Two different questions about AI search
“Is my site readable by AI crawlers” and “does my brand get mentioned in AI answers” sound related but require different evidence. AI Crawl Score answers the first with a bounded technical scan; Ahrefs Brand Radar answers the second with large-scale AI-response tracking.
What Ahrefs Brand Radar does
Per Ahrefs’ own overview, Brand Radar analyzes brand and entity visibility across a large corpus of AI responses, tracking appearances in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot and Gemini. It distinguishes “Mentions” (a brand name appearing in generated text) from “Citations” (an AI system linking to a specific page as a source), groups queries into topics, lets users define entities to track variations of a brand or competitor name, and benchmarks share of voice against named competitors. It is part of the Ahrefs subscription suite and depends on Ahrefs’ own keyword and web-visibility data to connect AI mentions back to underlying search demand.
What AI Crawl Score does
AI Crawl Score has no visibility into what any AI system says about a brand. Its free readiness checker instead performs a raw-fetch scan of up to five pages on a site, checking robots.txt rules per crawler user agent, sitemap presence, JSON-LD markup, and whether delivered HTML matches what was intended (redirects, blocking responses, missing canonical tags). It is a pre-condition check, not a mention tracker: a page cannot be cited if it cannot be fetched or parsed, but passing a technical scan does not mean any AI system will mention it.
Side by side
| Question | AI Crawl Score | Ahrefs Brand Radar |
|---|---|---|
| Tracks mentions/citations in AI answers | No | Yes |
| Technical fetch/robots/schema check | Yes | No, that’s a separate Ahrefs audit tool |
| Competitor share-of-voice | No | Yes |
| Requires paid subscription | No | Yes, part of Ahrefs |
| Output type | Point-in-time technical findings | Recurring AI-visibility reporting |
Which one fits your situation
Run AI Crawl Score’s scanner first, or alongside, when the question is operational: did a migration break the sitemap, is a key page noindexed, does structured data parse. Use Ahrefs Brand Radar when the question is strategic and competitive: how does brand visibility inside AI answers compare against named rivals over time, and which topics or prompts drive that visibility. Neither tool can guarantee that fixing a technical issue increases AI mentions, and Ahrefs’ own answer-engine-optimization material frames AI visibility as built on the same content-quality and technical-SEO foundation these two tools check from different angles.
See AI citation tracking methodology, seo vs aeo vs geo, and source citations and editorial trust.
Frequently asked questions
Does fixing AI Crawl Score findings guarantee more Brand Radar mentions?
No. Technical fixes remove barriers to being read; they do not guarantee an AI system will choose to mention or cite the page.
Can I use AI Crawl Score without an Ahrefs subscription?
Yes. The two tools are unrelated products; the AI Crawl Score scanner is free and requires no Ahrefs account.