Best Free AI Visibility Tools in 2026: What's Actually Free, Tier by Tier

The best way to check whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini mention your brand costs nothing: open each one, ask your buyers' actual questions, and write down who shows up. No login, no credit card, no vendor pitch. Most "free AI visibility tool" roundups bury this to get to a product list faster, which gets the priority backwards: the manual method is the baseline every paid tool gets measured against, not a fallback for people who can't afford one.

This guide gives you that method first, including a starter prompt set and a recording template you can copy today. Then it covers the free and free-tier tools genuinely worth adding, a longer list of ones marketed as "free" that aren't, what each free option actually limits, and when free stops being enough. If you're past the free stage already, the companion guide to the 12 paid AEO platforms and their real cost at scale is Best AEO Tools in 2026.

Key Facts

• There's less than a 1% chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI returns the identical list of brands twice for the same prompt, based on nearly 3,000 runs across 12 prompts, per Rand Fishkin's SparkToro research as reported by Search Engine Journal. Run a prompt once and you've sampled one outcome, not a fact.
• Only 23.1% of brand mentions in AI answers come with an accompanying citation, and just 13% of brands get both in the same answer, per BuzzStream's analysis of mentions versus citations. A free check needs to log both separately.
• ChatGPT replaces 74% of the sources it cites every week, and Google AI Mode replaces 56%, per a 17-week study across three platforms and six countries by SISTRIX. A once-a-quarter check misses most of what's happening.
• Ahrefs found ChatGPT cites only about half the URLs it retrieves (49.98%), and 88.46% of what it cites traces back to organic search results, not training data (Ahrefs). Your own site isn't the only thing worth checking.
• Google searchers click an actual website just 8% of the time when an AI summary appears in results, versus 15% when it doesn't (Pew Research Center). That's the stakes for why any of this is worth ten minutes a week.

The Best Free Method Isn't a Product

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude all have free consumer tiers (see Claude vs ChatGPT vs Gemini if you're not sure which to open first). That's your whole toolkit. Pick the 10 to 20 questions your buyers actually ask when they're comparing you to competitors, ask each one in each assistant, and write down who gets named and who gets linked.

Those are two different findings, not one. A mention is your brand's name appearing somewhere in the answer. A citation is a specific, attributed source the assistant points to, which is closer to a backlink than a brand nod. Our AEO vs SEO breakdown covers why that distinction exists in the first place; our guide to earning AI citations covers what to do once you know you're missing.

Build Your Starter Prompt Set

Don't just ask for your own brand name, that's the easy case and tells you the least. Spread prompts across categories so you see the real buying journey, not just your own visibility.

Run each row for your brand and your top two or three competitors. That's 15 to 20 prompts, a realistic week-one load for the manual method.

Log It the Same Way Every Time

A spreadsheet with these columns is the entire "product" here. Run the same prompt set weekly, not once, because of the drift and non-determinism in the Key Facts above.

Keep "mentioned" and "cited" as separate yes/no columns, never one blended "visibility score." That split is exactly what the BuzzStream figure above is telling you to track, and it's the same split our LLM citation tracking comparison found several paid tools blur in their own marketing copy. Run the full set every week for a month before drawing any conclusion about a single prompt; a one-off "we're not mentioned" result is one sample from a wide, shifting distribution, not a verdict.

Free Tools Worth Adding to the Manual Method

Once the manual method is running, a handful of vendor tools add something real for zero or near-zero cost. Most don't.

Conductor's Free AI Visibility Analysis

Conductor is an SEO platform that added AEO, not a point tool built for this job alone, and its free checker reflects that: a no-signup scan of your brand's presence in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, framed as a lead-in to its paid Essentials, Growth, and Enterprise tiers, none of which publish a price. It's a single snapshot, not a tracked history, and it checks three engines, not the five or more a dedicated tool covers. Use it as a five-minute second opinion alongside your own manual prompts, not as your ongoing system.

