Surfais and Ahrefs Brand Radar compared on engine coverage, refresh cadence, dataset composition and price, using Ahrefs' own published methodology.
Verified
6 September 2026
| Dimension | Surfais | Ahrefs Brand Radar |
|---|---|---|
| AI engines included | All five on every plan, including the £69 Starter: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. | Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Grok are published as separate engine indexes. Claude is available only through Custom Prompts, not the core index. No Meta AI or DeepSeek. |
| Engine gating | None. No engine add-ons and no engine unlocks by tier. | The engine list does not expand by tier; check volume does. Claude sits outside the core index at every tier. |
| Entry price | £69/mo Starter, ex-VAT. Growth £199, Scale £479, Enterprise from £1,999. 15% off annual. | $129/mo Lite within the Ahrefs suite. Standard $249, Advanced $449, Enterprise $1,499 on annual commitment. The standalone AI Visibility Index is priced per engine index, from $199/mo each, so every additional index is a separate subscription. |
| Prompts at entry price | 20 prompts, 1 brand, 1 country, 2 competitors. Extra prompts £6 each on brand tiers. | 5 monitored prompts and 150 checks per month at Lite. Custom-prompt packs are $50–$250/mo, with overage around $0.02 per check. |
| Seats | Not published. Plans are scoped by brands, prompts, countries and competitors rather than by seat. | Additional seats $40–$100 per user depending on tier. |
| Refresh cadence | Twice weekly on brand tiers, weekly on Agency Mode, daily on Enterprise. | Google AI Overviews and AI Mode update continuously. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot refresh once a month on a 90-day rolling window, which Ahrefs describes as being for stability. Published by Ahrefs at ahrefs.com/blog/brand-radar-methodology/. |
| Published score methodology | AIS Score weights are published and versioned. Version 2, dated 10 June 2026: Visibility 60%, Position 15%, Sentiment 10%, Share of voice 15%. Published at surfais.com/methodology. | The most transparent data sourcing in this comparison. Ahrefs publishes per-engine monthly query volumes, its refresh cadence, and describes its Estimated Impressions metric in its own words as a modeling choice, not a measured relationship. It does not publish a versioned weighting formula for a single headline score. |
| Free trial | 7 days, no card. 1 brand, one weekly scan plus two manual scans, one audit. | No free trial on any paid plan. The free Webmaster Tools tier does not include Brand Radar. |
| Agency / white-label | Agency Mode at £59 per client brand, minimum 5 brands, 20 prompts each, pooled. White-label reporting is scheduled to ship at the end of September 2026 and is not live. | No agency or white-label tier found. Projects scale 5, then 50, then uncapped. |
| API and integrations | No public API, no MCP server and no Looker Studio connector. | Documented API, Looker Studio connector from Advanced up, and bot crawler monitoring. |
| Security certifications | None. No SOC 2 and no ISO 27001 — SOC 2 is budgeted, not achieved. No SSO or SAML. | ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2. |
| Company stage | Early-stage UK company. Small customer base, no published customer count, no named enterprise logos. | Bootstrapped, no venture capital. Around 143 staff and an estimated $149M ARR as at 2024. Singapore. Brand Radar is bundled into a very large existing customer base. |
Verified 6 September 2026. Prices and features in this category change often; check each vendor's own site before you buy. Prices are shown in each vendor's own published currency and are not converted.
Two rows carry this comparison, and both come from Ahrefs' own published methodology rather than from us.
Refresh. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode update continuously in Brand Radar. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot refresh once a month, on a 90-day rolling window, which Ahrefs explains is for stability. That is a reasonable engineering choice for trend analysis and a poor fit for anyone who needs to know whether last month's work changed what ChatGPT says. Surfais refreshes every engine twice weekly below Enterprise and daily on Enterprise.
Claude. Claude is not in the core index. You can reach it through Custom Prompts, priced separately at $50–$250 a month for prompt packs. Surfais includes Claude on the £69 plan.
There is also a cost shape worth checking. Brand Radar's entry tier is $129 a month for five monitored prompts and 150 checks; the standalone AI Visibility Index is $199 a month per engine index, so each additional index is a separate $199 line on the invoice. Surfais is £69 for twenty prompts across five engines with no per-engine multiplication.
On method, Surfais publishes a versioned weighting for its headline score. Ahrefs publishes something different and, in its own domain, arguably harder — see below.
Ahrefs beats us on more rows than any other product here, and one of those rows is the one we usually claim.
