Ahrefs adds Grok to Brand Radar and quadruples API limits in April update

Ahrefs today disclosed eight product updates shipped during April 2026, with the headline changes concentrated in three areas: the addition of xAI's Grok to the Brand Radar AI visibility platform, a substantial increase in API capacity across all self-serve subscription tiers, and a redesigned overview dashboard inside Social Media Manager. The announcement, published May 25, 2026, on the Ahrefs blog and communicated to subscribers on May 28, also covers changes to Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and GSC Insights.

The breadth of the release reflects a development cadence that has accelerated throughout the past year. According to Ahrefs, the company shipped updates across Brand Radar, Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, GSC Insights, Social Media Manager, and the API during April alone.

Grok arrives in Brand Radar

The most widely discussed change is the inclusion of Grok - xAI's large language model - as a trackable platform inside Brand Radar. According to Ahrefs, Grok is now available for both Ahrefs prompts and custom prompts within Brand Radar. The feature became available on April 24, 2026, according to the company's changelog.

Pricing follows the same structure as other individual AI platform indexes. Grok is included in the All Indexes add-on, or available as a standalone subscription at $199 per month. Custom query tracking does not require an add-on, making it accessible at the base level for users who want to monitor specific questions rather than the full Ahrefs prompt set.

The addition brings Brand Radar's trackable AI platforms to include ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and now Grok. That range matters because AI platforms do not cite brands uniformly. A company that ranks prominently in ChatGPT responses may not appear in Grok's answers to the same question, and the gap is not always predictable from organic search performance alone.

Grok's market position has grown steadily. The platform entered the top 10 AI assistant rankings by November 2025, with positive growth indicators while several other platforms saw flat or declining share. The marketing community's interest in tracking Grok citations has grown correspondingly. Researchers testing brand manipulation across AI platforms in December 2025 found that Grok, alongside Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot, incorporated third-party misinformation into responses - a finding that underscores why citation monitoring across individual AI platforms provides different signal than aggregate tracking.

Cited pages report restructured around a citation funnel

Beyond adding Grok, Ahrefs made structural changes to the Cited pages report in Brand Radar. The Cited domainssection is no longer a separate report. It now appears as an "All domains" tab alongside "Yours," "Competitors," and "Other" - a reorganisation that consolidates domain-level and page-level citation data into a single interface. URL filters have moved from the table header into a filter bar below the tabs.

The more significant architectural change is the introduction of a citation funnel. Two new columns - Cited in and Found in - expose different stages of AI response analysis. According to Ahrefs, "Cited in" shows the total responses where the domain was cited, and "Found in" shows the total responses where the page was found, cited or not. The distinction separates two questions that were previously conflated: whether an AI model retrieved a page when generating a response, and whether it actually cited that page in the output.

This gap between retrieval and citation is meaningful for marketers. A page may appear in an AI model's source pool - reflected in the "Found in" count - without ever receiving a visible citation in the response text. Ahrefs surfaces these "Found but not cited" brand mentions explicitly, describing them as a way to identify and fill AI citation gaps. For practitioners focused on generative engine optimization, the distinction between a page being consulted and a page being named provides a more granular view of where content is falling short in the citation step.

The Citations chart received a parallel update. It now offers two modes: a "Found in" mode that plots two lines per page - solid for total responses where the page was found, dashed for responses where it was cited - and a "Position" mode that tracks each page's average citation position over time, with line thickness reflecting the volume of citations behind the average. The position mode addresses a monitoring gap that snapshots could not capture: whether a brand's citation rank inside AI responses is improving or degrading over time.

Separately, the prompt details panel for AI responses was redesigned. According to the changelog, cited pages and URLs found but not cited are now both clearly visible within the panel.

API limits raised across all self-serve plans

The API changes are the most numerically concrete part of the April release. According to Ahrefs, API units and rows-per-request are increasing across every self-serve plan in response to user requests.

The Lite plan moves from 25,000 to 100,000 API units per month - a 4x increase - and maximum response rows per request rise from 10 to 100, a 10x increase. The Standard plan advances from 150,000 to 400,000 API units, roughly a 2.67x increase, with response rows moving from 25 to 250 per request. The Advanced plan scales from 500,000 to 1 million API units, with response rows rising from 100 to 500.

According to the changelog entry from April 28, Ahrefs described the context for the change directly: "In this AI era, we're opening up more data to power your marketing."

The row-per-request increases are particularly significant for teams running automated workflows. A tool querying keyword data at 10 rows per request needed 100 API calls to pull 1,000 rows. The same volume now requires 10 calls on the Lite tier, and as few as 2 on the Advanced tier. For pipelines that run keyword or backlink analysis daily across large inventories, that compression translates directly into reduced API unit consumption per workflow run.

Brand Radar API also received two specific updates. Endpoints now support entities - both brand name variations and brand websites - matching what is already available in the UI. To handle the more complex input structure that entities require, POST versions of existing GET endpoints were created, accepting input as a JSON object in the request body rather than URL parameters.

