Deepcrawl vs Ahrefs: Lumar's Crawler, Ahrefs Site Audit and AI Reporting Compared (2026)

Deepcrawl vs Ahrefs is no longer a like-for-like comparison, because Deepcrawl renamed itself Lumar in September 2022. Lumar is an enterprise website-crawling platform with a GEO toolkit and no published price. Ahrefs is an SEO suite with a free Site Audit for verified sites and published plans from $129 a month, and it adds AI prompt tracking through Brand Radar.

This article uses vendor pages read on October 24, 2026. No product was run for this comparison, and claims such as speed or market position are the vendors' own. Prime AI Visibility publishes this site and is affiliated, so it appears in a separate section judged on the same questions.

Deepcrawl vs Ahrefs: the short answer

1. Deepcrawl is now Lumar. Lumar's own announcement, dated September 28, 2022, says it changed its name as it grew from a technical SEO platform into a broader website intelligence platform. Searches for "Deepcrawl" lead to the same company.
2. Both crawl your site; they differ in scale and packaging. Lumar sells to enterprise teams and publishes no prices. Ahrefs includes Site Audit in every plan and gives it away free, up to 5,000 pages a month, for websites you can verify.
3. Both now report on AI search, but not the same thing. Lumar's GEO toolkit starts from your site: whether AI bots can reach it, understand it and consider it reliable. Ahrefs' Brand Radar tracks prompts and answers.
4. Lumar lists no price at all. Ask for a demo or quote before comparing totals.
5. A crawl is not an answer check. Crawling shows what your pages contain. Saved answers show what an engine displayed.

How was this compared?

Facts come from Lumar's home, platform, crawler, GEO toolkit and pricing pages and its 2022 rename post, plus Ahrefs' Site Audit, Brand Radar and pricing pages. A cell reads Not listed where a page did not state a fact, and Not verified where it was ambiguous. Prices are monthly list prices in US dollars. Google's SEO Starter Guide frames the baseline. Its sections on helping Google find your content, and on checking whether Google can see your page the same way a user does, describe the first jobs a crawler supports.

What is Deepcrawl now, and who is it for?

Lumar describes itself as a website optimization platform for AI brand visibility (GEO and AEO), technical SEO, site speed, accessibility and custom analytics, "built for scale and used by enterprise teams". Its crawler page claims speeds of up to 450 URLs per second for non-rendered pages and 350 per second for rendered pages in its own tests, 350+ built-in reports in its Analyze product and automated tests in its Protect product.

Ahrefs describes Site Audit as a crawler that scans for 170+ issues, executes JavaScript, covers categories from indexability and redirects to structured data, and crawls up to 170,000 URLs a minute by its own figure. The same suite includes keyword research, backlink data and rank tracking.

In plain terms, Lumar is a crawl-and-governance platform that has added AI reporting. Ahrefs is a marketing data suite whose crawler is one module among many.

How do the crawlers compare?

Capability	Lumar (formerly Deepcrawl)	Ahrefs Site Audit
Crawl speed (vendor claim)	Up to 450 URLs a second non-rendered, 350 rendered	Up to 170,000 URLs a minute
Issue coverage	350+ built-in reports plus custom extractions	170+ issues in listed categories
JavaScript rendering	Rendered crawls listed	Executes JavaScript
Pre-release testing	Protect product runs automated QA tests	Not listed
Custom data extraction	Custom metrics and extractions	Not listed

Both speeds are vendor figures from different tests and are not comparable. Lumar's is per second under its own conditions, and Ahrefs' is per minute at its stated peak. A real crawl depends on your server, so speed is a question to test, not a number to rank.

What do they cost?

Product	Published price	What the page lists
Lumar	Not listed	Pricing page asks for a form, "flexible pricing and packaging"
Ahrefs Free	$0	Site Audit for verified websites, up to 5,000 pages a month
Ahrefs Lite	$129	100,000 crawl credits, 150 AI prompt checks, 5 AI prompts
Ahrefs Standard	$249	500,000 crawl credits, 300 checks, 10 AI prompts
Ahrefs Advanced	$449	1,500,000 crawl credits, 600 checks, 20 AI prompts

Ahrefs also lists an Enterprise plan from $1,499 a month on an annual commitment. Lumar publishes no figure, so no total can be compared. The mapping from Ahrefs crawl credits to pages is Not verified here, so confirm it before sizing a large site. Each Ahrefs prompt is checked daily on every selected platform, which the Brand Radar page gives as 5 prompts on 1 platform equal to 150 checks a month.

What do they say about AI search?

