citability vs Ahrefs Brand Radar vs Profound: Which AI Visibility Tool Fits

Three tools get named whenever someone asks how to track AI visibility, and comparing them feature-by-feature produces a table nobody can act on. The useful comparison is narrower: these products sell different jobs, and most buyers pick wrong because they compare prices across jobs instead of within one.

citability leads with a diagnosis. Ahrefs Brand Radar sells a brand-gap lens on top of an SEO suite. Profound sells ongoing enterprise monitoring. A diagnosis answers a question once. Monitoring watches a number every month. All three eventually offer tracking, and the real difference is what you are asked to buy before you know anything: with two of them, the subscription is the entry point.

That ordering matters more than it sounds, because the most common starting position is not a low citation rate but a citation rate of exactly zero, and a zero behaves differently from a small number. It usually has a structural cause that a trend line cannot show you, and tracking it monthly produces a flat chart at zero rather than an explanation.

The short answer#

Pricing above reflects publicly reported figures as of August 2026 and moves often. Confirm with each vendor before buying.

Where each one genuinely wins#

Ahrefs Brand Radar wins on corpus#

Nobody else joins AI brand mentions to a keyword and backlink index of Ahrefs' size. If you want to know which topics AI associates with a competitor instead of you, and then immediately see what those competitors rank for organically and who links to them, that join is the product. Ahrefs' own research is also the strongest public evidence base in this category: the finding that 76% of AI Overview citations come from pages already in Google's top 10 is why treating AEO as a layer on top of SEO, rather than a replacement for it, is the correct default.

The catch is packaging. Brand Radar is an add-on to a subscription you must already hold, and the AI indexes price per platform. If you are an Ahrefs customer, much of this is close to free at the margin. If you are not, you are buying an SEO suite to reach a visibility feature.

Profound wins on depth and scale#

Profound raised a $96M Series C at a billion-dollar valuation in February 2026, and the roadmap shows it. Conversation-level analytics and Agent Analytics for AI bot traffic are real capabilities, and for a team managing many brands with a dedicated owner, the platform is built for exactly that shape of work.

The catch is that it is priced for that team. Agency client workspaces are add-ons on top of the base plan, and the cost compounds per client. A solo operator or a single-site business is buying a platform sized for someone else's org chart.

citability wins on cost of finding out#

The entry point is a free scan that returns a live AI presence rate, not a teaser. It runs real prompts against real engines and reports how often you are actually recommended, alongside 18 infrastructure checks that each pass or fail with the evidence attached. Monitoring afterward is $39 per month, below the entry tier of either alternative and roughly a twentieth of a full Ahrefs Brand Radar configuration.

Two design decisions follow from one principle: never show a number we cannot defend.

No invented composite score. Every claim carries a label, verified or best-effort. Where a signal cannot be measured directly, the report says so rather than folding a guess into a single grade. A composite score that averages a measured value with an estimated one is a number that cannot be acted on, because you cannot tell which half moved.

Crawler identity is verified, not trusted. Any tool reading server logs can count requests claiming to be GPTBot. Claiming a user-agent is trivial, and impersonation is common. citability verifies crawler identity against published address ranges before counting a hit, so "ChatGPT's retrieval crawler fetched this page" means the crawler actually did. This distinction matters most in the exact situation you bought the tool for: deciding whether a page is being used as a source.

The catch is scope. citability does not carry a keyword corpus, and it is not built for an agency running dozens of client workspaces. It answers a question thoroughly, hands you a fix list, and tracks the result cheaply.

The decision, in three questions#

Do you already pay for Ahrefs? Then start with Brand Radar. The marginal cost is low and the corpus join is genuinely unmatched.

Do you have a team, several brands, and a budget line for this? Then Profound is built for you, and the per-client cost is the number to model.

Do you need to know whether you are cited, and what is structurally stopping it? Then get the diagnosis first, which costs nothing. Run the free scan. If the infrastructure checks come back clean and the presence rate is still zero, the problem is off-site consensus, not your site, and no amount of monitoring subscription will surface that faster than one diagnosis will.

The thing all three tools measure around, not through#

Worth naming, because no dashboard closes this gap for you. In a study of 75,000 brands, branded web mentions correlated with AI Overview visibility more strongly than backlinks, domain rating, or referring domains. YouTube mentions showed a 0.737 correlation with ChatGPT visibility, the strongest single factor measured.

Every tool here reports the symptom. The treatment is being named on pages you do not own: editorial and review sites, communities where your buyers already ask questions, and video. Choosing between these products decides how precisely you see the problem. It does not do the work. Related reading on that measurement gap: why AI mentions you without linking to you and why AI recommends your competitors instead.