Transparency. Ahrefs is the most open company in this comparison on data sourcing. It publishes its per-engine monthly query volumes, states its refresh cadence explicitly, and describes its Estimated Impressions metric in its own words as a modeling choice, not a measured relationship. Very few vendors will write that sentence about their own headline number. Everything critical on this page about Ahrefs' cadence and dataset comes from Ahrefs' own documentation, which is the point.
Security. ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2. Surfais has neither, no SSO, and SOC 2 is budgeted rather than achieved.
Data depth. A 110-billion-keyword database sits behind the prompt corpus, with both domain-level Cited Domains and URL-level Cited Pages drill-down, plus crawler monitoring. Surfais has nothing of that scale behind it.
Integrations. A documented API and a Looker Studio connector from Advanced up. Surfais has neither.
Google surfaces. Continuous refresh on AI Overviews and AI Mode, backed by the largest dataset in the set.
Company. Bootstrapped, profitable, roughly 143 staff and an estimated $149M ARR, with Brand Radar bundled to an enormous existing customer base.
Choose Ahrefs Brand Radar if you are an SEO team already inside Ahrefs, your priority is Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, and you want AI visibility sitting next to your keyword and backlink data. You will get continuous refresh where it matters most to you, the deepest dataset here, both ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2, and an API. For that buyer it is close to a default.
Choose Surfais if the chatbots are the point. If you need to know what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity say about you on a cadence faster than monthly, and you want Claude inside the core measurement rather than as a prompt pack, Brand Radar's design will frustrate you and ours will not.
Many teams will reasonably run both: Ahrefs for the Google surfaces and the keyword estate, Surfais for the conversational engines.
Ahrefs Brand Radar measures brand visibility across AI answers, YouTube and Reddit, and is sold inside the Ahrefs suite from $129 a month, with a standalone AI Visibility Index priced from $199 a month per engine index. Ahrefs is bootstrapped, has taken no venture capital, employs around 143 people and was estimated at $149M ARR in 2024. It holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2.
Surfais is a UK product that measures five AI answer engines on every plan and scores the result on a published, versioned scale. It is far smaller, holds no security certifications, and offers no API.
Ahrefs publishes the monthly query volumes behind each engine index: ChatGPT 14.5M, Perplexity 14.6M, Gemini 14.6M, Copilot 13.3M, Grok 13M, Google AI Overviews 282M and Google AI Mode 24M. That totals roughly 376 million, of which Google surfaces account for around 306 million — about 81 per cent. The non-Google chatbots together make up under 19 per cent of the dataset, while each engine index is priced identically at $199 a month.
That is a real skew and a buyer should factor it in. It is also a fact we only know because Ahrefs published it. No other vendor in this comparison discloses anything equivalent, and it would be dishonest to use their openness as a stick while treating silence elsewhere as neutral. If you want to check the numbers on this page, you can, and that is entirely to Ahrefs' credit.
Brand Radar refreshes ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot once a month across a 90-day rolling window. Ahrefs explains this as a stability choice, and for long-run trend reporting it is a defensible one: a 90-day window suppresses the noise that makes week-to-week AI visibility numbers so hard to read.
But it means Brand Radar cannot answer the question most teams actually ask after shipping a piece of work: did that change what the engines say? A 90-day rolling window will absorb the change and report it slowly. Surfais refreshes twice weekly on brand tiers and daily on Enterprise, which is faster on the chatbots and slower than Ahrefs on Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, where Ahrefs is continuous.
The IAB's August 2026 framework calls measurement decision-grade when it is reproducible, disclosed and versioned. Ahrefs and Surfais each meet part of that test in different places. Ahrefs discloses its data sourcing in unusual detail and is candid that its impressions metric is a model rather than an observation. Surfais publishes and versions the weights of its headline score — Visibility 60%, Position 15%, Sentiment 10%, Share of voice 15% in version 2, dated 10 June 2026 — and recalibrated it downward in June 2026 against its own commercial interest, after a customer with six mentions in sixty-nine runs was being scored as competitive.
Neither is the complete article. Between them they are the only two products in this comparison where a buyer can check anything at all about how the numbers are made.
Surfais has no SOC 2 and no ISO 27001, no SSO, no public API or MCP server, no Looker Studio connector, and white-label reporting does not ship until the end of September 2026. Against a bootstrapped, profitable company with 143 staff and both certifications, those are not small differences.
Verified 6 September 2026. Prices and features change; check the vendor's own site.