Noma vs Ahrefs
Two AI search visibility tools, compared on what each one tracks, what it costs, and which problem it is actually built to solve.
- Ahrefs includes AI tracking further down the range than most people assume. Brand Radar and tracked AI prompts appear from the Lite plan at $129 a month, not only at Advanced. There is also a separate Brand Radar AI subscription from $199 a month and custom prompt packages from $50 to $250. Anyone telling you AI features start at $449 has not checked recently.
- What Ahrefs does not publish is which engines it watches. Their pricing page refers to LLMs and tracked prompts generically without naming ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Grok. Noma names all five it covers, which is the thing you most need to know before buying.
- Seats are where the two diverge most sharply. Ahrefs includes one user on Lite, Standard and Advanced, with extras at $40, $60 and $80 a month and hard caps on how many you can add. Noma includes unlimited seats on every plan.
- And Ahrefs is an entire SEO suite, which Noma is not. Backlink index, keyword research, site audit, rank tracking. Noma has none of those and is not building them. If you need them, this is not a choice between two products; it is a question of whether you also need a dedicated AEO tool.
Why AI search visibility needs its own tool
Ahrefs earned its reputation on backlinks and keywords, and it remains one of the strongest products in that category. What has changed is that it now also tracks AI prompts, and it does so from a lower tier than most comparison pages claim. Pretending otherwise would be easy to disprove and would waste your time.
So the interesting question is not whether Ahrefs does AI search at all. It is whether AI tracking inside a large SEO suite goes deep enough for a team whose actual problem is AI visibility, and what it costs to give that data to more than one person.
Everything said about Ahrefs here comes from their published pricing page as checked on the date above, and this page says so plainly wherever their documentation does not state something — which, on the engine list, it does not.
What to look for in an AI visibility tool
Four questions separate tools that change what a team does from tools that add a dashboard. They are worth asking of both products below, and of whatever you are using today.
Engine coverage and cadence
A tool that watches four engines cannot tell you about the fifth, and an infrequent reading cannot separate a real shift from noise. Ask which engines are covered and how often each is polled before anything else.
Mentions versus citations
Knowing you were mentioned is a score. Knowing which page the engine drew on is a task list. If a marketplace listing is cited instead of your own product page, that is a fixable problem you cannot see from mention counts alone.
Prompts, not keywords
Nobody types "best sunscreen oily skin india" into an assistant; they ask a question. A prompt set assembled from real customer questions gives a different — and more honest — visibility picture than one derived from a keyword export.
Recommendations you can action
Most tools in this category are good at telling you that you are absent. The useful ones tell you why, and rank the fixes by expected impact so a content team knows what to write first.
Noma vs Ahrefs, feature by feature
| Capability | Noma | Ahrefs |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A tool built only for AI search visibility | An SEO suite that includes AI prompt tracking |
| Entry price | 14-day free trial, no card; paid plans after | Free tier and Starter at $29/month; Lite at $129/month |
| Where AI tracking starts | Every plan | Brand Radar and tracked AI prompts from Lite ($129/month) |
| Separate AI product | None needed | Brand Radar AI from $199/month; prompt packages $50–$250/month |
| AI engines named | Five — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok | Not published — referred to generically as LLMs |
| Polling cadence | Daily | Not published |
| Citation source tracking | Records which page each engine cited | Not published |
| Share of voice per prompt | Against competitors you name | Not published |
| Users included | Unlimited on every plan | One on Lite, Standard and Advanced |
| Extra seats | Included | $40, $60 and $80/month by tier, with caps on how many |
| Top published tier | Custom | Enterprise at $1,499/month, annual commitment |
| Keyword research, backlinks, site audit, rank tracking | Not offered, and not planned | The core product, and best in class |
| Creator marketing | Included via Nia — free, 10M+ profiles | Not offered |
| Paid media analysis | Included via Pulse — Google and Meta Ads | Not offered |
Rows come from Ahrefs’s public pricing and product pages as checked at publication. “Not published” means their documentation does not state a position, not that the answer is bad. “Not offered” means outside the product’s stated scope, and a row saying so is a note about what each one sets out to do rather than a criticism.
