data and content optimization.
• Advanced: custom, via a demo. The card says 40+ sites, 5,000+ keywords, and unlimited prompts tracked daily.
• Free: $0. One demo project, 10 reports a day, and some AI visibility features.

The toolkit knowledge base still describes Semrush One Advanced as 200 prompts a day. The live pricing card says unlimited, and it says custom pricing. If you are buying Advanced, use the pricing page and the order form, not the older sentence in the knowledge base. Semrush's Semrush One article says a free account can explore Semrush One on a 7-day trial. That trial is for Semrush One, not for the standalone toolkit, which the toolkit article says has no trial.

Reporting

Paid Semrush plans include My Reports, and the features article says you can put AI referral traffic and conversions from Google Analytics on a report alongside visibility metrics. The toolkit article says you can export CSV or PDF, or build the report in My Reports. Competitor Research compares you with up to four competitors on mentions, citations, and topics. Position Tracking can follow AI Overviews on any plan. Tracking on AI platforms such as ChatGPT and AI Mode requires Semrush One or the AI Visibility Toolkit.

What I could not confirm is the raw answer. Ahrefs' help center has a section titled for viewing the responses of custom tracked prompts. I did not find an equivalent sentence in the Semrush articles above. Until I do, I treat a Semrush score as a score, and I open the engine myself when a client decision depends on the wording.

Why Do Ahrefs and Semrush Disagree?

They disagree because they are not sampling the same questions on the same engines at the same time. Ahrefs' index is built from search demand and stored responses, re-tested monthly. Semrush's Brand Performance set is generated for your domain and refreshed weekly. A monthly distribution and a weekly synthetic set will not print the same share of voice, even when both vendors are acting in good faith.

Three other splits show up in client exports:

• Engine mix. A Copilot citation exists in an Ahrefs custom-prompt report and has nowhere to land in the Semrush Prompt Tracking list I quoted.
• Mention versus citation. Ahrefs defines both. Semrush's competitor report includes both, and the AI Visibility Score is defined as mentions against the median of competitors. A mention-based score can rise while citations stay flat.
• Google's own AI surfaces. AI Overviews and AI Mode are inside Google Search, and they do not behave like a chatbot. I keep them on a separate line, for the reason in Google AI Mode versus AI Overviews.

Search Console is still the source of truth for Google's side of this. The generative AI performance reports show impressions when a URL appears in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative features in Discover. They do not show ChatGPT. I pair the suite report with Search Console's AI reports and with GA4 for ChatGPT and Perplexity referrals. The Search Console walkthrough is how I track AI Overviews in Search Console. A visibility tool that cannot be tied to those two systems is a research tab, not a revenue report.

Verdict

Ahrefs wins the reporting job when the audience for the report will ask "show me the answer." Stored responses, a published mention-versus-citation definition, fanout queries, Copilot, Claude on custom prompts, and an index with no domain cap are the features I can point at on Ahrefs' own pages. The cost of using the index for real is the $199 or $699 add-on, on top of a suite that already costs $129 to $449 a month before Enterprise.

Semrush wins when the team already lives there and the deck is about Google AI plus ChatGPT. Starter at $199 a month, or $165.17 billed annually, buys SEO tracking and 50 daily prompts in one login. The $99 toolkit is the right add-on when you do not need another SEO suite. It is a weaker audit trail, on the public docs, because I cannot confirm the stored answer, and because Perplexity and Gemini sit on a different report from the daily prompt tracker.

Neither tool earns the citation. They report it. For a wider stack, including tools built only for this job, I still start with an LLM monitoring setup and only then pick a vendor. Publishing the pages those reports ask for is a different purchase, which is why I separated Outrank, Arvow, and Distribb into their own comparison.

Which Should You Choose?

Pick from the job, then from the contract you already have.

