The 10 Best Free AI Visibility Tools in 2026 (And Which 'Free' Ones Are Really Trials)

Search "free AI visibility tools" and most of what comes back is a 14-day trial with a credit card form at the end of it. The category is young, well funded, and in land-grab mode — free tiers are the exception, not the rule.

This list applies one rule: if it stops working after a trial period, it isn't free. Everything below is usable indefinitely at zero cost, with the real limits stated. The trials are named separately at the end, because some of them are worth taking — just know what you're signing up for. (If you have budget and want the full paid landscape, see our comparison of the best AI visibility tools, or the shorter list of AI visibility tools for founders and small teams.)

Full disclosure: we build Sightivo, which is first below.

The Best Free AI Visibility Tools at a Glance

How We Picked These

Free indefinitely, not free for 14 days. Trials are excluded from the list and named separately at the end, because conflating them is the single most common failure of "free tools" roundups.

Tells you something about AI visibility specifically — whether assistants name you, what they cite, or what feeds those answers.

Signup requirements stated, since "free" often means "free after you give us your work email."

Checked in August 2026 on each vendor's own pages.

Why Free Is Rare in This Category

Worth understanding before you go hunting: every AI visibility check costs the vendor real money. Running twenty prompts against ChatGPT with live web search is twenty API calls, repeated daily across every customer. That's a per-check marginal cost no amount of scale removes.

Traditional SEO tools amortise a crawl across all customers — one index, many users. AI visibility tools can't. Which is why free tiers here are small, and why "free" so often means "trial."

The 10 Best Free AI Visibility Tools

2. Manual prompt testing — free, and more instructive than any dashboard

Twenty prompts your buyers would ask, a spreadsheet, and an hour a month.

What you get: The actual wording assistants use about your category. You'll learn more from reading five raw answers than from a month of mention-rate charts — including how you're described, which competitors are framed as the default, and which sources keep getting cited.

Where it stops: Doesn't scale past a handful of prompts, no history, and single-session variance means you can't tell signal from noise.

Do this even if you buy something. Every serious practitioner still reads raw answers.

3. Semrush's free AI tools

What you get: Semrush publishes free tools including an AI visibility checker alongside its SEO checker and keyword tool, usable on a free account.

Where it stops: Capped queries, and the depth sits behind the AI toolkit add-on to a paid plan ($139/mo entry).

Best for: A second opinion if you already have a Semrush login.

4. Google Search Console

What you get: Impressions and clicks that include AI Overviews and AI Mode surfaces. If your impressions climb while clicks flatten, you're being shown inside AI answers and not clicked — which is itself the finding.

Where it stops: Google doesn't cleanly separate AI surfaces from classic results, so this is inference rather than measurement.

Pro move: Compare impressions-to-clicks ratio over the last 16 months on your best informational pages. That divergence is the closest free proxy for AI Overview impact — the pattern Ahrefs measured as a 58% CTR drop on top-ranking pages.

5. Google Analytics

What you get: Referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and gemini.google.com — plus what those visitors do, which is the number that actually matters.

Where it stops: Only captures people who clicked through. Most AI answers produce no click at all, so this undercounts your influence badly.

Pro move: Build one segment for AI referral sources and compare its conversion rate against organic. Semrush's data suggests AI visitors are worth 4.4x a traditional organic visitor — check whether that holds for you before investing further.

6. Bing Webmaster Tools

What you get: Free index and query data for Bing — which matters because Bing's index feeds Microsoft Copilot. Includes a competitor comparison Search Console doesn't offer.

Where it stops: Copilot only, and Bing's view of the web.

7. Perplexity — the fastest free way to build a target list

Free to use, and it does something ChatGPT doesn't do as plainly: it shows numbered sources for every answer.

What you get: Ask Perplexity the buying question in your category and read the source list. Those URLs are the pages currently shaping the answer — the roundups, comparisons and directories you need to be on.

Where it stops: Manual, one query at a time, no history. Perplexity's source selection isn't identical to ChatGPT's, though the overlap is substantial.