Where Noma fits
Noma runs your category prompts against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Grok on a schedule and records whether your brand is named in the answer each one generates. Five engines, polled daily — the fifth being Grok, which most tools in this category do not cover.
Being mentioned is only half the reading. When an engine cites a page, Noma records which page: your own site, a marketplace listing, a review roundup, or a competitor’s blog. That is the difference between knowing you are invisible and knowing what to do about it. Alongside the mention it captures the wording used to describe you, because being named as a budget option is a different outcome to being named as the category leader.
Share of voice is measured per prompt rather than as one site-wide number, because visibility is never uniform across a category — most brands are strong on a handful of questions and absent on the rest. The prompt set is built from questions customers actually ask rather than from a keyword list, and the recommendations that come back are ranked by expected impact: the pages to write, the wording to fix, the structured data to add.
Noma also sits on one platform with Nia for creator marketing and Pulse for paid media, so AI visibility can be read next to the channels competing with it for budget. Whether that matters depends entirely on whether you have those problems too.
What Noma actually measures
The rest of the platform: Noma for AI search visibility, Nia for creator marketing and attribution, Pulse for Google and Meta Ads — or how the three apply in your category.
Where Ahrefs fits
Ahrefs is the better product for the job it was built for and it is not close. The backlink index is among the largest anywhere, the keyword data is excellent, the site auditor and rank tracker are mature, and an enormous number of marketers already know how to drive all of it. Noma offers none of that and is not trying to. Their AI tracking is also included from $129 rather than gated at the top of the range, and there is a free tier and a $29 Starter plan, so getting a first look at AI prompts costs very little if you are already an Ahrefs customer.
What it does not cover
- The AI engines covered are not named on the pricing page, so you cannot confirm before buying whether Claude, Grok or Perplexity are included.
- One user is included on Lite, Standard and Advanced. Extra seats cost $40 to $80 a month each and are capped, so the whole team seeing the data is a per-head decision.
- Polling cadence is not published, so how quickly a change in AI answers reaches the dashboard is unknown.
- Whether the source page behind a citation is recorded is not published, and that is the difference between a visibility score and a list of pages to fix.
- Deeper AI research sits behind a separate Brand Radar AI subscription from $199 a month, on top of the plan you already pay for.
Which one your team actually needs
Category presence, before it is gone
AI answers name two or three brands and stop. There is no tenth position to occupy and no long tail to fall back on — you are in the answer or you are not in the consideration set at all. The number worth reporting upward is share of voice across the questions customers actually ask, tracked over time, because it moves slowly and then all at once.
A discipline that diverges from ranking
AEO shares fundamentals with SEO — crawlability, structured data, credible sources — then parts company on what counts as success. A page can rank third for a keyword and never be named by an engine answering the same question. Measuring the two with one tool produces a confident answer to the wrong question.
What to write, in what order
Citation source data turns AEO from a theory into a queue. If engines are quoting a review roundup for your category, the work is getting into that roundup. If they are quoting a competitor’s comparison page, the work is writing a better one. Both are concrete; a visibility score is not.
The cost of finding out
For a brand that has not yet established whether AI search matters in its category, the first question is what it costs to find out. A trial that needs no card answers that in a fortnight. A monthly commitment answers it in a procurement cycle.
What a rollout looks like
AI visibility is not a switch. This is the sequence that gets a team from “we think we are missing from these answers” to a trend a content team can work against.
Phase 1 — Baseline
Week 1–2- Build the prompt set
Start from the questions customers ask in your category rather than from a keyword export. Twenty good prompts beat two hundred derived ones.
- Name the competitors you care about
Share of voice is only meaningful against a defined set. Pick the brands you actually lose to.
- Take the first reading
Establish where you appear, where you do not, and which sources engines cite instead of you. This is the number everything after is measured against.
