Endata's free report vs. the Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker

Endata vs. Ahrefs' checker at a glance

What is the real difference between the two free tools?

The direction of the question. Ahrefs' checker asks “where does this brand name appear in AI answers?” It looks for your name across prompts Ahrefs already holds and counts what it finds.

Endata's report asks “when a buyer asks about what we sell, without naming anyone, who gets recommended?” None of its six questions contains a business name, so being mentioned means an assistant chose you unprompted.

The two can disagree, and both be right. A firm can have plenty of mentions in answers about itself and still be absent when someone asks for “the best accountant for a small restaurant”. A firm with almost no mentions can still be the one an assistant names for a narrow question.

What does Ahrefs' free AI Visibility Checker tell you?

You type a brand name. Ahrefs advises entering it the way your audience says it, and it works for product names, personal brands and competitors too. There is no signup, and Ahrefs says there is no limit on how many brands you check.

The report has five parts:

• Total AI mentions: how many times AI platforms mentioned the brand across the tested prompts.
• Mentions by AI platform: which platforms mention you and which don't.
• Top 5 topics: the subjects assistants associate with the brand.
• Top 5 cited domains: the sites referenced most when the brand is mentioned.
• Top 5 cited pages: the specific URLs cited alongside it.

Ahrefs calls it a limited preview and a one-time snapshot: five results per section, with no history and no competitor comparison. Those are in Brand Radar, its paid product. The prompts are what Ahrefs calls search-backed, built from questions people really search on Google, not invented ones. The page does not say how many prompts a free check covers.

What does Endata's free report tell you?

You enter your website. Endata reads it and asks you to confirm your audience, two to six competitors and three to five topics, then asks for an email address so it can send you the link. It writes six buyer questions and puts each to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini through their makers' APIs, with web search on: up to 24 answers, in a couple of minutes.

AI Visibility Report

Acme Insurance

Sample report

6 questions, each asked on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini · Oct 12, 2026

Questions tested

6 × 4 assistants = 24 answers

Answers that mention you

13% 3 of 24

Where your business stands

• Summit Risk67%
• Harbor Insurance54%
• Northstar Coverage42%
• Acme InsuranceYour business13%

Questions where you’re missing

• Who offers commercial fleet insurance for small trucking companies?

  ChatGPT mentioned Summit Risk

• Which insurance brokers specialize in interstate trucking?

  Perplexity mentioned Harbor Insurance

• What does cargo insurance cost for a five-truck fleet?

  Gemini mentioned Summit Risk

+ 2 more questions in the full report

How to read this. AI answers change from one run to the next, so these figures are a sample of what your customers may see, not a ranking.

The report shows:

• the share of answers that named you;
• your standing against each competitor you listed;
• other businesses that kept appearing, which you may not have thought of as competitors;
• the questions you were missing from, and who was named instead;
• an action plan of up to five steps.

It has limits of its own. Six questions is a small sample, not a measure of a market. It needs an email address and a minute of setup. You can run five reports per email address every 30 days. And it does not show citations, cover Google's AI results, or keep a history unless you move to a paid plan.

What can you do next with each result?

With Ahrefs' result, the next move is yours to work out. Ahrefs suggests using the report to spot gaps and set priorities, and notes that if your own domain is missing from the cited domains, content and digital PR are where to look. For more data the path is Brand Radar: historical trends, AI Share of Voice, competitor benchmarking and tracking of your own prompts. That is a serious tool for a team with writers; see Endata vs. Ahrefs Brand Radar.

With Endata's result, the next move is written down. The plan lists what to publish, starting with the questions where competitors were named and you were not. The first two steps are shown in full; the rest open when you claim the report into a workspace.

On a paid plan Endata then does the work. For each question it searches the last 30 days of news and web sources, keeps up to eight pieces of evidence and drafts an answer that cites them claim by claim. You can add your own attributed view. Nothing is published until you approve it. Approved answers go to a hosted newsroom on your own domain or to your CMS, and the same six questions are asked again every month. The walk-through is in How to fix a hidden AI visibility gap in 10 minutes.

Neither paid step is a trial of the other: Ahrefs' buys measurement, Endata's buys published answers. Ahrefs says its prices may vary by region. Endata's plans are on the pricing page.

Should you run both?

Yes. They cost nothing and take a few minutes together. A sensible order:

1. Run Ahrefs' checker on your brand name. Note which platforms mention you and which domains get cited.
2. Run it on two competitors. There is no side-by-side view, but the totals give a rough sense of scale.
3. Run Endata's free report. See which buyer questions name those competitors and not you.
4. Compare. Many mentions but few recommendations means your name is known but not attached to what buyers ask. Few of both means there is not yet enough published for assistants to find.

Either way the remedy is the same: clear, sourced answers to the questions buyers ask, published where assistants can read them.

What Endata does not do

A comparison is only useful if it is honest about both sides. Endata does not:

• give a result without an email address, or in seconds;
• count every mention of your brand across a large set of prompts;
• show which domains or pages assistants cite;
• cover Google AI Overviews or AI Mode, Copilot, Grok or Meta AI;
• measure sentiment, ranking position or prompt volume;
• promise that an assistant will recommend you. What an assistant says is its own decision; Endata makes sure there is a clear, sourced answer for it to find.

Frequently asked questions