Keyword Monitoring in the Age of AI (2 Tools You Need)

So today, effective keyword monitoring covers three main areas:

• Search engine optimization (SEO): Tracking your rankings for target keywords in traditional search results.
• PR and social media management: Monitoring mentions of your brand or topics across social platforms, forums, and news sites.
• Visibility in AI search engines and LLM-generated content: Ensuring your brand and products are accurately represented in AI-driven answers and summaries.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean you need another tool specifically for monitoring keywords in LLMs like ChatGPT and AI overviews. In this guide, I’ll explain why Ahrefs and Mention might be all you need to track keywords effectively across every channel, including AI search.

Traditional keyword monitoring meant checking if you ranked #3 for “best project management software.” Now you also need to know: Does ChatGPT mention your tool when someone asks for project management recommendations? Are you cited in Google’s AI Overviews for relevant queries? Which competitor gets mentioned instead of you in AI-generated comparisons?

This shift matters because AI overviews have doubled since Google’s March Core Update and now appear for 16.48% of US searches (up from 7.6%). When someone searches for “best CRM for small business,” they might never scroll past the AI overview that summarizes the top options, meaning that the traditional ranking position becomes less relevant than the frequency of AI mentions.

Ahrefs now tracks both scenarios. You can monitor your #1 ranking for “email marketing tools” while simultaneously tracking how often you’re mentioned in AI overviews for email marketing queries.

Key use cases

Ahrefs offers five tools within the suite that help with keyword monitoring: Rank Tracker, Brand Radar, Report Builder, Site Explorer, and Alerts.

Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker monitors your and your competitors’ keyword positions over time and shows whether your SEO efforts are paying off.

Setup takes minutes: add your keywords, select target locations and languages, then Ahrefs starts collecting ranking data. You’ll receive weekly updates by default, or switch to daily tracking for faster insights.

The dashboard shows top-level metrics like share of voice, average position, and estimated traffic from your target keywords, along with performance history charts. You can switch between mobile and desktop rankings and locations.

You can track your overall visibility in AI overviews for all keywords in the SERP features section.

Below, you will see a list of all your tracked keywords with regularly updated SEO data.

From there, you can check particular keywords or tag your keywords to analyze them in bulk or tag keywords by topic, product line, or campaign to analyze performance in groups.

One of the best uses of this data is to identify content that needs refreshing. If keywords around a specific topic start declining, that’s your signal to update the related page.

Finally, the competitor comparison report shows exactly how you stack up against rivals across all these metrics, revealing gaps in your keyword strategy.

Other noteworthy features:

• Google Search Console integration: Connect your GSC to use Google’s data on clicks, click-through rates, and impressions more effectively.
• SERP intent analysis: Open SERP overviews to compare different time periods and hit “Identify intents” to track shifts in search intent over time for any keyword.
• Target Page Outranked Alert: Get notified when another page on your site ranks higher than the one you intended to rank for a specific keyword.

Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer now includes trending keyword detection to help you spot rising search terms before they become saturated with competition.

Enter any topic, and navigate to the Matching terms report. You’ll see keywords ranked by search volume growth over the past three months. Sort them by the growth rate (GR) columns to get the highest trending keywords on top.

For each trending keyword, you get the full Keywords Explorer data set: monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, traffic potential, and cost-per-click. This means you can quickly assess whether a trending term is worth targeting or if it’s already too competitive.

Beyond basic growth metrics, you can filter by specific trend patterns and analyze a time period:

• Linear growth: Demand increases steadily over time at a consistent rate—ideal for building long-term content around stable, growing topics.
• Exponential growth: Demand starts off slow but then surges rapidly—perfect for catching viral trends early.
• S-curve growth: Demand builds gradually, takes off quickly, then levels out as the market saturates—useful for identifying trends entering their peak phase.
• Damped growth: Demand spikes early but quickly loses momentum and flattens—helps you avoid investing in fading trends.