Area	Lumar GEO Toolkit	Ahrefs Brand Radar
Starting point	Your website: discovery, understanding and inclusion	Prompts and answers across engines
Bots	Reports on AI bot interaction, robots.txt and rendering	Bot Analytics, free while in beta
Answers	Brand mentions and sentiment, per its home page	Custom prompts with daily checks
Price	Not listed, demo form	Included prompts in paid plans, add-ons listed

Lumar's GEO page groups its reporting under three headings: AI discovery (availability, crawlability, raw versus rendered HTML, robots.txt, nosnippet and AI bot interaction), AI understanding (page content and structured data) and AI inclusion (semantic relevance and AI referral tracking). It also describes a GEO Content Evaluator that measures brand presence across several models. The pages read did not list per-plan prompt limits or engine counts for those features.

Ahrefs' Brand Radar page describes custom prompts you write, fanout queries behind a prompt, tags, and a modeled index across 496 million prompts. It lists AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini, with Claude on the larger index plan.

Which questions does each answer?

Keep five signals separate whichever product you use:

1. Mention. An answer names your brand.
2. Citation. An answer links one of your pages.
3. Recommendation. An answer suggests your brand as a choice.
4. Referral. A visit arrives from an answer.
5. Conversion. The visit becomes a lead or sale.

A crawler can only tell you whether a page is reachable, readable and well formed, which supports the third and fourth signals indirectly. It does not show what an engine said. Prompt tracking shows what an engine displayed, but not why. Lumar's referral tracking and Ahrefs' free Web Analytics address the fourth signal, and neither product's pages describe conversion reporting. Use your own analytics for the fifth.

Which one fits which team?

Lumar fits large sites where a developer team needs scheduled crawls, automated checks before release and governance reporting. Limit: no listed price, and its AI pages list no prompt limits.

Ahrefs fits teams that want a crawler inside a wider SEO suite and a small set of tracked prompts. Limit: included prompt checks are small, and crawl credits are an unfamiliar unit.

In our judgement, the real split is team structure rather than features. A platform team shipping releases weekly will value pre-release checks. A small marketing team will value a free crawl and one login for keywords, links and prompts. These are editorial judgements, not measured outcomes.

How should you run a fair trial of Deepcrawl vs Ahrefs?

Use the same section of the same site, so the two crawls can be read side by side.

1. Pick a section of 500 to 5,000 URLs. The Ahrefs free tier allows up to 5,000 pages a month on a verified site.
2. Crawl it in each product with JavaScript rendering on for both.
3. Export the issue lists and compare the top ten issues for overlap and for issues only one found.
4. Spot-check five findings against the live page, so you know which reports are accurate for your site.
5. Record setup time and hand-off effort. Count how long it took to send a fix to a developer.
6. Repeat after a release to see how each product shows change.

An invented example: a site crawl lists a page as blocked by robots.txt in one product and as crawlable in the other. The spot check against the live robots.txt file settles it, and the disagreement itself tells you which setting to confirm.

What can a vertical show about question sets?

Pulse Terminal is a public site in another field, so it works as an illustration. Its homepage and its stocks page describe one market-research product that grades stocks and answers questions with sources shown beneath each answer. A product like that has questions a crawl would never list, such as "which large-cap semiconductor stocks have a rising trend" (invented). An engine's answer to that question could cite the product's pages or someone else's, and only a saved answer shows which. This is an illustrative public website, not a Prime AI client, endorsement or paid relationship, and it carries no AI-search outcome.

Where does Prime AI Visibility fit?

Prime AI Visibility does not crawl your site. It is an AI Search Visibility Platform that asks buyer questions of AI engines and saves the answers. The free check runs up to five questions across ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, keeps up to 15 answers with the links each displayed, and needs no card. It is one check a month. Starter is $69 a month and adds Gemini and an AI Overview-style preview. It reports brand named and website cited as separate counts. It has no crawler analytics, no sentiment reporting, no traffic reporting and no managed service.

That makes it a different layer from both products above. Use it as an AI visibility checker for a baseline, and as an AI visibility tracker once the question set is stable. Read the features page for the measures it reports. As an AI Visibility Platform it is affiliated with this site, so treat this section as a disclosed recommendation, not an independent ranking.

For the process, read the AI visibility audit guide, the AI visibility strategy guide and the guide to choosing a tool. For a related head-to-head, see Profound vs Ahrefs.

When is implementation the next job?

If a crawl shows blocked pages and an answer check shows competitors cited instead of you, the work becomes technical and editorial. Percepture, a company connected to Prime AI Visibility, covers AI visibility tools and measurement. Its generative engine optimization services cover the implementation. It is a services firm, not a crawler.