Scrunch AI vs Ahrefs Brand Radar, where one of them sells the AI crawler report and the other gives it away

These two overlap on the one thing most of this category ignores, which is what AI crawlers and agents do when they arrive on your own site. They price that overlap in opposite ways. Read on 31 October 2026, ahrefs.com/brand-radar publishes AI traffic reporting as Free, install Web Analytics and bot visit reporting as Free while in beta, install Bot Analytics, describing the second as watching AI crawlers in real time, when they read your pages and which ones they visit most. On the same day www.scrunchai.com/pricing publishes AI Agent and Bot Traffic as a feature of its Core plan at $250 a month, with Site Optimization, Agent Pages and an Agent Experience Platform in its product set and the platform itself marked Enterprise.

So if the crawler question is the one you came to answer, one of these two will answer part of it this afternoon for nothing. What you are paying Scrunch for is the next step after the report, and that is a fair thing to pay for.

The agent and crawler side, as each one publishes it

Capability	Ahrefs	Scrunch AI
Which AI bots hit your pages	Bot Analytics, free while in beta	AI Agent and Bot Traffic on Core, multi domain tracking available
Traffic arriving from AI assistants	Web Analytics, free	Agent Traffic, in the product set
Serving agents a different experience	Not published	Agent Pages, and an Agent Experience Platform at Enterprise
Site changes recommended	Site Audit on the paid plans	5 site audits a month, site map 25 pages, 1 page optimisation a month on Core
Off site surfaces	AI Sources covering YouTube, TikTok and Reddit, free while in beta	Not published
Product level visibility	Not published on this page	Shopping, and Product Observability at Enterprise

The Ahrefs free column is not a trick. It is a product strategy, and the trade is that both free tools require installing something on your site and they report on your own property only. Scrunch's version is inside a paid plan with a published page optimisation allowance and an agent serving product that has no equivalent on the Ahrefs page at all.

The prompt side, where the pricing reverses

Count tracked questions and the value flips. Ahrefs bundles AI prompt checks into its SEO plans, published as 150 checks and 5 AI prompts on Lite at $129 a month, 300 and 10 on Standard at $249, 600 and 20 on Advanced at $449 and from 2,500 and from 83 on Enterprise at $1,499 with an annual commitment required. Its separate products are three custom prompt packages, Basic at $50 a month with 2,500 checks and overage at $0.020, Growth at $100 with 7,000 checks and overage at $0.015 and Scale at $250 with 25,000 checks and overage at $0.010, plus $699 a month for all models and a Brand Radar AI product from $199 a month over 519 million real prompts. Its own worked examples sit beside those packages: 80 prompts daily on one platform at Basic, 100 prompts daily on two platforms at Growth.

Scrunch Core publishes 125 unique prompts and 5,000 responses a month for $250. Against the 20 AI prompts bundled with a $449 Ahrefs Advanced plan, that is a different order of magnitude on the monitoring side, and it is the right way round to notice: the suite gives you a taste of prompt tracking and sells you data, the specialist gives you the prompt tracking and sells you the site work.

Ahrefs does publish the unit clearly enough to compare, which many vendors do not: each prompt is checked daily on every selected platform, 5 prompts on 1 platform equals 150 checks a month, and Claude consumes 8 checks per update. So twenty prompts on four platforms daily is 2,400 checks a month by that rule, which is four times the 600 bundled with Advanced and inside the 2,500 on its $50 a month Basic prompt package.

Seats, countries and the things that constrain each plan

Scrunch Core includes 5 user licences and limits the breadth: Countries 1, Personas 1, Languages 1, Competitors 5, AI Search Trends 3 topics, with Looker Studio, Query API, advanced API and MCP all marked Enterprise, and Google single sign on on Core with SAML and OIDC at Enterprise.

Ahrefs includes 1 user on every paid plan and sells more, at $40 a month each on Lite, $60 on Standard and $80 on Advanced, and publishes API and MCP access on every paid tier with uncapped API, SSO, access management, an audit log and a stated no training on your data at Enterprise. Payment is by Visa, Mastercard, American Express or UnionPay, with wire transfer on request at Enterprise.

So an organisation of five readers in one country is cheaper and simpler on Scrunch. An organisation of one analyst who needs API access on a modest plan is cheaper on Ahrefs, since API and MCP are published on Lite at $129.

