Ahrefs Brand Radar Tutorial: From Setup to Action
A useful Brand Radar report starts with consistent entities and a measurement question, not with exporting every available chart.
Enter a website for an instant index-based view, confirm the detected brand and competitors, then save the report. Add a small set of custom prompts tied to real customer decisions, choose assistants, locations, and refresh frequency, and wait for tracked data to populate. Read mentions, citations, modeled impressions, and share of voice separately, then turn each important gap into a website, content, PR, or measurement action.
This tutorial covers initial exploration, manual entity grouping, saved reports, filters, custom prompts, tags, baseline design, citation review, and verification. It explains when the large Ahrefs index is useful and when a controlled custom-prompt set is required.
A repeatable first-report workflow
| Stage | Action | Evidence to save |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Choose one decision, market, language, and reporting period | Written measurement question |
| Entities | Confirm brand names, domains, products, and competitors | Entity rules and exclusions |
| Discovery | Explore the Ahrefs index and filter relevant responses | Filters, dates, platforms, cited URLs |
| Tracking | Add a stable custom-prompt sample with tags and frequency | Prompt inventory and settings |
| Diagnosis | Inspect the useful passage and source behind each gap | Response, citation, and gap reason |
| Action | Update one best-fit page or pursue one credible source opportunity | Owner, page, change, deployment date |
| Review | Repeat under the same settings and compare cautiously | New observation plus referrals and conversions |
See which AI crawlers actually reach your website.
Track visits from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, search bots, and other discovery agents-then see which public pages attract their attention.
- Monitor leading AI and search crawlers
- Review which public pages receive visits
- Connect crawler activity to your visibility work
Main Explanation
Start by writing the decision the report must support. Examples include discovering which competitors appear for category questions, finding domains cited for implementation questions, or monitoring whether a fixed set of buyer objections mentions the brand. A report without a decision becomes a collection of volatile numbers. Choose one market and language for the first baseline so geography does not silently change the sample.
Run the quickstart with the main website. Ahrefs says Brand Radar can detect a likely brand and associated competitors automatically. Review every detected entity before accepting it. Add legal names, common product names, and relevant domains only when they represent the same entity. Remove ambiguous short names that can match unrelated companies. Configure competitors by the same rules so share-of-voice comparisons are not structurally biased.
Explore the broad Ahrefs index before creating custom prompts. Filter by platform, date, topic, response, citation, and competitor to identify recurring questions and cited sources. Sort by relevance when you need strong entity matches and by search volume when you want higher-demand modeled opportunities. Export only the rows that can lead to an action and retain the filters with the file.
Save the useful configuration as a report. A saved report preserves brands and filters and enables custom prompts. Build the custom set from sales calls, support questions, GSC queries, category comparisons, implementation tasks, and branded verification questions. Keep prompts natural and distinct. Do not create twenty rewrites of the same question merely to increase the chance of a mention.
For each custom prompt, record the assistant, location, refresh frequency, tag, and owner. Ahrefs currently documents daily, weekly, and monthly tracking. More frequent checks consume more checks, while less frequent schedules allow a larger prompt set. Newly added prompts can take up to 24 hours to show response data. Freeze the wording during the measurement cycle or label the prompt as new when it changes.
Read the report as a diagnostic sequence. First, confirm whether the entity appears. Second, inspect whether the brand is described accurately. Third, open the cited and “found but not cited” pages. Fourth, identify the specific contribution made by competing sources. Fifth, map the gap to the strongest existing owned page. A missing mention may need better evidence or entity clarity; it does not automatically require a new article.
Close with website verification and business outcomes. Test whether the target page is public, canonical, in the sitemap, internally linked, and clear enough to answer the prompt. Track identifiable AI referrals and conversions separately in analytics. TruboRankAI can audit these website foundations and use Search Console context, while Brand Radar supplies the external response and citation research layer.
Practical Steps
- Write one measurement question for the report.
- Enter the website and review detected entities.
- Group valid brand names and domains consistently.
- Add competitors using the same entity rules.
- Explore and filter the broad Ahrefs index.
- Save the report and add distinct custom prompts.
- Choose assistants, locations, tags, and refresh frequency.
- Wait for tracked responses, then diagnose sources before taking action.
- Verify the target website page and monitor business outcomes separately.
Stop guessing whether AI crawlers see your best pages.
Use crawler activity as an early discovery signal, identify pages that receive attention, and find important pages that may need a clearer path.
- Monitor leading AI and search crawlers
- Review which public pages receive visits
- Connect crawler activity to your visibility work
Turn AI crawler visits into a repeatable visibility workflow.
Monitor discovery over time, compare activity across important pages, and use the evidence to decide what deserves attention next.
- Monitor leading AI and search crawlers
- Review which public pages receive visits
- Connect crawler activity to your visibility work
FAQ
Do I need custom prompts to use Brand Radar?
No for broad index research. Custom prompts are useful when you need a stable set of business-specific questions, locations, assistants, and refresh schedules.
How long do new tracked prompts take to appear?
Ahrefs says newly added tracked prompts can take up to 24 hours to show response data.
How many competitors should I add?
Add the smallest set needed for the decision and apply the same entity rules to each. Because share of voice is comparative, changing the competitor set changes the result.
Should every missing mention become a blog post?
No. First check whether an existing product, documentation, comparison, or support page already matches the intent and only needs stronger evidence, clarity, or links.
Sources and methodology
The workflow was derived from Ahrefs' current Help Center sequence and then organized into a reproducible measurement loop. It separates index discovery from custom tracking and separates visibility observations from website access, referrals, and conversions.
These references support the changeable facts and study findings discussed above. Results depend on each source's sample, date, market, query set, and measurement method.