Wellows vs Ahrefs Brand Radar (2026): citation tracker or AI mention index?
Wellows tracks your own prompts daily and turns missing citations into outreach. Brand Radar sits inside Ahrefs and models AI answers at index scale. Pricing, engines, cadence and fit compared.
Quick verdict
These two tools answer different questions, so the right pick depends on which question you have. Wellows is the better tracker: you choose the prompts, it runs them daily or weekly, and every gap comes back as a task (a page to write, a site to email). Ahrefs Brand Radar is the better research database for teams already paying for Ahrefs, with a modeled prompt index in the hundreds of millions and a direct pivot into backlink data. For tracking a brand or a client book week to week, Wellows wins this head-to-head. Neither one publishes the crawler logs or conversion attribution that would tell you why a citation is missing or what an earned one was worth, which is why we'd trial Promptwatch alongside either.
Two instruments, side by side
Wellows facts are from wellows.com/pricing and its llms.txt, read 25 October 2026. Brand Radar facts are from our Ahrefs Brand Radar listing, whose pricing was read on 24 October 2026.
| Wellows | Ahrefs Brand Radar | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Standalone, citation-first AI visibility platform | AI visibility module inside the Ahrefs SEO suite |
| How you pay | Basic $29, Standard $97, Growth $249, Scale $497 a month, plus Custom | Custom Prompts included with paid Ahrefs plans (from $129/mo on our listing); AI Visibility Index from $199/mo, $699/mo for all models |
| Prompts | Unlimited; volume is limited by a monthly balance of AI answers | Custom Prompts daily quota: 5 (Lite), 10 (Standard), 20 (Advanced). Index: 496M+ prompts modeled from Ahrefs keyword data |
| Engines | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini | AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot; Claude on Custom Prompts only |
| Refresh | Daily or weekly, set per project | Index question sets retested monthly |
| What it counts | Citations: explicit (your page cited) and implicit (a cited third-party page mentions you), with sentiment per cited page | Brand and competitor mention share, plus YouTube and Reddit sources |
| Turning gaps into work | Quick Wins, Content Opportunities, KIVA drafts, Outreach with contact emails | Pivot to Ahrefs backlink and content tools |
| Agencies and clients | Unlimited projects and seats; white-label reporting on every plan | No white-label or per-client structure on our listing |
| AI crawler data | Not published | Ahrefs says it reports AI crawler activity; no crawl-to-citation path documented |
| AI-referred conversions | Not published | Not published |
| Trial | 7 days, no free plan | Not on our listing; Custom Prompts come with any paid Ahrefs plan |
What each one is actually for
Brand Radar's index is built for category questions. Is our share of AI mentions growing across the market? Which competitor's pages dominate AI Overviews in our niche? A modeled corpus that large covers ground no hand-picked prompt list can. When a rival's page wins, it is one click from that page's backlink profile in regular Ahrefs, and for an SEO team whose fixes are mostly links and content, that path is short.
Wellows is built for a working prompt list. You decide which questions matter, and it reads the citation list behind each answer, then the cited pages themselves. The explicit and implicit split is useful in practice: an implicit citation means a review site or forum thread the engine trusts is already talking about you, and a cited page that doesn't mention you at all becomes an outreach target with a contact and a template. Brand Radar shows you share of voice. Wellows shows you who to email next.
Cost for one brand, and for ten
For a single brand already on Ahrefs, Brand Radar's Custom Prompts cost nothing extra, but the quota is tight: 5 daily prompts on Lite, 20 on Advanced. Wellows Basic covers 12 prompts a day across all five of its engines, and Standard covers 43. If you already pay for Ahrefs and only need a handful of prompts, Brand Radar is the cheaper start. If you need dozens of prompts checked daily, Wellows is the better buy.
Adding the AI Visibility Index changes the picture: $199 a month to start, $699 for every model, on top of the Ahrefs subscription. That spend buys research scale, not a longer tracked list.
The ten-client case is where they part ways. Our Brand Radar listing records no white-label or per-client structure, so an agency would be stretching one Ahrefs account across clients. Wellows has unlimited projects and seats on every plan with client dashboards included. Growth at $249 holds 18,000 answers a month, which is 120 prompts daily on all five engines, shared across however many projects you set up.
Accuracy and freshness
Our Brand Radar listing records an independent January 2026 test in which it reported 3 ChatGPT mentions for a site where manual checks found 123. The listing attributes that to snapshot timing and prompts modeled from keyword data. Index sets are retested monthly, so week-to-week changes won't show. Custom Prompts, which track the exact questions you enter, are the better route if you want precision inside Ahrefs.
Wellows collects from each engine's public, logged-out interface with web search on, rather than from APIs alone, and keeps every run so you can compare any two dates. It isn't real time, but daily is a fair cadence for tracking whether last week's page update earned a citation.
Who should pick which
Choose Ahrefs Brand Radar if your team lives in Ahrefs, your questions are about category share and competitor dominance, your fixes run through links, and you need Copilot or Claude (Claude through Custom Prompts) in the same place as your keyword data.
Choose Wellows if you need a tracked prompt list with daily data, you want each gap turned into an outreach target or a draft, or you report to several clients and need white-label dashboards without per-client fees.
Look further if the next question is "can the bots reach our page" or "did any of this convert". Neither tool documents that.
Where we land
Wellows beats Brand Radar as a tracker, and Brand Radar beats Wellows as a research add-on for Ahrefs teams. The layer both leave out is the one we'd buy for: Promptwatch adds Agent Analytics crawler logs with the crawl-to-citation path, visitor analytics that tie AI referrals to conversions, and coverage of Claude, Copilot and Grok on every paid plan. Brand plans start with a free Explore tier and Essential at $95 a month, and agencies can start on Kick-off at $199. Compare it against your shortlist at promptwatch.com.