A second API addition covers report management. Three new endpoints give programmatic access to the full lifecycle of a Brand Radar report: a GET endpoint to list existing reports with metadata, a POST endpoint to create a new report and configure its tracking platforms and schedule, and a PATCH endpoint to update tracking settings on existing reports. According to Ahrefs, this update means the API now supports a full prompt tracking workflow covering report creation, tracking schedule, prompt addition, and result monitoring.

A Looker connector for Brand Radar also became available in April. According to the changelog from April 4, the connector provides history charts for AI mentions, impressions, and AI Share of Voice, plus distributions of those metrics across brands and platforms. It supports filtering by Ahrefs or custom prompts, countries, and matches in prompts, domains, and URLs.

Site Explorer: two new reports

Site Explorer gained two new reports in April. The Organic positions report shows every ranking URL for a site's organic keywords. Ahrefs notes that while the existing Positions in Calendar report shows positions with daily movements, this new report shows all positions regardless of movement - a broader snapshot that captures stable rankings the calendar view would omit.

The Crawled pages report shows all pages on a site crawled by AhrefsBot, sorted by the most recent crawl attempt. According to Ahrefs, the report is useful for spotting crawl issues, finding new competitor pages before they rank in search, and auditing which pages are being discovered versus ignored. The report became available April 4, according to the changelog.

Both reports add operational detail that is most useful in competitive research and technical SEO workflows. Finding a competitor's newly crawled pages before they achieve ranking positions is a relatively narrow use case, but one that has no simple equivalent in other reports.

Keywords Explorer: historical volume for lists

Keywords Explorer now shows a graph of historical total search volume for multiple keywords or a saved keyword list. The chart shows combined search volume across all terms in the list and how that total has changed over time. According to Ahrefs, this supports tracking seasonality or monitoring how demand shifts across a niche over time.

The Keywords report also received two new filters. A word count filter works consistently with word count filters elsewhere in Ahrefs tools. A Rank Tracker status filter replaces the previous "Not tracked only" option, allowing users to view both tracked and non-tracked keywords in a single report. The change eliminates a workaround that was previously required to check GSC metrics for tracked terms.

GSC Insights in Portfolios

GSC Insights are now visible in Portfolios, the dashboard view for users managing multiple properties. According to Ahrefs, this allows tracking of combined performance across country-specific sites, different brands, or sections of a single domain from one dashboard. The changelog records the update as going live April 23.

For agencies managing multiple GSC properties, this reduces the navigation required to get an aggregate view of search performance. It does not change the underlying data - it surfaces existing GSC Insights data within the portfolio layer that was previously GSC-exclusive.

The Social Media Manager overview page received what Ahrefs describes as a full redesign, shipping April 22 according to the changelog. The previous version showed only follower counts. The new version organises the page into four components.

Quick stats at the top show Posts Published, New Followers, Total Engagement, and Average Engagement Rate, each with period-over-period deltas and date range filtering. A connected channels section displays follower counts, growth deltas, and connection and token status per channel. An upcoming posts section shows the next five scheduled posts inline. A top posts by views section surfaces the content receiving the most attention.

According to Ahrefs, the redesign makes the Overview a full snapshot of social media health rather than a single-metric summary. The addition of period-over-period deltas brings the format closer to the comparative views available in other Ahrefs reporting tools.

Why this matters for the marketing community

The April release lands at a moment when the gap between organic search visibility and AI citation visibility has become a practical measurement problem for marketing teams. Research published by Ahrefs in February 2026 found that AI Overviews correlate with a 58% reduction in click-through rates for top-ranking pages - nearly double the 34.5% figure documented in April 2025. That compression has pushed marketers to monitor AI citations as a distinct channel, not just an extension of organic search.

Ahrefs research from June 2025 added a conversion dimension to the argument: AI search traffic converts at 23 times the rate of traditional organic traffic, despite representing only 0.5% of total visits. The implication is that AI citations, though rare, carry disproportionate commercial value - making the precision of Brand Radar's citation funnel data more directly relevant to revenue analysis.

Lily Ray, noted SEO practitioner, described in May 2026 a workflow connecting Search Console data, Ahrefs, and several other tools through MCP servers to build unified reporting dashboards that update daily. Brand Radar was specifically cited as the Ahrefs component she used for AI visibility monitoring. The API expansions announced in April directly affect the economics of workflows like that one, where daily automated pulls across large keyword sets were previously constrained by row limits.

The Grok addition also carries relevance that extends beyond platform count. PPC Land has documented Grok's growth trajectory and the distinct way different AI platforms handle brand citations. Adding Grok to Brand Radar gives marketers a direct comparison point between a platform that has historically received less attention in citation analysis and the established benchmarks set by ChatGPT and Perplexity.

The MCP integration context is also relevant. The changelog records that on April 18, Ahrefs added interactive widgets to the Ahrefs MCP, enabling Claude and ChatGPT to render scorecards, time-series charts, and table reports directly in chat responses, with each widget linking back to the corresponding Ahrefs report. On the same date, Brand Radar API endpoints gained entity support. These two changes together extend the API's usefulness to teams running AI-assisted analysis workflows where data needs to surface in a conversational interface rather than a browser-based dashboard.

