Surfais and Brandlight compared on engine coverage, published pricing, security and method — noting that most Brandlight commercial detail is sales-led rather than public.
Verified
6 September 2026
| Dimension | Surfais | Brandlight |
|---|---|---|
| AI engines included | All five on every plan, including the £69 Starter: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. | Their homepage names five: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Grok. Some third-party reviews claim eleven. The count is not clearly stated on their own site as at 6 September 2026. |
| Engine gating | None. No engine add-ons and no engine unlocks by tier. | Not published. |
| Entry price | £69/mo Starter, ex-VAT. Growth £199, Scale £479, Enterprise from £1,999. 15% off annual. | Not published. Pricing is sales-led and their pricing URL returned a 404 on 6 September 2026. Third-party estimates exist but we have not been able to verify any of them, so we do not repeat them. |
| Prompts at entry price | 20 prompts, 1 brand, 1 country, 2 competitors. Extra prompts £6 each on brand tiers. | Not published. |
| Seats | Not published. Plans are scoped by brands, prompts, countries and competitors rather than by seat. | Not published. |
| Refresh cadence | Twice weekly on brand tiers, weekly on Agency Mode, daily on Enterprise. | Their enterprise page describes automated weekly reporting. That is a reporting cadence; the underlying prompt refresh frequency is not published. |
| 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. | No published methodology found. brandlight.ai/methodology returned a 404 on 6 September 2026, and the Brandlight Score is presented as a percentage with no visible formula. An independent review advises buyers to ask their sales team about sampling design. |
| Free trial | 7 days, no card. 1 brand, one weekly scan plus two manual scans, one audit. | Not published. |
| 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. | An explicit agency partnership programme, and a multi-brand Enterprise HQ view. White-label not published. |
| API and integrations | No public API, no MCP server and no Looker Studio connector. | No public API found. |
| Security certifications | None. No SOC 2 and no ISO 27001 — SOC 2 is budgeted, not achieved. No SSO or SAML. | SOC 2 Type 2, confirmed on their own enterprise page. |
| Company stage | Early-stage UK company. Small customer base, no published customer count, no named enterprise logos. | $35.75M raised in total: a $5.75M seed in April 2025 from Cardumen and G20 Ventures, and a $30M Series A on 11 February 2026 led by Pelion. New York, with Israeli R&D roots. |
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.
The difference a buyer will feel first is that Surfais publishes what it costs and what it covers. Brandlight does not publish pricing at all — their pricing URL returned a 404 on 6 September 2026 — and does not publish prompt volumes, seat allowances or trial terms. Everything is a sales conversation. Third-party estimates circulate; we have not been able to verify any of them and will not repeat them as fact.
Engine coverage is the second difference. Brandlight's homepage names five engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Grok. Some third-party reviews say eleven. Whichever is current, Claude does not appear on their own homepage list, and neither does Google AI Overviews. Surfais covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews on every plan, including the £69 tier, and says so in public.
Third, the score. The Brandlight Score is shown as a percentage with no visible formula, and their methodology URL also returned a 404. The AIS Score publishes its weights — Visibility 60%, Position 15%, Sentiment 10%, Share of voice 15%, version 2, 10 June 2026 — versions them, and was recalibrated downward in June 2026 against our own commercial interest.
Brandlight is the best-funded pure-play in this set and it is built for a buyer we do not serve.
Security. SOC 2 Type 2, confirmed on their own enterprise page. Surfais has no SOC 2 and no ISO 27001 — SOC 2 is budgeted, not achieved — and no SSO or SAML. If your information security review is a gate rather than a questionnaire, Brandlight clears it and we do not.
Crawler and server-log analytics. Bot identification, crawl frequency, server-log analysis and access-denial detection. This is a real capability, it is more than most vendors offer, and Surfais has nothing equivalent. If you need to know which agents are reaching your site and which are being turned away, they can tell you and we cannot.
Multi-brand enterprise reporting. The Enterprise HQ view is built for organisations running many brands under one roof, alongside an explicit agency partnership programme.