AthenaHQ's Essential Tier: The One Genuinely Free Account

AthenaHQ's Essential plan is free, full stop, no card, no expiration date on the plan itself. New accounts get a one-time $25 credit (300 credits) covering ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Copilot, with unlimited team members on the account. Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, and Meta AI are reserved for the $295/mo Starter tier and up. The honest limit: those 300 credits are a one-time grant, not a monthly refill, so this is a real first look and a way to keep a dormant account ready, not a substitute for ongoing weekly tracking once the credits are gone.

HubSpot's Free AEO Trial

HubSpot's AEO product is still labeled beta and sold standalone at $50/mo ($45/mo annual), but the trial is genuinely free: 25 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, no credit card, and HubSpot's own page doesn't put a day limit on it in writing. It's also bundled free into Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise, so check there first if you're already a HubSpot customer. The catch is the same one AthenaHQ has in reverse: once the 25-prompt trial stops being enough, you're paying $50/mo for the same three engines, with no published rate to track more without upgrading.

Ahrefs Brand Radar: Free If You Already Pay, Plus a Genuinely Free Preview

Be precise about this one, because it's the entry most likely to mislead a reader scanning "free" roundups: Ahrefs Brand Radar's Custom Prompts feature is free on every paid Ahrefs Lite plan and above (Lite gets 5 prompts tracked daily, Standard 10, Advanced 20, Enterprise 83+), which is free if you already pay for Ahrefs, not free. Ahrefs serves its Brand Radar prices in a regional currency with no visible switcher: its page displayed them to us in euros (from EUR 47/mo) on 2 October and in pounds (from GBP 40/mo) on 5 October, while the vendor has separately quoted USD elsewhere ($50 for Custom Prompts, $199 for the Index). Confirm which currency your account shows before budgeting.

What's actually free with no Ahrefs subscription: an instant AI Visibility Index preview you can run against any domain from the Brand Radar page itself, and a separate free Bot Analytics install (in beta) that shows which AI crawlers are visiting your own site. Neither requires a paid plan, and the Bot Analytics option is a simpler alternative to grepping your own server logs, covered further down.

Semrush: The One That Might Not Even Give You a Trial

Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit costs $99/mo per domain for 25 tracked prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, and Perplexity (the pricing page's engine list), with no free tier at all. Semrush is now an Adobe company, with the acquisition completed on 28 April 2026, and the toolkit is still sold under the Semrush name. Worth stating plainly because it's the kind of thing a "free tools" roundup should catch and most don't: Semrush's own pages disagree with each other about whether even a trial exists. They also disagree on the billing term (the pricing page says $99 is billed annually, while the knowledge base says "$99 per month") and on seat cost (extra users from $45 on the pricing page, a $99 license per the knowledge base).

That pricing-page trial language reads like generic Semrush account boilerplate rather than a toolkit-specific offer, but we can't assert it either way; the two pages simply disagree, and both were read the same day. Confirm directly with Semrush before assuming you get to try anything here for free.

Bonus: Free Technical Checks That Answer a Different Question

Two vendors in this category offer free tools that check whether your site is readable by AI crawlers, which is not the same question as whether assistants mention or cite you. Goodie's Agent Readiness Audit runs 36 checks across 8 categories (discovery, crawl access, rendering, machine-readable structure, and more) against your domain, free, no signup. Goodie also publishes a free AI Visibility Index you can browse (31 preset industries, not a custom check of your own prompts) and a free LLMs.txt Generator that builds the file for you. Scrunch offers a similar instant audit with no card required, separate from its $250/mo Core plan.

Treat these as a worthwhile ten minutes, not a visibility fix. The evidence doesn't support them moving the needle on citations: schema markup showed no meaningful lift in AI citations across 1,885 pages studied by Ahrefs, and llms.txt is barely fetched at all. Across 12 weeks and 83 sites, ezy.ai found GPTBot made 7 llms.txt fetches versus 3,990 robots.txt fetches, ClaudeBot made 9 versus 3,120, and PerplexityBot made zero llms.txt fetches versus 775 robots.txt fetches. Ahrefs separately found 28% of domains now publish an llms.txt file, and 97% of those get zero requests for it (Ahrefs). Generate the file if a free generator makes it a two-minute task, as Goodie's does, but don't expect it to change whether you're mentioned. Our longer explainers on llms.txt and schema markup for AI search walk through what each one still does and doesn't do.

