KoldOS vs Ahrefs Brand Radar: market data, or your site.
Ahrefs Brand Radar and KoldOS operate at different scales of the same question. Brand Radar is a module in the Ahrefs suite that tracks brand visibility across AI answers, YouTube, TikTok and Reddit, published at $398 per month for selected platforms and $699 per month for all of them, drawing on a database Ahrefs describes as "475M+ Total monthly prompts" that are "search-backed prompts, not synthetic ones". KoldOS is a generative engine optimisation agency in Australia working on one site at a time. Brand Radar answers what the market is asking and who is being named. KoldOS answers why one particular brand is not, and then fixes it.
01Side by side
What each of us actually sells.
Ahrefs Brand Radar claims checked 8 August 2026
| Dimension | Ahrefs Brand Radar | KoldOS |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A module in the Ahrefs suite to "Track and grow your brand's visibility across AI answers, YouTube, and Reddit".1 | An agency engagement scoped to one business, covering diagnosis and then remediation. |
| Published pricing | Two tiers published: "Select platforms" at $398/month and "All platforms" at $699/month.1 | Scoped and quoted per engagement after a diagnostic. |
| Where the prompts come from | A published database of "475M+ Total monthly prompts", described as "Powered by search-backed prompts, not synthetic ones".1 | A prompt set written for one category from that business's real buying questions, published with the results. |
| Custom prompt allowance | The all-platforms tier publishes "2,500 checks/mo for custom prompts" alongside the prompt database.1 | No per-check ceiling. The constraint is the agreed scope of the engagement. |
| Surfaces covered | "AI Overviews & AI Mode", ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, Grok, plus TikTok, YouTube and Reddit, the last three listed as free while in beta.1 | Answer engines chosen per client, plus the off-site sources those engines are observed to cite for that category. |
| What it tells you | How often a brand appears across tracked prompts and platforms, with search demand and web visibility alongside.1 | Why a specific brand is absent from specific answers, traced to rendering, crawl access, entity clarity or authority. |
| Who does the remediation | Not published as part of Brand Radar. The product is sold as tracking and market data.1 | KoldOS. The technical and editorial changes are the deliverable. |
Sources
Every claim about Ahrefs Brand Radar above is quoted from those pages and was checked on 8 August 2026. Products change their pricing and their feature tiers without notice, so treat anything here as of that date and check the source before deciding on it.
02When to pick them
Pick Brand Radar if the question is about the market, not the site
A database of 475 million search-backed prompts answers questions no agency can answer from a single client's data: what an entire category is really being asked, which brands own which questions, and where demand is moving quarter to quarter. That is genuine market intelligence and it is worth $699 a month to a business making category-level decisions. It is the wrong purchase only if the question is narrower, meaning one site, one gap, and no one free to close it.
03Questions
- What does Ahrefs Brand Radar cost?
- Ahrefs publishes two tiers: "Select platforms" at $398/month and "All platforms" at $699/month, the latter including "2,500 checks/mo for custom prompts". Those figures were read from the Brand Radar page on 8 August 2026.
- Why does Ahrefs emphasise search-backed prompts?
- The published wording is "Powered by search-backed prompts, not synthetic ones", meaning the prompt database is built from observed search demand rather than generated. Any prompt set is only as good as its relationship to what people actually ask, so the provenance of the questions is a fair thing to advertise and a fair thing to ask any vendor about.
- Does tracking TikTok and Reddit matter for AI visibility?
- It is more relevant than it first sounds. Assistants cite community and video sources regularly, and a brand absent from the places an engine likes to draw on will struggle to be named regardless of how good its own pages are. Brand Radar lists those surfaces as free while in beta.
- Can KoldOS work alongside Ahrefs?
- Yes, and the split is natural. The suite supplies market-level demand data and continuous tracking; the agency supplies the diagnosis and the implementation on one site. Neither replaces the other and the two costs answer different questions.
- Is being tracked the same as being fixable?
- No, and the gap between them is where most programmes stall. A dashboard showing a brand named in 4% of answers is a fact, not an instruction. Turning it into work requires knowing which pages were retrievable, which passages were liftable, and whether the engine could identify the business as an entity at all.
04Definitions
Before you buy either
Find out what is actually broken first.
A tracking subscription tells you that you are absent. Our free checker tells you why, across twenty-three checks, with every finding traced to a line in your HTML. Costs nothing and needs no account.