• You already pay for Semrush, and the prompts are Google AI and ChatGPT. Turn on Semrush One Starter, or the $99 toolkit if the SEO plan is enough. Do this before you add Ahrefs.
• You already pay for Ahrefs Lite or above. Spend the included checks first. Five to twenty daily prompts on one engine is enough to learn whether the channel moves. Buy a $50 prompt pack or a $199 index when that allowance truncates the list.
• The brand is new, or the category language is not in the keyword database. Use custom prompts. Ahrefs says the index under-covers brands with little search demand. Semrush Brand Performance will invent a prompt set from your domain, which is useful, and it will not be the wording your sales team hears on calls unless you also track those sentences yourself.
• You need Copilot, or Claude, in the same log as ChatGPT. Ahrefs custom prompts. I did not find those answer engines on Semrush's tracking lists. Grok is listed at Ahrefs and currently paused for new data.
• An agency reports many domains. Ahrefs' index has no domain cap. Semrush charges $99 a month for each extra Brand Performance domain on the toolkit, and another $99 for each extra user license. Run that math before you call Ahrefs expensive.
• The deck has to include the sentence the buyer saw. Ahrefs, because the stored response is documented. I would not promise that from Semrush on current public docs.
• Fintech, payments, payroll, or another regulated offer. Buy the tracker. Do not hand the narrative to a score you cannot open. The same standard is why I keep answer engine optimization as the work after the report, not as a feature of the report.

On live accounts, Austin Heaton's rule is one fixed prompt list, opened in the tool and opened in the engine whenever a number moves. The tool is allowed to be faster than me. It is not allowed to be the only witness.

What I Could Not Confirm

• A month-to-month price for the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit. The pricing page shows $99 a month, billed annually.
• That Semrush shows the full AI answer text behind a metric.
• A single Semrush engine matrix. The Semrush One article and the features article disagree on whether Brand Performance includes AI Overviews.
• The Advanced prompt cap. The knowledge base still says 200 a day. The pricing page says unlimited, on a custom plan.
• The size of Semrush's prompt database. I am not repeating older index figures I did not re-read for this update.
• Whether Ahrefs still displays historical Grok responses. The help article only says new collection is paused.
• A Brand Radar CSV row limit. Export is described by a customer on the product page and by the API docs, not by a row cap I could quote.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Ahrefs Brand Radar come with a normal Ahrefs plan?

Lite, Standard, and Advanced include custom-prompt checks: 150, 300, and 600 a month. The prebuilt AI Visibility Index is separate and starts at $199 a month for one index. Starter, listed at $29 a month in Ahrefs' plan guide, does not include tracked AI prompts.

Which AI engines does each tool report?

Ahrefs' public index covers Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot. Custom prompts add Claude, and the help center lists Grok with new collection paused. Semrush's toolkit pricing page names ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, and Perplexity. Prompt Tracking, on the Semrush One help page, is Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT.

Can I track my own buyer prompts?

Yes. Ahrefs counts one check as one prompt, on one model, in one location, and you choose a daily, weekly, or monthly cadence. Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit includes 25 prompts tracked daily. Semrush One Starter includes 50, and Pro+ includes 100.

Do these tools show the AI answer behind the score?

Ahrefs says Brand Radar stores every response, and the help center explains how to view custom-prompt responses. I could not confirm the same stored-answer view in Semrush's public help. When the wording matters, I open the engine.

How much extra does AI reporting cost on top of the SEO suite?

On Ahrefs, one index starts at $199 a month and all indexes are $699 a month. Custom-prompt packs start at $50 a month. Semrush lists the AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 a month per domain, billed annually. Semrush One Starter is $199 a month, or $165.17 a month billed annually.

Which tool should a fintech or B2B team buy first?

If you already pay for Semrush and the questions are Google AI and ChatGPT, start there. If you need Copilot, a stored answer, or citations split from mentions, start with Ahrefs' included checks and add an index when the brand already has search demand. I would run the same prompt list in both before an annual add-on.

Will either tool get the brand cited?

No. Both tools report visibility. Citations come from pages, entities, and sources the models already trust. The report tells you where you are missing. It does not publish the page that fixes it.

Read next:

• Profound vs Peec AI vs Otterly vs Semrush AI Toolkit
• How to Measure AEO Results
• Outrank vs Arvow vs Distribb for Automated Blog Posting

If the export is already arguing with itself, book a 30-minute call and we will read the prompt list against the engines your buyers actually open.