Free AI visibility checker tools: what each one can tell you

What a free AI visibility checker does

A free AI visibility checker asks AI assistants questions about your market and tells you whether your brand came up. You type your brand or your website, wait a minute, and get a short report.

It is a snapshot, not a measurement over time. The tool picks the questions, runs them once, and shows a summary. That is enough to tell you whether the assistants know you exist. It is not enough to tell you whether you are gaining or losing.

We make Agentcites, a paid tool with one free first scan, so it is not in this list of free checkers. Every tool below was checked on its own page on 10 October 2026, and each one is free there. Where a page did not say something, we write "Not stated".

The criteria used to compare free checkers

Five questions decide what a free checker can tell you. They were set before any tool was looked at.

Six free AI visibility checkers, verified on their own pages

The table lists every tool we could confirm is free on its own page today. They are in alphabetical order, because no criterion ranks one above the others for every reader.

What each free checker says about itself

Each entry quotes the tool’s own page on what is free and what is not.

Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker

Ahrefs’ page says "No signup, no credit card, no limit on how many brands you can check." You enter a brand name, and it reports mentions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. The page says the free tool "shows a limited preview (top 5 results per section)". It covers the most assistants of the free checkers here.

Amplitude AI Visibility

Amplitude’s page offers "a limited, free experience to non-customers" before you create an account, and says it tracks your brand across "ChatGPT and Google AI Overview". The page does not say exactly what the limits are.

AthenaHQ Essential

AthenaHQ’s pricing page lists a free Essential tier with 300 credits and says "1 credit = 1 AI response". It covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot. Unlike the one-off checkers here, it is an account inside a full product, so you can return to it until the credits run out.

Backlinko AI Brand Visibility Checker

Backlinko’s page says the checker "runs 150 live queries about your category and analyzes the responses" across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. It asks for your company name, website, product category and top competitor. It is the only free checker here whose page states how many questions it runs.

HubSpot AI Search Grader

HubSpot’s page says "There is no cost to run an AI Search Grader analysis" and that no account is needed. It analyses GPT-5.4 mini, Perplexity and Gemini, and grades sentiment, share of voice and how well the assistants know your brand. It calls the result a one-time snapshot and points to a paid HubSpot product for ongoing tracking.

Semrush AI Visibility Tool

Semrush’s free tool page says "You can use the tool three times per day for free, without registering or creating an account." You enter a domain, and it reports visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews. Deeper analysis needs the paid AI Visibility Toolkit.

Free trials are not free checkers

Several paid tools offer a trial that ends. A trial is a fair way to test a product, but it is not a free checker you can come back to.

• Profound’s pricing page offers "50 prompts run daily for 7 days" on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
• Scrunch’s pricing page offers a 7-day free trial of its Core plan.
• OtterlyAI’s pricing page and Peec AI’s pricing page both offer a free trial.
• Agentcites has no trial. The first scan of a new website is free and needs no card: it asks 20 of your questions to four assistants, once. Weekly scans and the rest need the plan, at $149 a month per website, as the pricing page shows.

What a free check cannot tell you

A free check shows one moment, from questions you did not choose. Four things sit outside what it can show.

• It cannot show a trend. One run is one draw, and the next run may differ.
• It may mix in questions that name you. A question with your brand in it is answered with your brand, which flatters the result.
• It does not explain a loss. Knowing you were left out is not the same as knowing why.
• It may not ask the assistant your buyers use. Check the assistants column above against your own buyers.

The first point has public evidence behind it. A SparkToro and Gumshoe study, reported by Search Engine Journal, ran 2,961 prompts and found the same brand list came back "less than 1% of the time across repeated runs". In the same study, leading headphone brands appeared in 55 to 77 per cent of 994 responses. A brand can be named often without being named every time, so one free run can land either way.

Run a free check twice before you believe it. If the two results differ, the difference is the swing, not a change in your visibility.

Why two free checkers disagree about the same brand

Two free checkers can give the same brand very different results, and neither has to be wrong. They are asking different questions of different assistants on different days.

• They ask different questions. Ahrefs starts from a brand name, Semrush from a domain, and HubSpot and Backlinko from a description of your business, so each builds a different set of questions.
• They ask different assistants. HubSpot names GPT-5.4 mini, Perplexity and Gemini, while Amplitude names ChatGPT and Google AI Overview. A brand can do well in one and poorly in another.
• They ask on different days. The same question can get a different answer from one run to the next, so two checks an hour apart can differ.
• They summarise differently. One counts mentions, another grades sentiment or computes a score, and the pages do not always say how.

So compare a free checker only with itself. Run the same tool with the same input a week apart, and treat a change between two different tools as noise rather than news.

How to read the result of a free check

Read a free result as a starting point, not a grade. Three things on the report tell you most of what it can.

The cited pages are often the most useful line. They show which pages an assistant leaned on when it answered, and those pages are where your work should go first. If a review site keeps appearing, getting listed there may do more than any page on your own site.

When to move from a free checker to a paid tool

A free checker is enough while your question is whether the assistants know you at all. Move to a paid tool when you need to know whether something you did changed the answers.

• You need a trend. Only repeated runs of the same questions can show one, and free checkers are built for one-off use.
• You need your own questions. A free tool chooses the questions, and they may not be the ones your buyers ask.
• You need the reason for a loss. Most free reports show who won, not why.
• You need someone to write the fix. None of the free checkers here writes a page.

Before paying, run the manual check below for a few weeks. It will tell you whether the problem is big enough to pay for, and it gives you a baseline to judge any paid tool against.

A free check you can run yourself

You can do a more honest check than any free tool with an hour and a spreadsheet. It costs nothing, and you choose the questions.

1. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and make sure OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot are not blocked. OpenAI’s crawler page says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT search answers.
2. Write ten questions a buyer would ask without knowing your name.
3. Ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, in a fresh chat each time.
4. Paste each answer into the sheet with the date, and note every brand it names.
5. Count the answers that named you, out of the total, and write both numbers down.
6. Repeat the same questions a week later and compare.

The OpenAI crawler documentation explains which crawler does what. The method page sets out how Agentcites runs the same steps on a schedule, and the AI visibility tools comparison covers the paid tools if you outgrow a free one.