No Free Tier, Just a Trial

The rest of the category markets itself as approachable, but none of these six publish a plan that's actually free forever. Each gates a time-limited trial behind its cheapest paid tier instead.

Three of these are worth a specific flag: Peec AI, Goodie, and Scrunch all publish prices, even though some roundups list them as quote-only, so check a vendor's pricing page yourself before writing it off.

What Each Free Option Actually Limits

Headline "free" hides the real question: free to do exactly what, for how long? This is the table that answers it.

The pattern across every row: the catch is almost never the price, it's the refresh rate and the history. A single free snapshot tells you where you stand today. None of the free rows above give you a trend line without becoming a paid row first.

Is Free Actually Enough for You?

For most companies checking a handful of key prompts for one brand, yes, at least to start.

What Free Cannot Do

Three things consistently separate a free check from a paid program, no matter which vendor you pick:

• Competitor tracking at scale. Free tiers cap you at one brand; watching five competitors across the same prompts means five times the manual work or a paid seat.
• History and trend lines. Every free option above either keeps no history (Conductor) or depends on an account staying active (AthenaHQ, HubSpot). A paid tool is the only way to see a month-over-month graph instead of a single point in time.
• Sampling frequency high enough to see real change. The SISTRIX and SparkToro figures in the Key Facts above both point the same direction: these answers drift fast and aren't deterministic, so catching a real shift (not noise) takes dozens of runs a week, not the handful a free tier allows.

If any of those three is the actual job, skip the free tier and go straight to a paid comparison; our 12-platform AEO tools guide runs the real-usage cost scenario for exactly that case.

The Statistic That Sells This Whole Category

Nearly every paid tool and placement service in this space rests on one claim: most of what AI assistants cite comes from third-party pages, not a brand's own site. If that's true, checking your own visibility matters less than getting named on the pages assistants already trust. Treat this claim with more care than any price on this page, because every source making it has something to sell.

Figures read directly from each publisher's own site, 2 October 2026. All three have a commercial stake in this category; none of them is a neutral, disinterested measurement.

Three vendors landing in the same range is directionally useful, and it's genuinely why a free self-check matters: if most citations really do go to pages you don't own, your own manual prompts will show you that gap directly, which is more convincing than any vendor's aggregate figure. Just never repeat 85%, 88.4%, or 75.8% as "independent" research; they're each a company's own data, published to support a sale, covered in more depth in Should You Pay for AI Citations? and Noble vs Anchorial if a placement service is what you're actually weighing against a free check. Best AI Citation Placement Services in 2026 prices seven vendors.

Watch Your Own Logs and Search Console (Also Free)

The free option nobody markets to you: your own server already records which AI crawlers visit, and your analytics already records which AI assistants send you readers. Both are free if you're already running a website. How to measure AI visibility covers what to search for in your logs and what a crawler hit can and can't prove.

Pair that with a look at your referral traffic. These are the domains to search for in Google Search Console and your analytics tool's referrer report:

If grepping raw logs isn't practical, Ahrefs' free Bot Analytics install (mentioned above, still in beta) does this for you without a paid plan. Either way, a visit from one of these crawlers doesn't guarantee a citation, but a complete absence of them tells you something the prompt method can't: that you may not even be in the retrieval pool to begin with.

What to Do Next

Pick 10 prompts from the starter set above, run them across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude this week, and log the results in the recording template. That single week of manual checking will tell you more than any vendor's dashboard about whether you're even in the conversation. Only after that, if you need an ongoing free account, open AthenaHQ's Essential tier or HubSpot's trial; if you're already paying for Ahrefs, turn on Custom Prompts before you consider anything else. If the free options above genuinely aren't enough once you've tried them, the full paid comparison and real-usage cost scenario live in Best AEO Tools in 2026, and if you're still mapping AI tooling across your marketing stack more broadly, our guide to choosing AI marketing tools is a useful next stop.