Comparisons

TofuBofu vs Ahrefs Brand Radar: the prompt database, or the fix done

By Arnav Mukherjee, founder of TofuBofu · August 3, 2026

I build a competing product, so read this with the appropriate suspicion. I will try to earn it back by starting with the part of Ahrefs Brand Radar that we cannot match.

Every AI visibility tool has to decide which questions to track on your behalf, and most of us decide it the same way: a setup wizard, some templates, a founder's judgement about what buyers probably ask. Ahrefs decides it from a database the company describes as more than 451 million monthly prompts pulled from real user searches. Grounding question selection in observed demand rather than in an educated guess is a structural advantage, and no amount of positioning on my side makes it disappear.

The interesting argument sits elsewhere, in two places. Whether that advantage survives contact with the long tail of B2B services questions, and what happens to any of this data once the report has been read. A software engineer researching the category put the second problem more bluntly than I would have: "Every AI visibility tool I've tested only does monitoring. None of them tell you what to actually fix."

What Brand Radar does well

The product page describes tracking brand mentions across AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini and Grok, benchmarking against competitors, surfacing citations you did not know about, creating custom prompts, exporting the data, and monitoring YouTube, TikTok and Reddit while those remain in beta.

If you already run Ahrefs, the adjacency carries a lot of the value. AI mentions land beside your backlink profile, your keyword demand and your web-mention index, in one place, so you can look at citation movement and organic movement together instead of reconciling two tools and two definitions of the same brand. Teams that already have a weekly rhythm around Ahrefs data will absorb this without changing how they work.

The prompt database compounds. Trend data built on questions people demonstrably ask holds its value over quarters in a way that trend data built on invented questions does not, because the second kind quietly measures your own assumptions. For a category where most tools are eighteen months old, that is a serious asset.

Where prompt-volume data gets thinner

A prompt database answers the question of what many people ask. B2B services deals tend to turn on what very few people ask, and the two do not overlap as much as the headline number suggests.

Our own regional research points at this repeatedly. On broad category questions, the answers were crowded with national brands and multi-region roll-ups, decided by footprint before a smaller firm entered the contest. The questions a specialist can actually win are the qualified ones, combining a vertical, a city, a company size and a constraint, along the lines of managed IT for a 40-person law firm that needs help maintaining SOC 2. A question that specific may be asked a handful of times a month across an entire country, which puts it below the threshold where prompt-volume data has anything useful to say.

That cuts both ways and I would rather say so. For a software company in a large category, observed prompt demand is close to essential, and guessing at questions there is a real weakness in tools like ours. For a regional services firm, the winnable questions are ones you already know from your own sales calls, and the constraint is having somebody write the pages that answer them.

Where the two products part ways

The Brand Radar page describes measurement, benchmarking, citation discovery, custom prompts and exports. It does not describe generating content, publishing to a CMS, or recommending a specific fix for a specific losing question. That is a design decision rather than an oversight, and it fits the buyer Ahrefs sells to, who has an SEO team ready to act on a finding.

TofuBofu runs the same first half and then keeps going. Six engines get asked your buying questions, you read the verbatim answers rather than a score, and from there the product drafts the content and schema aimed at the questions you lose, publishes to your CMS, and re-runs the scan so you can see whether the engine changed its mind. We hold less data than Ahrefs and complete more of the work.

Engines, honestly

Five of six overlap. Brand Radar covers AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini and Grok. We cover ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Bing Copilot, on every plan including the free one. They have Grok and we do not; we have Claude and they do not. Which absence matters depends on where your buyers research, and for most B2B vendor questions the shared five do the heavy lifting, so I would not choose between two tools on engine count alone.

Price, and the cost that follows it

Ahrefs lists Brand Radar at 398 dollars a month for selected platforms and 699 dollars a month for all of them, the higher tier including 2,500 custom-prompt checks and the social beta, with further custom prompts as an add-on. The page does not state whether an Ahrefs subscription is required alongside it, which is worth confirming before you budget.

Our pricing runs differently. The free tier gives one scan a month of all six engines without a card, and the paid tiers start at 99 dollars a month, adding weekly scanning, sentiment, alerts and drafted articles targeted at the gaps a scan finds.

Comparing those two figures directly would mislead, and the reason is worth spelling out. Measurement is one line in the budget for this problem. The other line is whoever writes the pages, adds the schema and publishes them, which is a freelancer, an agency retainer or a portion of an employee's week. A firm buying measurement alone has covered the smaller half of the cost and none of the effort. Judge either product on the total cost of getting AI to name you, and the arithmetic changes shape depending on whether that second line already exists in your business.

Where Ahrefs wins outright

One thing I want to state plainly, since comparison posts written by vendors tend to bury it. Ahrefs is a full SEO suite: backlinks, keyword research, site audits, rank tracking, a very large crawl index. TofuBofu does none of that, and has no plans to. SEO is the floor for all of this work, because an engine that cannot crawl or render your pages will never cite them, and a serious firm should own a serious SEO tool. AEO is the layer above, winnable even while your rankings sit still, and that layer is the whole of what we do. Anyone treating these as substitutes will end up short on one side.

Which one to pick

Buy Brand Radar if you already run Ahrefs, you have an SEO or content person on staff, your category has enough search volume for prompt-demand data to be meaningful, and the thing slowing you down is knowing precisely where you stand. Under those conditions the prompt database earns its price and somebody will act on the output. Nothing I build changes that recommendation.

Pick us if you run a lean team where no job title contains the word content, your winnable questions are narrow enough that you already know them from sales calls, and a more precise dashboard would deliver a sharper description of a problem you still cannot solve.

If the choice is unclear, run the free scan before spending anything. Finding out whether AI names you at all costs nothing, and the answer usually makes the rest of the decision straightforward in one direction or the other.