What happened
Ahrefs launched Agent B — since relabeled Ask Ahrefs on its blog — a side-panel assistant that reads the page you're on and your whole workspace, summarizes findings, compares your site against competitors, runs API queries, and navigates Ahrefs tools on its own. It's free for everyone during the beta.
The bigger release hides in Brand Radar. It now has prompt-based indexes for Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, tracking whether your brand shows up in responses to full questions rather than keyword fragments — viewable across platforms at once or filtered to one. The old keyword-based AI Mode index is discontinued; the keyword AI Overviews index keeps updating alongside the new one.
The Cited Pages report also gained two columns covering a 90-day window: bot visits, showing how often AI bots crawl each page, and AI traffic, showing actual visits arriving from AI sources. Smaller additions shipped in the same batch — a "Fix with Agent A" button in Site Audit, "Copy for AI" Markdown exports, and a Google Business Profile review dashboard.
Why this matters
Until now, most AI-visibility reporting was manual spot-checking: type a prompt, screenshot the answer, hope it's representative. A prompt-based index gives you a recurring, defensible number for AI-surface presence — and a number is the precondition for accountability. If rankings go in your weekly report, an AI-visibility figure belongs in the next column. What gets measured gets defended; what stays anecdotal gets deprioritized.
The bot-visits and AI-traffic pairing is the sharper diagnostic tool than it looks. A page with steady bot visits but no AI traffic has a content problem — it's being read and passed over. A page with zero bot visits has an access problem — robots.txt, rendering, or crawl priority. Two columns, and you know which of two very different fixes to make.
As for the agent itself: every SEO suite is bolting on an assistant right now, and honestly, they mostly save clicks. The assistant is the demo. The indexes are the deliverable — they change what you can prove to a client, a boss, or yourself.
What to do about it
Put an AI-visibility number in your monthly report
If you're on Ahrefs, pull the Brand Radar prompt-based AI Overviews and AI Mode figures for your brand and your closest competitor, and report them beside rankings every month. The first month is your baseline; the trend line is what makes AI-surface work fundable. If a competitor's line climbs while yours sits flat, that's your argument for budget written for you.
Run the two-column diagnostic on your top 20 pages
Sort your money pages in Cited Pages. Zero bot visits: check robots.txt for GPTBot and friends, and confirm the page renders without JavaScript. Bot visits but no AI traffic: strengthen citability — concrete facts, clear structure, schema. Same report, two different repair jobs.
Use the free agent for grunt work, not judgment
Agent B costs nothing during beta, so let it summarize workspaces and chase mention spikes. But re-verify anything that lands in a client deliverable or a business decision — an assistant that navigates tools autonomously can also misread them autonomously.