Ahrefs owns backlinks. SKYA owns the answer engines.
Ahrefs is the reference-grade backlinks and SEO suite; Brand Radar is its AI mention tracking, from $199 a month, over an index of hundreds of millions of prompts. SKYA covers the AEO job for your own brand and goes further on it: up to 9 AI platforms, competitor intelligence, 4 specialist agents, hallucination defense and one-click Fix Now, from $59 a month. Most serious teams end up running both.
Keep Ahrefs for backlinks and market-wide AI data. Run SKYA as the purpose-built AEO layer for your own brand.
Ahrefs Brand Radar's position: Category-leading backlinks and SEO suite, from $129 a month (Lite). Brand Radar AI, from $199 a month and $699 for all models, tracks where AI answers cite or omit a brand across an index of hundreds of millions of prompts.
| Capability | SKYA | Ahrefs Brand Radar |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Dedicated AEO platform | SEO suite with AI add-on |
| Starting price for AI tracking | $59 a month (Starter: 4 AI platforms, 50 tracked prompts) | Brand Radar AI from $199 per month; $699 for all AI models |
| AI platforms tracked | Up to 9 (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, DeepSeek, Grok, Copilot). 4 on Starter, 7 on Agency, all 9 on Brand Pro at $199 and Agency Pro at $649 | Brand Radar: AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, with Claude on higher tiers |
| Prompt dataset | The prompts you track, read on your plan's schedule | An index of hundreds of millions of prompts |
| Hallucination audit | Included on every paid plan: 3 to 7 chat assistants by plan, each claim checked against your facts | Not listed on the Brand Radar page |
| Backlinks at scale | Not the product | Category leader |
| Classic keyword research | Live SERP-verified ranked keywords | Category leader |
| Publish drafts and fixes to your site | One-click install on WordPress, head fixes through the SKYA apps for Shopify and Webflow, drafts into all three and eight headless stacks, seven of them in beta | Not listed on the Brand Radar page |
| Prompt volume in your market, ICP and intent filters | Search demand scored 1 to 5 per tracked prompt, in the country you track, with persona and intent filters | Classic search volume; a market-wide AI prompt index in Brand Radar |
| Citation freshness and hidden sub-queries | Cited pages dated; the searches behind each answer recorded | Not listed on their feature page |
| Topic clusters and prompt tags | Topic clusters with suggested topics, and intent, buyer stage, persona and branded or comparison tags on every prompt | Prompts tagged by hand by topic, funnel stage or campaign; topic suggestions and automatic tags not listed (checked 15 October 2026) |
| AI crawler visits and AI referrals | AI crawler visits by page, on every plan, from your Cloudflare, the SKYA Helper for WordPress, a webhook with snippets for Vercel, Akamai and your own server, or a log upload (CloudFront and Google Cloud CDN included), plus an AI referral snippet; for any other host, SKYA Edge at $15 a project a month | AI crawler visits as they happen, and the pages AI search sends traffic to (checked 15 October 2026) |
| Ads in AI answers | Ads in ChatGPT answers: the prompts that carry them, the share of answers with ads, and which advertisers appear, you and tracked rivals marked | Not listed on the Brand Radar page (checked 15 October 2026) |
| Honesty rules | Refund when nothing measured; scores withheld below the evidence floor | Not listed on their feature page |
| Meta Ads Hub | Included: creative lab, fatigue read, fixes with copy and image briefs | Not listed on their feature page |
| Google Reviews | Free on every plan: request links, QR codes, private feedback, what AI platforms say about your reputation | Not listed on their feature page |
| Reddit Visibility | Included from Agency and on Brand Pro: cited threads, who is named, the gaps | Not listed on their feature page |
| AI Shopping (AI shopping shelf) | Add-on from $29: product visibility, position and win rate against rival products on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Copilot, with price, stock and dead link alerts | Not listed on their feature page |
| Seats | Unlimited on every plan | See their plans |
A tick marks the side that leads on that row. No tick means the two are even, or not directly comparable. Ahrefs facts checked on 25 September 2026 against ahrefs.com/brand-radar and ahrefs.com/pricing. A cell that carries its own date was read again on that date.
An honest, feature-level breakdown of both platforms across the pillars that actually move the needle for answer engine optimization.
SKYA reads the prompts you track for your brand on a schedule, priority prompts every 3 days and the rest weekly or every 14 days by plan, with a daily Brand Pulse on top, and turns what it finds into fixes. Brand Radar reads a market-wide index of hundreds of millions of prompts. The first tells you what to change; the second tells you where the market is.
SKYA covers up to 9 AI platforms: 4 on Starter, 7 on Agency, all 9 on Brand Pro and Agency Pro. Ahrefs Brand Radar covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, with Claude on higher tiers.
SKYA ships both. Neither is listed on the Brand Radar page.
Ahrefs is unmatched here. SKYA does not aim to replace it.
Every SKYA finding ends in something you can ship. The nine readiness checks each generate their fix; schema, meta tags, sitemap, robots and llms.txt install on WordPress in one click; Shopify takes schema, meta description, Open Graph and llms.txt through the SKYA app, and Webflow takes page titles, meta descriptions and Open Graph after you approve them; and any draft the Content Engine or the action plan writes carries a Publish to site button that creates an unpublished post or page in your own editor, on WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and Framer, and in beta on Ghost, Strapi, Directus, Payload, Sanity, Drupal and Adobe Experience Manager. Ahrefs: not listed on the brand radar page.
A SKYA audit that measured nothing is marked failed and refunds its credit; a reputation dimension without enough independent sources says Not scored instead of printing a number; every hallucination finding is checked against your own facts before it is called false; and the Reddit and citation counts are stored answers, never a rank. That is the difference between a dashboard you can put in front of a client and one you have to explain.
The Meta Ads Hub is included on every SKYA plan, Reddit Visibility (the threads AI cites and where a rival is named instead of you) is included from the Agency plan onwards and in Brand Pro, AI Shopping (your products inside AI shopping answers) is an add-on beside any plan, and Google Reviews (request links, QR codes, private feedback from unhappy customers, what AI platforms say about your reputation) is free on every plan. Ahrefs: none of these are listed on their feature page.
Brand Radar's all-models price is $699 a month.
Recommendations that ship, not recommendations that sit.
AI tracking from $59 a month. Brand Radar AI starts at $199.
Nothing SKYA generates stays trapped in the tool. Copy it, or send it to your site as a draft and finish it in the editor you already use.
Visibility, fixes, content, ads, reviews and Reddit for every client, with seats and roles, a project switcher on every page, dated client-ready reports, and add-on products you can resell.
Starter $59/mo, Brand Pro $199/mo for all 9 platforms, up to Agency Pro at $649/mo.
Ahrefs Lite $129, Standard $249, Advanced $449 and Enterprise $1,499 a month. Brand Radar AI from $199 a month, $699 for all AI models.
SKYA's nine-platform plan, Brand Pro at $199, costs about the same as Brand Radar AI's entry price and less than a third of its all-models price.
Keep Ahrefs for backlinks, rank tracking and site audit.
Start a SKYA 7-day trial for the AEO layer.
Enter your domain. The first answers land within minutes of setup.
Enable Fix Now installers and share the live dashboard with the team.
Free 7-day trial. No credit card required. Up to 9 AI platforms, competitor intelligence, 4 agents, hallucination defense and fixes that reach your site once you approve them. The first answers land within minutes of setup, and every tracked prompt has its first reading within 24 hours on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overview.