Phase 2 — Fix the sources
Week 3–8- Answer the question in the first two sentences
Engines quote what is quotable. A page that opens with positioning and reaches the answer in paragraph six will not be cited.
- State facts that can be verified and attributed
Add the structured data that lets an engine attribute a claim to your brand rather than to whoever restated it.
- Get into the roundups engines already cite
If a third-party comparison is the source for your category, being absent from it is the whole problem. That is outreach work, not on-page work.
Phase 3 — Hold and widen
Ongoing- Read the trend weekly, not daily
Answers move as models and their sources update. Weekly is enough to tell a shift from noise in most categories.
- Widen the prompt set as the category moves
New questions appear. A prompt set fixed at launch slowly stops describing the category it was built for.
- Judge it against the rest of the budget
Nia for creator and Pulse for paid sit on the same platform, so AI visibility can be read next to the channels competing with it for spend.
The verdict
If you need keyword research, backlinks, a site auditor or rank tracking, Ahrefs is not the thing you replace and Noma does not compete for that work. If you are already paying for Ahrefs, the AI prompt tracking from the Lite tier is a reasonable first look at AI answers and may be all the AI visibility you need. Noma is the better fit when AI search is the problem you are actually solving: five named engines including Claude and Grok, daily polling, the source page behind each citation, and a seat for everyone who needs one rather than $40 to $80 a head. Plenty of teams should run both.
Choose Noma if
- AI search visibility is the problem you are solving, not a tab you occasionally open
- You want the engine list stated up front, including Claude and Grok
- More than one person needs the data and per-seat fees would decide who
- You need the page behind each citation, not only a mention count
- AI visibility should sit beside creator and paid performance in one place
Choose Ahrefs if
- Backlinks, keyword research, site audits or rank tracking are core to your work
- You already pay for Ahrefs and its included AI prompt tracking is enough
- One seat covers your team and $29 to $129 a month is the budget
- A single vendor for search and AI matters more than depth in AI
Common questions
Do Ahrefs AI features require the $449 plan?
No. Brand Radar and tracked AI prompts appear from the Lite plan at $129 a month, and there is a free tier plus a $29 Starter plan. There is also a separate Brand Radar AI subscription from $199 a month and custom prompt packages from $50 to $250. The claim that AI features start at $449 is out of date and this page does not make it.
Which AI engines does Ahrefs track?
Their pricing page does not name them. It refers to LLMs and tracked prompts generically. That is the single most useful thing to know before buying an AI visibility tool, so it is worth asking their sales team directly. Noma names all five it covers: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Grok.
Can Noma replace Ahrefs?
No, and it is not built to. Noma has no keyword research, no backlink index, no site auditor and no rank tracker, and none are planned. If your team relies on those, Ahrefs is not the thing you replace, and running both is a normal outcome rather than a failure of either.
What does each one cost?
Ahrefs publishes a free tier, Starter at $29, Lite at $129, Standard at $249, Advanced at $449 and Enterprise at $1,499 a month with an annual commitment. One user is included on Lite through Advanced, with extras at $40, $60 and $80 a month. Noma runs a 14-day trial with no card and includes unlimited seats.
Why do seat costs matter for AI visibility work?
The prompts come from what customers ask, the fixes are content and structured data, and the results get reported upward. That is three or four people minimum. When each additional seat is $40 to $80 a month and capped, the tool quietly decides who is allowed to look at the data.
Is AI search visibility different from SEO?
They share fundamentals — crawlability, structured data, credible sources — and diverge on what counts as success. SEO measures where a page sits in a ranked list. AI search visibility measures whether your brand is named inside a generated answer, where there is no list and often no click. A page can rank third for a keyword and never be mentioned by an engine answering the same question.
Ahrefs is a trademark of its respective owner. Nurdd is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Ahrefs. Marks and product names are used only to identify the products being compared, and every claim about Ahrefs was taken from their own public pages on the date shown above.
Other comparisons
Find out whether AI engines name you
Build your prompt set and see your first visibility report inside the trial. Fourteen days, no credit card.