What we found testing two Moroccan brands
On 5 November 2026 we ran Ahrefs' free AI Visibility Checker on Royal Air Maroc and on La Mamounia, the Marrakech hotel. The checker counts how often each AI platform mentioned the brand in the questions Ahrefs tracks, and which sites those answers cited.
| Platform | Royal Air Maroc | La Mamounia |
|---|---|---|
| Total mentions | 136K | 20K |
| Google AI Overviews | 29K | 3.7K |
| Google AI Mode | 26K | 3.6K |
| Copilot | 19K | 2.7K |
| Gemini | 16K | 2.4K |
| ChatGPT | 14K | 3.0K |
| Perplexity | 11K | 1.9K |
| Grok | 2.6K | 385 |
| Most cited page | English Wikipedia | English Wikipedia |
Three readings stand out:
- Other sites shape the answer. For both brands the most cited page was the English Wikipedia article. Behind it came rating and review sites for the airline (Skytrax, AirlineRatings, Trustpilot) and Tripadvisor and Instagram for the hotel. The brands' own sites were the most cited domains, but no single page of theirs led.
- The sources lean European. Skyscanner and Kayak in their French versions, French Wikipedia, Tripadvisor in French. A Moroccan business that wants to be described well by an AI answer needs to be described well on those platforms.
- The free version is a preview. It shows the top five topics, domains and pages. For both brands the top topics were mostly the brand name itself. Ahrefs notes on its AI Mode and AI Overviews trackers that coverage "is strongest in English", so a business known mainly in French or Arabic should expect thinner data.
AI Discoverability: the new checks in Site Audit
Ahrefs' September update, published on 28 October 2026, adds an issue category to Site Audit that "checks whether AI crawlers like ChatGPT and Claude can reach, read, and cite your pages". The first checks:
| Issue Ahrefs flags | What it means for your site |
|---|---|
| Pages blocked from AI bots in robots.txt | The most common cause of absence. Check which bot is blocked: blocking a training crawler such as GPTBot does not stop search, blocking OAI-SearchBot does |
| Pages too slow or heavy for AI crawlers | A crawler that gives up before the content loads has nothing to cite |
| Inconsistent AI bot policies | For example a robots.txt that allows a bot while the firewall blocks it |
| Similar AI-generated content | Pages that repeat each other give an answer no reason to pick one |
| Pages requiring JavaScript rendering | Ahrefs says "most AI bots can't execute it". A site that builds its text in the browser shows them an empty page |
Ahrefs announces more to come: an AI Discoverability score, a dedicated report, structured data recommendations, stale content detection, and links with its Bot Analytics, Web Analytics and Brand Radar tools.
Brand Radar: tracking mentions in AI answers
Brand Radar is the paid product behind the free checker. It covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, adds Claude for custom questions, and has tracked Grok since an update in April 2026. Its questions are "search-backed": Ahrefs builds them from real searches, mostly Google's People Also Ask questions, rather than writing them itself. Recent changes worth knowing:
- Prompt-based AI Overviews and AI Mode indexes (May 2026), which follow long, full questions.
- Bot visits and AI traffic beside each cited page of your site, when you also use Ahrefs' Bot Analytics and Web Analytics.
- Entity matching (July and August 2026), so a brand is recognised as a brand and not as a word. Useful for a name that is also a common word.
- AI adjusted volume, which weights each question by how much each platform is used, so the same question counts differently on ChatGPT and on Gemini.
Brand Radar is sold on top of an Ahrefs plan. The current price is on Ahrefs' pricing page.
The three free checkers
- AI Visibility Checker: mentions on six platforms plus Grok, top five topics, cited domains and cited pages. No account.
- AI Mode Tracker and AI Overviews Tracker: the same view for Google's two AI features alone.
Run your own brand, then your two closest competitors. The cited domains column is the useful one: it lists the sites an answer trusted when it talked about your sector.
How far to trust it for a site in Morocco
We use Ahrefs every day, and we use it as a direction rather than a verdict:
- It has gaps on Moroccan searches. In the keyword research for this very series, several Moroccan searches with real demand, such as «agence seo rabat» at about 200 a month, had no results page stored in Ahrefs.
- Its numbers are estimates from its own questions. The same hotel showed 20,000 mentions in Ahrefs and 350 in Semrush's free checker on the same day. Compare a brand with itself over time, in one tool, never across tools.
- Google's own figures come first. For AI Overviews and AI Mode, Search Console's generative AI report shows the impressions your pages actually received.
- Ask the assistants yourself. In French and in Arabic, with your city and your service: no tool asks those questions the way your customers do.
Our guide to Semrush for AI search covers the other tool we use, and GEO and SEO explains where these tools fit in the work.
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