This feature is perfect for content teams who want to stay ahead of the curve. Instead of going after overused keywords, it helps you spot rising search trends so you can create content early, before the competition heats up.

One of Ahrefs’ most significant new additions is Brand Radar, which specifically addresses the challenge of monitoring brand visibility in AI-driven search results.

Search is evolving beyond blue links, and keywords aren’t just for Google anymore. Brand Radar helps you track which keywords trigger LLM answers about your brand, how often you’re mentioned, and which competitors are winning attention in AI search. Currently supports: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Google’s AI Overviews (Gemini coming soon).

Let’s take a look at some of Brand Radar’s use cases.

Discover which keywords generate AI mentions of your brand. You’ll know what your audience is actually seeing in AI overviews, so you can shape perception, catch misinformation early, and build trust at the top of the funnel.

You’ll also see a quick view of how your visibility is growing in AI-generated search summaries.

Find keywords where competitors are mentioned, but you’re not. These are missed opportunities where your content isn’t considered relevant, yet. Fix that, and you gain a foothold in emerging traffic sources before they go mainstream.

Benchmark AI-specific keyword performance. Traditional SERP rankings no longer show the full picture. Knowing your share of voice in LLM chatbot (ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.) answers helps you prioritize what drives discovery in 2025.

Analyze AI entities to uncover keyword themes and product-category links. Learn which product categories or use cases LLMs associate with your brand, and which ones they don’t yet. That’s your roadmap for content and positioning.

Actually, brand Radar doesn’t just track AI-generated answers. It lets you scan over 16B “regular” web pages in search of your keywords, as well.

Want to see how often sports brands show up in conversations about running shoes? Or how frequently a competitor is mentioned in AI tools for marketers? Brand Radar lets you zero in on those intersections, so you can track topical relevance, not just raw volume.

Need some inspiration for your content strategy? Open Site Explorer, plug in any website (for instance, your competitor), and check out the Organic Keywords report. The report will show you all the keywords they rank for, how much traffic they get, the keywords’ difficulty, which page ranks for the keyword, and even some more advanced stuff like the ranking history.

One handy way to use this report is to see which keywords your competitors have started targeting recently. You can also use filters to focus on keywords you might want to rank for yourself.

You can also check what keywords your competitors bid for and where they send their paid traffic with the Paid keywords report.

Ahrefs’ Report Builder lets you create custom dashboards and automated reports using data from Site Explorer and Rank Tracker. Instead of manually pulling screenshots or exporting CSVs for client reports, you can build professional dashboards that update automatically.

Click Create, then Add widget to start building reports from existing projects, portfolios, or custom targets. Mix and match widgets to create exactly the report you need—whether it’s a monthly SEO summary for executives or a detailed competitor analysis for your team.

Use cases:

• Client reporting: Combine keyword rankings, organic traffic from target keywords, and competitor keyword data into a single dashboard that updates weekly or monthly
• Executive dashboards: Focus on keyword-driven metrics like share of voice for target keywords, keyword ranking trends, and competitive keyword positioning for C-level presentations.
• Competitor monitoring: Track rivals’ keyword gains/losses, organic traffic from their top keywords, and backlink growth in one automated report.
• Multi-location tracking: Compare keyword performance across different geographic markets for international keyword campaigns.

Ahrefs’ Alerts is a tool for automated email notifications. It’s perfect for keyword monitoring because it allows you to:

• Be notified when a site ranks for new keywords.
• Be notified of new content that contains a keyword or a search query.
• See new mentions of your brand and products.

For example, you can use it to monitor the web for pages that mention your competitors but don’t mention you. You can also set additional filters, such as Domain Rating and website traffic, to save you some time on link building.

Start from just $29/month, or unlock the full power of Ahrefs—including Rank Tracker, Site Explorer, and Trending Keywords—starting at $129/month. Add Report Builder for $99/month to create custom reports perfect for agencies and larger teams. Pay annually and save 17%.