Capital and stage. $35.75M raised in total, including a $30M Series A led by Pelion in February 2026. Sentiment analysis comes as standard. Surfais is an early-stage UK company with a much smaller customer base and less runway behind its roadmap.
Choose Brandlight if you are a large enterprise with a formal procurement process and a security gate. SOC 2 Type 2, multi-brand Enterprise HQ reporting and deep crawler and server-log analytics are aimed squarely at you, and a sales-led engagement is how organisations of that size usually buy anyway. If you run several brands or need to prove which agents can and cannot reach your site, they are the stronger option.
Choose Surfais if you want to know the price before the call, know exactly which engines are measured, and read the formula behind your score. For a single-brand marketing team or an agency running client work, £69 a month with all five engines and a published method is a faster, more checkable starting point than an enterprise sales cycle.
If you do talk to Brandlight, ask two things in writing: the current engine list, and how the Brandlight Score is calculated, including sampling design.
Brandlight describes itself as the enterprise platform for AI brand visibility — measure, optimise and grow how your brand appears across AI search. It is based in New York with Israeli research and development roots, and has raised $35.75M in total: a $5.75M seed in April 2025 from Cardumen and G20 Ventures, followed by a $30M Series A on 11 February 2026 led by Pelion. It holds SOC 2 Type 2, confirmed on its own enterprise page.
Its feature set is enterprise-shaped: competitor monitoring, sentiment analysis out of the box, citation and source attribution which appears to be at domain level, a multi-brand Enterprise HQ view, an agency partnership programme, and unusually strong AI crawler analytics covering bot identification, crawl frequency, server-log analysis and access-denial detection.
Surfais is a UK measurement product covering five AI answer engines on every plan, from £69 a month, scored on a published and versioned scale, with a monthly deep-dive audit included at every tier.
Brandlight publishes no pricing. Their pricing URL returned a 404 when we checked on 6 September 2026, and we could find no published figures for prompt volume, seat allowances, or whether a free trial exists. Various third-party sites quote numbers; none of them are sourced to Brandlight and we are not going to repeat them.
This is not a criticism in itself. Sales-led pricing is normal at the enterprise end of most software categories, and it lets a vendor scope a deployment properly rather than force a large organisation into a published tier. It does mean the two products cannot be compared on price at all, and that a buyer cannot self-serve. If you want to know what AI visibility measurement costs before booking a call, Surfais publishes four tiers from £69 to £1,999 and an agency rate of £59 per client brand; Brandlight will tell you on a call.
Brandlight's enterprise page describes automated weekly reporting. That is a reporting cadence, and it is not the same claim as a weekly prompt refresh — the underlying measurement frequency is not published. We flag the distinction because it is the sort of thing that is easy to conflate in a comparison table, and getting it wrong in either direction would be unfair. Surfais refreshes twice weekly on brand tiers, weekly on Agency Mode and daily on Enterprise.
The Brandlight Score is presented as a percentage without a visible formula, and brandlight.ai/methodology returned a 404 on 6 September 2026. An independent review notes the absence of published methodology and advises buyers to ask the sales team about sampling design. That is sound advice for any vendor in this category, including us.
Surfais publishes the AIS weights and versions them. Version 2, dated 10 June 2026, is Visibility 60%, Position 15%, Sentiment 10% and Share of voice 15%. That version lowered scores: a customer with six mentions across sixty-nine runs had been reading as competitive, which was flattering and wrong. The IAB's August 2026 framework calls measurement decision-grade when it is reproducible, disclosed and versioned, and that is the specific claim we make — about the headline score formula, not about transparency in general.
No SOC 2 and no ISO 27001, no SSO, no public API or MCP server, no Looker Studio connector, twice-weekly refresh below Enterprise, white-label reporting not shipping until the end of September 2026, and a company and customer base far smaller than a business that has raised $35.75M. Brandlight's crawler and server-log analytics have no equivalent in our product at all.
Verified 6 September 2026. Prices and features change; check the vendor's own site.