What is AI Search visibility?

AI Search visibility shows how often and how prominently your brand is mentioned in AI generated answers. With Peekaboo, you can measure brand visibility in AI Search results, understand your presence in customer buying journeys, and take action to improve it.

How does Peekaboo calculate visibility scores?

Peekaboo calculates AI visibility using a position based score from 0 to 100. Higher scores mean your brand is mentioned more prominently in AI answers. Scores are aggregated across prompts and AI models, then benchmarked against competitors to give a clear visibility metric.

Why does AI Search visibility matter for my brand?

AI Search engines shape customer buying decisions by providing direct answers. Strong AI Search visibility ensures your brand appears at the top of answers, builds trust, and drives discovery. Without it, competitors capture visibility and you risk being invisible in a new search channel.

What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the latest evolution in digital strategy, extending SEO by ensuring brands appear in AI-generated answers through authority, content, and citations.

How can Peekaboo help agencies and brands?

Peekaboo helps agencies manage multiple clients with competitor benchmarks, white label reporting, and ROI proof. Brands use Peekaboo to track visibility in AI Search, ensure accurate answers, and uncover opportunities to grow awareness and outperform competitors in AI generated results.

Can I see which sources AI uses to generate answers?

Yes. Peekaboo's Source Analysis shows which domains, articles, and content AI engines cite when generating answers. This helps you identify high authority publications to target, discover PR opportunities, and fill content gaps so your brand is more likely to be used by AI systems.

How often is brand visibility analyzed?

Peekaboo tracks AI visibility daily by default so you always have fresh insights. You can adjust the analysis frequency, schedule batch reporting, or run on demand checks, giving both brands and agencies flexibility to track visibility in AI Search whenever needed.

How do prompts impact AI visibility analysis?

Prompts simulate the real questions customers ask in AI Search. Peekaboo tests discovery, purchase, and problem solving prompts to measure your visibility, track competitor mentions, and uncover which keywords and contexts drive AI generated brand recommendations.

What are AI citations and why do they matter?

AI citations are the sources that generative models rely on when recommending brands. With Peekaboo, you can see which sites influence answers, identify gaps where you are missing, and build authority so AI systems are more likely to include your brand.

How do I improve my AI visibility score?

You can improve AI visibility scores by publishing high quality content, earning authoritative citations, and optimizing prompts that reflect customer intent. Peekaboo identifies low scoring areas and shows exactly where to act so your brand gains more visibility in AI generated answers.

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Best affordable alternatives to Ahrefs Brand Radar

October 23, 2025

5 min read

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By Filipe Lins Duarte

Ahrefs Brand Radar is powerful but pricey. This guide highlights budget-friendly alternatives that track brand mentions, rank order, and cited sources inside AI answers. We compare Peekaboo, Brandlight, LLMO Metrics, and Peec AI

Best affordable alternatives to Ahrefs Brand Radar

Ahrefs Brand Radar is a great tool to help you understand your brand visibility in engines. However, its pricing can be quite off-putting since its most advanced package is $700 per month, which is way above budget for many companies

In this article, we are going to review some affordable alternatives to Ahrefs Brand Radar that don't use all of your marketing budgets and can be a great fit for your company, especially if you're a mid-market organization or a small business

What is Ahrefs Brand Radar and what does it do?

Ahrefs Brand Radar tracks how often your brand and competitors appear inside AI answers and search results. Think branded mention rate, order of appearance, and which pages or domains the models rely on when they bring you up.

How do teams use it in real life?

PR teams watch if yesterday’s coverage gets picked up inside AI answers for target queries.
Content teams check if new pages start earning citations from the models.
Product marketers track whether comparison style answers list their product in the top three, then compare by market.

If you’ve ever asked “did that campaign move anything,” this gives you a way to measure it.

Other AI visibility tools to consider

Like we mentioned though Ahrefs Brand Radar can be expensive for many teams. So let's take a look at some other AI visibility tools to consider if you're looking for an affordable alternative to Ahrefs Brand Radar.

Peekaboo (aipeekaboo.com)

Peekaboo is an affordable alternative to Ahrefs Brand Radar, and it’s a great choice for agencies and mid-market companies. It checks how you and your competitors show up across AI answers and search, then turns that into a short list of actions you can actually ship. No mystery metrics. Just signals you can move.

Here’s a simple workflow we use. Track 20 to 50 “money” queries. When inclusion drops, Peekaboo shows which sources fell out of the answer and which ones replaced them. If a competitor’s blog post starts getting cited, you’ll see the angle they used, the subheads that made it into the answer, and the referring domains that likely tipped the scale. Then you get two or three next steps. Pitch this outlet. Refresh this page with these gaps. Produce a comparison page that mirrors the answer structure.

We’ve tested this with early stage teams and with agencies that run dozens of clients. It works best if you keep the setup tight, review weekly, and commit to one change per cycle. Pricing is simple. Custom packages start at 25 dollars per month. Contact our team directly so we can scope the right setup. If you’re an agency and want your own branding, we offer white labeling with your logo and client workspaces.

Brandlight

Brandlight is a clean way to show where you appear inside AI summaries and what changed since last week. Strength is clarity. If you build client reports, this makes your life easier.

A practical example. Say a client cares about three categories, like “best payroll software,” “payroll for contractors,” and “how to run payroll.” Brandlight tracks mention rate, rank order, and the links AI answers lean on. When the client asks “why did we drop,” you can point to the two sources that replaced you and the phrases the model kept repeating. It’s light on workflow, which is fine if you prefer to run tasks in your own project tool.

LLMO Metrics

LLMO Metrics is for people who like tidy graphs. It normalizes inclusion and share of voice across multiple models and markets so you aren’t guessing if a change came from your work or from a model update.

How we’d use it. Pick four models, three markets, and five high intent queries per market. Track weekly. When a release note hits or a model quietly shifts, your trend lines will show it. Then you annotate the week with what you shipped. Over a month, you’ll know if “refresh competitor pages first” beats “ship new how to pages.” It’s more measurement than playbook, which suits data minded teams.

Peec AI

Peec AI focuses on shelf space inside AI shopping and category answers. It’s built for questions like “who gets named, in what order, and how often.”

This helps when you live in crowded categories. Let’s say you sell in “email marketing for ecommerce.” If a new brand starts showing up above you, Peec flags it, shows the phrases that keep getting them included, and where those phrases likely came from. You can respond with a targeted comparison page, a partner case study, or a PR pitch to the two publications that feed that answer most. It’s simple, quick to scan, and useful for category managers.

What’s the best alternative to Ahrefs Brand Radar?

If you want visibility plus specific next steps you can ship the same day, pick Peekaboo. If you want a strong general purpose alternative with broad AI visibility tracking, Peec AI is a solid choice.

Quick takeaway

Start small and build from there. Track 20 to 50 queries that matter, review every week, and make one change per cycle. It’s something a lot of teams overlook, but it’s how you actually learn what moves inclusion and citations.

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Filipe Lins Duarte

I'm Filipe, the CEO & Co-Founder of Peekaboo. I lead all commercial and customer facing functions here at the company. I am obsessed about making sure our customers are heard and have a great experience with us!