How Octopus Energy uses Ahrefs Brand Radar to monitor AI visibility across global markets

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Here’s the top features in Ahrefs Brand Radar that made her job easier:

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. 

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.

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.

Brand Radar revealed the topics Octopus Energy held authority and exposed the gaps that were holding them back across different AI platforms and markets.

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.

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.

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.