Why it's the most useful free thing here after a checker: it converts "we're not mentioned" into a concrete list of pages to pursue, at zero cost, in about ten minutes.

8. Microsoft Copilot — the free Bing-fed check

What you get: Ask the same buyer questions in Copilot and note who's named. Because it draws on Bing's index, it's the surface most directly influenced by the Bing Webmaster Tools work above.

Where it stops: Manual, and a smaller share of buyer research than ChatGPT for most categories.

Pair it with: Bing Webmaster Tools, since improving what Bing knows about you is the most direct lever on this particular assistant.

9. Google Alerts

What you get: Email alerts whenever your brand is mentioned anywhere new.

Where it stops: Misses plenty and has no AI-specific view.

Why it belongs here: Assistants learn from what's published about you. New mentions are the leading indicator; AI mention rate is the lagging one. Watching the input is free.

10. HubSpot's AEO Grader and similar free graders

What you get: A one-off score for how "answer-ready" your site is, from various vendors offering free graders as lead magnets.

Where it stops: These grade your own pages — on-page readiness — rather than measuring whether assistants actually name you. Useful, but a different question. And most exist to start a sales conversation.

The "Free" Tools That Are Actually Trials

Named honestly, because several are worth taking:

• ZipTie — 14-day free trial, then $69/mo. Genuinely useful trial if you have a specific question to answer.
• SE Ranking — 14-day trial without a card, then $129/mo Core.
• Morningscore — 14 days, no card, then $69/mo.
• Semrush — 7-day trial on paid plans (distinct from the free tools above).
• Otterly.AI — no perpetual free tier, but Lite at $29/mo is the cheapest paid entry in the category.
• Profound, Peec AI, Scrunch, Similarweb — demo or quoted; no free tier.

A trial is worth taking when you have a decision to make inside two weeks. It's a bad way to establish a baseline you'll want to compare against in six months.

A Free AI Visibility Routine

Today. Run a no-signup check to see where you stand. Write down which competitors got named instead of you.

This week. Write 20 real buyer prompts. Ask each one manually across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Log who's named and which sources get cited — those cited URLs are your target list.

This month. Set up Search Console, Analytics AI-referral segmentation, Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Alerts. Start a free tracking plan so the same prompts are asked repeatedly rather than once.

Ongoing. Pursue the sources that keep getting cited. That's the actual work: Muck Rack's analysis of 25 million cited links found 84% of AI citations come from earned media, so being written about elsewhere is what moves this — not anything you can do on your own site.

Common Questions

Can I check if ChatGPT mentions my brand for free?

Yes. Ask it directly with your buyers' questions, or run a free checker that generates those questions and reports which brands were named. Both cost nothing; the checker is faster and less biased by the phrasing you'd instinctively choose.

What's the best free AI visibility tool?

For a one-off answer, a no-signup checker. For ongoing tracking, a free plan that asks the same prompts repeatedly — a single check tells you where you stand, not whether you're improving.

Are there really no free tiers on the big AI visibility platforms?

Mostly not. Trials, yes; perpetual free tiers, rarely — because each check has a real per-run API cost the vendor can't amortise the way a crawler-based SEO tool can.

How often should I check?

Monthly. AI visibility moves on the timescale of other people publishing about you, which is slow. Daily checking mostly measures model variance.

Does checking my own brand in ChatGPT influence the results?

No. Your queries don't train the model on your brand, and personalization doesn't meaningfully change a fresh session's answer. What changes it is what's published about you elsewhere.

Key Takeaways

• Free tiers are rare here because every check costs the vendor real API money
• A no-signup spot check is the fastest way to find out whether you have a problem
• One check tells you where you stand; only repeated checks tell you whether you moved
• Search Console, Analytics, Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Alerts cover the free proxy metrics
• The fix is always off-site: 84% of AI citations come from earned media

Check your domain free, no signup — then start on the free plan if you want the same questions tracked over time.