Ahrefs Adds Custom AI Prompt Tracking To Measure Brand Visibility

As AI assistants increasingly influence how people discover products and services, marketers are under pressure to understand whether their brands appear in AI generated answers at all. Ahrefs has addressed that challenge with the launch of custom AI prompt tracking in Brand Radar, giving teams a new way to monitor brand visibility across platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. The update reflects a growing shift in the MarTech ecosystem as AI driven discovery becomes a meaningful complement to traditional search.

Ahrefs announced that the new capability allows brands to track exactly how they are represented in AI generated responses by defining their own prompts. Until now, measuring visibility in AI assistants has been difficult. AI answers change frequently, platforms do not share underlying query data, and the same question can surface different recommendations from one moment to the next. At the same time, adoption continues to rise. OpenAI has said ChatGPT now reaches hundreds of millions of users each week, while industry analysis from Similarweb estimates that hundreds of billions of prompts are processed annually.

Brand Radar, Ahrefs’ AI visibility product, was originally designed to track prompts derived from popular, high volume topics. This native tracking provides brands with a broad view of how often they appear in AI driven discovery for commonly asked questions. However, many high intent moments happen in the long tail, when users ask more specific questions while comparing options or searching for solutions to concrete problems.

The introduction of custom AI prompt tracking is designed to fill that gap. With the new feature, teams can define and monitor the exact questions that matter most to their business and see how their brand appears across multiple AI platforms. By focusing on specific prompts rather than isolated answers, marketers can gain a clearer and more consistent picture of visibility over time.

“Custom prompts are about granularity,” said Tim Soulo, Chief Marketing Officer at Ahrefs. “Brand Radar’s native index gives brands a broad view across the most commonly searched topics, but custom prompts let teams get much more specific about where they want to gauge their AI visibility.”

Selecting the right prompts to track is a challenge in itself. The way people phrase questions to AI assistants can vary widely, and focusing on too narrow a set of prompts can lead to biased conclusions. Ahrefs said it is building toward workflows that help teams generate and expand prompt lists, making it easier to capture a representative set of real world questions. The goal is to provide a more comprehensive view of how brands surface in AI answers without over relying on anecdotal results.

The launch highlights how AI visibility is becoming a new measurement category for marketers. As conversational interfaces increasingly sit alongside search engines as discovery channels, understanding brand presence in AI responses is emerging as a strategic priority. Custom AI prompt tracking allows marketers to move beyond guesswork and begin treating AI platforms as measurable channels with repeatable insights.

With this update, Ahrefs is positioning Brand Radar as a tool for navigating the uncertainty of AI driven discovery. By combining broad topic coverage with prompt level tracking, the platform aims to help brands understand where they stand today and how their visibility evolves as AI assistants continue to shape consumer decision making.