Which to buy

• You only want to know which AI crawlers read your site. Install the Ahrefs free tools first. Spending nothing to answer part of the question is the right first move, and it tells you whether the paid version is worth it.
• You want to change what a crawler finds, not just see it. Scrunch, which is the only one of the two publishing a product for serving AI agents and a page optimisation allowance.
• You want 100 or more tracked questions, cheaply. Ahrefs, on its Growth prompt package at $100 a month, whose own published example is 100 prompts daily on two platforms. Scrunch Core at $250 publishes 125 prompts on four engines with 5,000 responses and five licences, so compare platforms and licences rather than the prompt count alone.
• You want a prompt database rather than prompts you wrote. Ahrefs, whose AI Visibility Index is published at $199 a month over 519 million real prompts, with its own guidance that it is best once your brand already appears in AI search.
• Reddit, YouTube and TikTok matter to your category. Ahrefs, on AI Sources, free while in beta. Scrunch publishes nothing equivalent.

What we publish on the crawler side, which is nothing

We sell in this category, and on the subject of this page our own answer is short. Read on 31 October 2026 our pricing page publishes no bot analytics, no crawler traffic report and no agent serving product at any tier. A buyer whose question is which AI bots read my pages and how often should install the free Ahrefs tools or buy Scrunch, and we are not a candidate for that job.

What our page does publish is the answer side and the writing. GEO Growth is $299 a month, or Rs 11,799, for 100 buyer questions, 1,200 scheduled answers, five engines including Claude at a published 3 credits a check, and 20 pages a month written and published to your own site, with 300 questions, 3,500 answers, 40 pages and a Visibility API on GEO Scale at $599. On seats Scrunch is ahead of us with its 5 licences against our published Logins included, 1, full access, and Ahrefs is ahead of us by selling additional named users at all. Our cadence is weekly on priority questions where both vendors here publish daily.

If Scrunch is the half you are weighing, our page on Scrunch reviews compared covers what it publishes in place of a rating.

Questions about the crawler reports and the prompt allowances

Are the Ahrefs AI traffic and bot tools really free

Its Brand Radar page publishes AI traffic as Free, install Web Analytics, and bot visits as Free while in beta, install Bot Analytics, read on 31 October 2026. Both are installs on your own site, and free while in beta is a condition with a date attached rather than a permanent price, so it is worth re reading before you build a process on it.

How many AI prompts come with an Ahrefs plan

5 on Lite at $129, 10 on Standard at $249, 20 on Advanced at $449 and from 83 on Enterprise at $1,499, with check allowances of 150, 300, 600 and from 2,500. Each prompt is checked daily on every selected platform, so the platform count multiplies the consumption.

What does Scrunch include for 250 dollars

125 unique prompts, 5,000 responses a month, 4 LLMs, 5 site audits a month, a 25 page site map, 1 brand workspace, 5 user licences, 5 competitors, 1 country, 1 persona, 1 language, 1 page optimisation a month, AI agent and bot traffic, sentiment analysis, Google SSO and email support, with a 7 day free trial.

Which one shows what my product listings look like in AI answers

Scrunch publishes Shopping as a product and Product Observability at Enterprise. Ahrefs does not publish a product level visibility feature on its Brand Radar page.

Can I use both

They answer different halves and neither blocks the other, so yes, and the cheap version of that is the Ahrefs free installs for crawler data alongside whichever paid product you choose for prompt monitoring. Count the total before you commit, because two subscriptions and four extra Ahrefs users adds up quickly at $40 to $80 a head.

Which has the stronger published data handling commitment

Ahrefs, which publishes no training on your data, SSO, access management and an audit log at its $1,499 Enterprise tier. Scrunch publishes Google SSO on Core and SAML and OIDC at Enterprise, which is the better self serve answer of the two.

How we know this

We read the assistants rather than guessing what they do. In our own audit of 1,260 saved answers from ChatGPT and Gemini across the United States, the United Kingdom and India, 82.0% of every citation landed on a site the business itself owned, and review directories took 0.7%. Counted as one domain per reading, 16,516 of 20,143.

That is the whole asymmetry: the pages you own are the pages an assistant quotes back to a buyer. See the dated readings and the method on our proof page.

Find out whether assistants name your business, on your own domain and your own buying questions.

By Aditya Goel, Founder, AI Knows Us. Reviewed 1 November 2026.