Mention is the kind of tool you’d want to use to see who talks about your brand or your competitors on social media, forums and the web in general. It’s the kind of tool social media managers and PR professionals use daily.

Key use cases

Here are some of the ways Mention can help monitor online conversations about your keywords.

If you’d like to not only see but also analyze your online mentions, Mention allows you to:

• See keyword popularity in time.
• Get a sentiment analysis.
• Get a breakdown of the sources.
• See countries where your keywords were mentioned.

It all begins with clearly defining what you’re looking for, and this tool lets you get really specific. Beyond basic search filters like AND or OR, you can even set how close certain words or phrases should appear to each other.

Mention offers three types of alerts for different monitoring needs:

• Basic Alert: Quick monitoring using simple keywords with AI-suggested additional terms
• Standard Alert: Boolean operators through a query builder for refined results
• Advanced Alert: Full Boolean search capability with up to 2,000 characters for complex queries.

For example, I can set a keyword alert that reports conversations in the U.S. about Ahrefs’ data where the words “ahrefs” and “data” are within six words of each other.

Mention gives you access to a massive stream of keyword data across social, news, blogs, and more, and Quick Charts are how you tap into it instantly.

Want to see how sentiment around a product or topic has changed? Use a line chart to track sentiment over time, or switch to a radar chart for a more holistic view across platforms.

But they don’t stop at just positive vs negative. Mention’s analysis adds nuance, letting you surface the most extreme conversations (think outrage or viral praise) with more granularity.

You can also filter results by influencer score, helping you focus on the conversations that are most likely to move the needle.

What I especially like about Mention is the custom reports feature. You can mix and match whatever insights Mention offers and collate them into a single report.

For instance, here you can see a comparison of “Apple Vision Pro” and “Meta Quest Pro” in the sentiment and sources dimensions on one report.

Find influential voices driving conversations around your keywords

Mention has a special feature for influencer analysis that goes beyond basic mention tracking.

You can use it to create a list of notable influencers talking about your brand, complete with their follower count, location, interests, and an influence rating out of 100.

You can filter influencer reports by sentiment (showing only positive mentions), influence score, and engagement levels. This means you can quickly identify high-impact influencers who are already speaking positively about your space, making partnership conversations much more targeted and effective.

Social media teams will love this feature that turns monitoring into action. When you spot an interesting mention, you can assign it to another person, and they can respond right inside the app without switching between platforms.

The response feature works across multiple social networks, so your team can reply to a Twitter mention, respond to a Facebook comment. This unified workflow prevents mentions from falling through the cracks and ensures consistent response times.

Set up an integration in Zapier, and you can take advantage of response triggers for common scenarios. For example, if someone mentions a customer service issue, the platform can automatically assign it to your support team with priority tagging. For positive mentions, you might set up auto-responses that thank users while flagging potential testimonial opportunities.

The platform tracks response times and engagement metrics, so you can measure how your community management efforts impact overall brand sentiment. You’ll see if faster responses lead to better sentiment scores, helping you optimize your social media strategy based on real data.

Start with Solo at $49 / month for core listening and publishing, or unlock richer analytics and extra seats on Pro for $99 / month. Add unlimited users plus advanced Boolean alerts on Pro Plus at $179 / month; massive-scale tracking (100 k + mentions and TV/radio sources) is covered by the Company plan—custom pricing, just talk to sales. Pay yearly on any tier and pocket two months free.

Final thoughts

Back in the 2023 version of this post, I recommended three tools: Ahrefs, Mention, and Glimpse. They’re all still solid picks. But here’s the thing—Ahrefs has grown so much that you can now cover a ton of ground without juggling extra platforms.

Between Ahrefs and Mention, you can monitor keywords across traditional search, AI-generated content, and social media, all in one streamlined setup. So it’s not that Glimpse is a bad tool. It’s just that, in 2025, if you’re looking to simplify your stack while staying ahead of where attention is going, these two tools are probably all you need.

Got questions or comments? Find me on LinkedIn.