For the advertiser audience that reads PPC Land, the practical implications of the April release cluster around three decisions: whether to add Grok monitoring to existing Brand Radar configurations, whether the API limit increases justify automation workflows that were previously too expensive in API units to run continuously, and whether the new citation funnel data in Brand Radar changes how content gaps are identified and prioritized. None of those questions has a universal answer, but the April release provides more data at lower cost than was available in March.

Timeline

December 9, 2024 - Ahrefs launches web analytics tool across all plan tiers, including free tier, marking the company's expansion beyond SEO
December 31, 2024 - Ahrefs shifts Site Audit crawler from France to the United States, introducing new IP range 202.8.40.0/22
June 16, 2025 - Ahrefs publishes study showing AI search visitors convert 23x higher than traditional organic traffic, based on 30-day Web Analytics data
June 18, 2025 - Google's "great decoupling" of clicks and impressions documented; Ahrefs Brand Radar cited as a tool for tracking AI Overview keyword coverage
October 29, 2025 - Ahrefs begins restoring top-100 SERP tracking after Google removed the num=100 parameter in September 2025
November 1, 2025 - Amplitude launches AI Visibility tool as standalone competitor to Brand Radar-style monitoring
November 2, 2025 - Lorelight shuts down its standalone AI visibility tracker, with founder citing Ahrefs and other integrated SEO platforms as better-positioned for GEO features
December 22, 2025 - Grok enters the top 10 AI assistant rankings, with positive growth indicators
December 28, 2025 - Ahrefs' fake brand experiment reveals that Grok, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot all incorporated third-party misinformation into responses
February 4, 2026 - Ahrefs publishes research showing AI Overviews correlate with 58% CTR reduction for top-ranking pages, covered by PPC Land
April 1, 2026 - New Brand Radar API endpoints released for managing custom reports, covering GET, POST, and PATCH operations on brand-radar-reports
April 4, 2026 - Looker connector for Brand Radar goes live; new Crawled pages report added to Site Explorer
April 6, 2026 - Keywords Explorer gains historical search volume trendlines for multiple keywords or saved keyword lists
April 18, 2026 - Interactive widgets added to Ahrefs MCP for Claude and ChatGPT; Brand Radar API gains entity support; Ahrefs MCP becomes available in official ChatGPT apps directory without manual setup
April 21, 2026 - Cited pages report in Brand Radar updated with Found in, Cited in, and Avg. position columns; prompt details panel redesigned
April 22, 2026 - Social Media Manager Overview page redesigned; GSC Insights Keywords report gains word count and Rank Tracker status filters
April 23, 2026 - GSC Insights added to Portfolios view
April 24, 2026 - Grok added to Brand Radar for Ahrefs prompts and custom prompts
April 28, 2026 - API limits increased for Lite (25K to 100K units, 10 to 100 rows), Standard (150K to 400K units, 25 to 250 rows), and Advanced (500K to 1M units, 100 to 500 rows) plans
May 14, 2026 - Lily Ray describes using Brand Radar and the Ahrefs MCP in daily AI-integrated reporting workflows
May 25, 2026 - Ahrefs publishes April 2026 product update blog post, authored by Andrei Tit
May 28, 2026 - Update communicated to newsletter subscribers

Summary

Who: Ahrefs, the Singapore-based marketing platform headquartered at 16 Raffles Quay, #33-03 Hong Leong Building, Singapore 048581.

What: Eight product updates shipped in April 2026, with the most significant changes being the addition of xAI's Grok as a trackable platform in Brand Radar, a restructured Cited pages report with a citation funnel showing "Found in" and "Cited in" metrics, API unit increases of up to 4x on the Lite plan and rows-per-request increases of up to 10x, a redesigned Social Media Manager overview, two new Site Explorer reports (Organic positions and Crawled pages), historical keyword volume charts in Keywords Explorer, GSC Insights integration into Portfolios, and a Looker connector for Brand Radar alongside new Brand Radar API endpoints for entity support and report management.

When: The updates were shipped across April 2026, with specific dates ranging from April 1 (Brand Radar API report endpoints) through April 28 (API limit increases). The blog post announcing the updates was published May 25, 2026.

Where: The updates are live across Ahrefs' cloud-based platform, accessible through the web interface and programmatically via API. The announcement was published at ahrefs.com/blog and communicated via email newsletter on May 28, 2026.

Why: Ahrefs cited popular user demand as the driver for the API limit increases. The Grok addition and citation funnel changes address a growing market need for granular AI citation monitoring as AI platforms become primary discovery surfaces for consumers - a shift documented extensively in Ahrefs' own research showing AI search visitors converting at rates 23 times higher than organic traffic, and in external research linking AI Overviews to a 58% reduction in click-through rates for top-ranking pages.