7 Free Tools to Check Your AI Search Visibility (2026)

Start with a free read

A paid subscription is not the first step. Before you commit to one, you can get a useful first read of whether AI engines see your brand, and it costs nothing. Free tools will not run hundreds of buyer questions across every engine on a schedule, but they answer the two questions worth asking first: when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation in your category, does your brand come up, and can the crawlers that feed those answers even reach your site. This roundup covers seven free ways to check, what each one actually looks at, and where free stops being enough.

One note on what "free" means here. Some of these are one-off snapshots: you enter a domain or a question, you get a result, and that is it. Others are free tiers of paid products that keep monitoring for you but cap the prompts and engines you can track. That difference matters, so it is the last column in the table below.

The free tools worth starting with

Here are the four free tools most people reach for first, side by side. Three more do-it-yourself options follow the table.

Seven free tools, reviewed

1. Measure AI Visibility Checker

Best for: a fast answer to whether ChatGPT names you. Our free AI Visibility Checker takes a brand or domain and a buyer question and runs it live in ChatGPT, showing whether the answer names you and which sources it cites. It is a one-off snapshot rather than a tracker, so treat it as the fastest way to confirm whether you have a problem worth fixing. If ChatGPT names three rivals and not you, that is your signal to start measuring properly. Disclosure: this is our tool, and it is free to use with no account, which is why it leads this list.

2. Measure AI Crawler Checker

Best for: ruling out the most common, most fixable cause of invisibility. Before an engine can cite you, its crawler has to be allowed to read you. Our free AI Crawler Checker reads your robots.txt and llms.txt and tells you whether bots like GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended are permitted or blocked.

Sites sometimes block these crawlers without meaning to, through a blanket bot rule or a CDN setting, so this quick check can explain a low score on its own. Also free, no account.

3. HubSpot AI Search Grader

Best for: a free grade to benchmark against. HubSpot's grader gives a one-off answer-engine optimization score for how AI-ready your brand and site look. Like our checkers it is a snapshot and a lead magnet rather than an ongoing tracker, but it is a credible free second opinion and a reasonable number to measure improvements against. Cost is zero; it does not monitor over time.

4. Otterly.AI free plan

Best for: a taste of ongoing monitoring without paying. Otterly.AI offers a limited free plan that keeps watching a small number of prompts across the main engines, rather than a single snapshot. That makes it the one genuinely ongoing option on this shortlist, with the catch that the free tier caps how many questions and engines you can track. Plan limits change, so check Otterly's pricing page for the current caps. It is a fine way to see what continuous monitoring feels like before deciding whether to pay for more.

5. The engines themselves

Best for: the most honest free check there is. You can open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude and ask them the questions your buyers ask, then read who gets recommended. It costs nothing beyond the free tiers of the assistants, and it shows you the raw answer rather than a score. The weakness is that it does not scale or record anything: answers vary from run to run and between accounts, so a single manual check is a spot reading, not a trend. Do it for five real buyer questions and you will learn more than any grade can tell you. Our engine-specific guides for Perplexity, Gemini and Claude explain what to look for in each.

6. Google Search Console and GA4

Best for: seeing whether AI answers already send you traffic. Two free Google products tell you what is happening downstream. Google Search Console shows the queries and pages Google surfaces in search; it does not give a clean, standalone AI Overviews report, and our guide to the Search Console generative AI report covers what it does expose. Google Analytics 4 can be segmented to isolate referral traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity and other assistants. Neither was built for AI visibility, but together they are a free way to connect mentions to real visits, which is the part most dedicated tools charge for. Measure builds on exactly this data with native GA4, Search Console and Bing Webmaster attribution.

7. Bing Webmaster Tools

Best for: understanding how Copilot and Bing see your site. Microsoft Copilot leans on the Bing index, so Bing Webmaster Tools, which is free, is a useful window into whether that index has crawled and understood your pages. It will not tell you whether Copilot names you in an answer, but a page Bing cannot index well is a page Copilot is unlikely to cite. Pair it with the crawler check above for a complete free picture of readability.

A 30-minute free audit, step by step

The tools above are most useful in a fixed order, because each step rules out a cause before the next one. Here is the sequence we would run for a brand starting from zero, using only free tools.

1. Crawler access (5 minutes). Run the AI crawler checker on your domain. If GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended is blocked and you did not intend it, fix that before anything else; every later result depends on it.
2. Ask the engines (15 minutes). Write five buyer questions, for example "best [category] for [your customer type]", "alternatives to [biggest competitor]", "[category] for [specific use case]", "how do I [problem you solve]" and "is [your brand] good for [use case]". Run each in ChatGPT (or via the free checker), Perplexity, Gemini and Claude in a logged-out or fresh session.
3. Score it (5 minutes). For each of the 20 answers, give 2 points if you are named in the first three recommendations, 1 point if you are named lower down, and 0 if you are absent. Note which rivals appear and which sources are cited. A score out of 40 is crude, but it gives you a baseline to re-run in a month.
4. Check for traffic (5 minutes). In GA4, filter referral sessions for sources such as chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai. Even a small number of sessions tells you AI answers are already sending visitors, and which landing pages they arrive on.

Read the result as a pattern rather than a grade. Absent everywhere with crawlers blocked is a technical fix. Absent everywhere with crawlers open usually means too little third-party coverage. Named in one engine but not the others points to the specific sources that engine cites, which the next step is to track properly.

Where free tools stop

Free tools are a first read, not a program. Three limits are worth being clear-eyed about.

• Sampling. A free check looks at one phrasing at one moment. AI answers vary between runs and between accounts, so a single result can miss a mention that would appear on a slightly different question or an hour later. One green result is reassuring; it is not proof.
• No trend. Snapshots cannot show whether you are gaining or losing ground, which is the number that actually tells you whether your work is paying off. For that you need the same set of questions run on a schedule and scored over time.
• Narrow coverage. Free tiers cap prompts and engines, and running every engine daily is expensive, so no free tool checks everything continuously. In Measure, for example, Perplexity is the engine run daily on most plans; the others are sampled on a cadence that scales with the plan.

How to choose a free tool

Match the tool to the question you are actually trying to answer.

• Just want to know if you have a problem: run the Measure AI Visibility Checker and ask two of the engines by hand. Ten minutes, no account.
• Score is low and you want to know why: run the AI Crawler Checker first, because a blocked bot is the cheapest possible fix, then check Bing Webmaster Tools for indexing issues.
• Want a number to benchmark: take the HubSpot grade, and re-run it after you make changes.
• Want to feel ongoing monitoring: use the Otterly free plan, or Search Console and GA4 to watch AI-referral traffic build.

When you outgrow the free tier, the deciding features are the same ones that matter at any tier: engine coverage, how many buyer questions you can track and how often, whether the tool shows the sources and competitors winning citations, and whether it connects visibility to real traffic and revenue. Measure is self-serve from $19.99/mo (no free plan; the checker above is our free tool), tracks all five engines, and ties visibility to native GA4, Search Console and Bing Webmaster attribution, so the free checks above lead straight into the paid version of the same picture. You can browse all our free tools or start tracking whenever the snapshot stops being enough.