Octopus Energy used Ahrefs’ Brand Radar to replace a resource-heavy manual process for monitoring AI visibility across multiple global markets. With Brand Radar, Laura was able to present clear, actionable findings about their brand in AI search to C-suite and global marketing teams. This also helped her team get buy-in to reshape their content strategy and head new marketing initiatives to own their narrative better on AI platforms.
“If you want a really intuitive platform for tracking and understanding your AI results, one that’s easy to use, easy to explain, and useful for both SEO and non-SEO teams, this is it. Everyone can quickly understand the insights and confidently share them with their own teams.” Laura Iancu
Octopus Energy is a UK-headquartered energy company that supplies domestic electricity and gas to 7.7 million households across nine countries. Its business divisions cover retail energy, renewable generation, low carbon technology services.
Problem: Everyone was worried about AI visibility, and getting answers from existing tools was tough
As AI became more prevalent, both the C-suite and local teams across the company were scrambling for answers: how is AI search impacting brand discovery and the bottom line? It turns out that analyzing AI visibility across countries, markets, and lines of business was no easy task.
Each country had different brand histories, which made multi-market tracking tedious and complicated
Octopus Energy operates globally, with branches across the UK, Germany, Japan, the United States, and more. Each branch also had unique brand histories; for example some countries needed to monitor previously acquired brands that were still surfacing in AI answers and older parts of the web.
Manual monitoring methods were slow and resource intensive
Laura recalled the tedious job of setting up tracking of separate domains and brand variations for each country’s branch (octopusenergy.de, octopusenergy.jp, etc.), then mapping each branch against regional competitors. It was a “very long, assiduous manual task” that involved extracting question-based queries from Google Search Console, then fetching answers from these queries from multiple AI platforms by hand.
Early attempts to automate parts of this process using custom scripts with help from the team’s developers had some success, but still “involved a lot of resources of time”. Lots of work was also required to make the data presentable to non-SEO stakeholders and the C-Suite, making turnaround time slow.
Solution: Brand Radar replaced tedious manual work and gave C-suite clarity
Laura had been using Ahrefs for years, and was inspired to pick up Brand Radar after attending a Search Engine Journal x Ahrefs webinar on AI Visibility. She found the data from Brand Radar matched the output of what her manual process for monitoring AI Visibility was producing. After that, there was no reason to keep looking.
“Before Brand Radar, I was testing scripts and manually extracting AI responses from ChatGPT, AI Overviews, all the main AI-search platforms. Very tedious, and very not glam at all. With Brand Radar, it’s now just a few clicks to identify what I need, and export everything directly.”
Here’s the top [x] features in Ahrefs Brand Radar that made her job easier:
1. Straightforward metrics helped everyone get the picture quickly
Octopus Energy needed a solution that any team member could use regardless of technical or SEO knowledge. Brand Radar’s metrics: mentions, citations, and impressions were all relevant and straightforward, making it easy to quickly communicate the state of their AI visibility.
“It’s really user-friendly. Even if someone isn’t familiar with the terminology, they can still understand what they’re looking at pretty quickly. I can share Brand Radar with teams across marketing, product, dev and beyond, and feel confident they’ll be able to find their way around with little to no hand-holding.”
“And it’s the same with organic. I’ve experienced the opposite with other platforms, where you spend far too much time explaining what each number actually means. At that point, you’re not talking about organic performance anymore, you’re translating the dashboard, wasting time, and losing the room.”
Laura was able to sit down with global digital marketing teams and present the findings clearly, going through each market one by one: “Here are your numbers, here’s how relevant your piece of the pie is in this country, and here’s how the energy sector looks across the markets we work in.” She made recommendations based on country-specific rules, cultural context, competitor insights, and the AI platforms most relevant in each market.
2. Entities made it possible to track multiple domains and brand names as single markets
Brand Radar allows for multiple website domains and brands to be combined into a single entity.
It then suggests competitors based on your brand, whose websites and brands can be combined into an entity too. This flexibility allows Laura to build an accurate comparison of where each country’s branch stood in their local market.
“Within the B2C energy sector, brands tend to get acquired very quickly and change names,” Laura says. “I could add all these variations and use the knowledge from the market owners in Japan, for example, to capture how the brand actually changed over the years, and get specific numbers.”
“For Octopus Energy UK, I still get the brand ‘Bulb’ appearing in AI answers even though that subsidiary was acquired five years ago. Obviously we’re not using that brand name anymore at all, but AI is still mentioning it now.”
3. Advanced filtering and grouping to surface gaps in brand authority
Brand Radar revealed the topics Octopus Energy held authority and exposed the gaps that were holding them back across different AI platforms and markets.
“The Topics report was a big one for us. In such a volatile environment like AI search, no brand can expect to be number one for absolutely everything, especially while we’re still learning which factors fully influence visibility. Even with strong PR, brand trust, and authority behind you, it’s still wise to prioritise the topics that matter most and build where your strategic priorities lie.”
For Octopus Energy, that priority area was low carbon technology: “heat pumps”, “solar panels”, and “EV chargers”. The brand had been actively building awareness in this space, and Brand Radar gave Laura a way to see how that was translating into AI visibility.
A full overview of her findings are detailed in Laura’s article here.
Brand Radar helped Octopus Energy revamp their content strategy for AI search
What Brand Radar made visible was the gap between content written for traditional search and content that holds up when AI pulls from it. The core insight came from surfacing patterns spotted across actual AI responses that Brand Radar was surfacing.
“I was looking for a faster way to serve the right content formats and think more strategically about how content is retrieved by both search engines and LLMs. What we now do is plan content that doesn’t rely on the previous paragraph,” Laura explains. “The paragraphs are connected, but you’d be able to understand one paragraph without reading the previous. If one of them is out of context and published in a newspaper or in an AI overview, people would understand what the product is more accurately.”
The broader strategic shift was away from repetitive Q&A formats and toward topic clusters where Octopus Energy could genuinely own the narrative in AI search.
