Free AI Visibility Tools: A Practical Roundup for 2026

AI-powered answers are changing where people find information. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews now handle a growing share of the queries that previously sent people to search result pages. For brands, this creates a new visibility problem: appearing in a ranked list on Google is only part of the picture. What AI says about your brand when someone asks for a recommendation, a comparison, or a product suggestion is equally important.

The catch is that most tools built to track this cost money, some of them a significant amount. A team just getting started does not need to spend hundreds of dollars per month to understand its baseline AI visibility. There are legitimate free paths forward, and they are worth knowing about before committing to a paid subscription.

This guide covers all the meaningful free options as of early 2026: manual querying, Semrush's free AI checker, HubSpot's AEO Grader, and Prompt Eden's three free marketing tools plus its free plan. Each option has real limits, and this guide is honest about them. The goal is to help you find the right starting point for your situation.

The most free option of all is also the most time-consuming. Every major AI platform, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, is free to use at its base tier. You can open each one and ask it questions about your brand, your product category, and your competitors. This takes no budget, no sign-up beyond a basic account, and no tools at all.

The manual method works like this. First, build a list of prompts that reflect how real customers research in your category. "What are the best tools for X?" or "Which platforms do Y professionals use?" or "Compare [your brand] with [competitor]" are good starting templates. Aim for twenty to thirty prompts across a mix of informational, comparison, and recommendation queries.

Second, open each AI platform in an incognito browser window to avoid personalization effects. Run each prompt and record three things: whether your brand appears in the response at all, where it appears relative to competitors, and what the AI says about it. A spreadsheet with one row per prompt per platform is sufficient.

Third, repeat this at least monthly. A single snapshot tells you where you stand. A series of snapshots tells you whether things are improving or declining.

What Manual Querying Gets Right

• It is genuinely free. No credit card, no trial, no hidden costs.
• It is accurate. You see exactly what the AI says, with no intermediate layer of abstraction or data aggregation.
• It builds intuition. Reading actual AI responses teaches you how AI platforms frame your category in ways that dashboards do not.

What Manual Querying Gets Wrong

• Scale. Running twenty-five prompts across four AI platforms is one hundred individual queries. Doing that monthly takes several hours. Adding more platforms or prompts multiplies the time linearly.
• No trend tracking. Unless you save every response, you cannot compare what an AI said last month to what it says today.
• No competitor benchmarking. Without systematic tracking, it is hard to see patterns in how AI positions you versus your competitors.
• Personalization drift. Even in incognito mode, AI responses vary slightly across sessions, which can make manual results inconsistent.

Manual querying is the right starting point if you have never checked your AI visibility at all. It costs nothing and takes an afternoon. The question is whether the value of ongoing tracking justifies moving to a tool.

Semrush offers a free AI Search Visibility Checker that runs a point-in-time check on your brand across several AI platforms. You enter your domain or brand name, and the tool queries AI platforms including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, then returns a visibility score and a summary of how your brand appears.

The tool also offers a separate free AI Overviews Checker focused specifically on Google's AI Overviews surface, which has become a significant source of zero-click traffic for many categories.

What the Semrush Free Checker Provides

• Snapshot visibility score. An overall metric showing how visible your brand is across the AI platforms the tool queries.
• Mention context. A summary of where and how your brand appears in AI-generated answers.
• Competitive positioning. A comparison of your visibility against other brands in your space.
• No sign-up required. The basic check runs without creating a Semrush account.

Limitations to Know

The free checker is a one-time snapshot, not ongoing monitoring. You get a report for a moment in time, not a trend line. The platform coverage depends on what Semrush's tool queries, and it does not cover the full range of AI platforms a brand might care about, particularly standalone API models like Claude or autonomous coding agents.

Semrush's broader AI Visibility Toolkit, which includes ongoing tracking and deeper competitive analysis, sits inside paid Semrush plans. The free checker is a useful diagnostic, not a monitoring solution.

Best for: Teams that want a quick, account-free check on their current AI visibility before deciding whether to invest in proper monitoring.

HubSpot launched its Answer Engine Optimization Grader as a free diagnostic tool that analyzes brand visibility, sentiment, and competitive positioning across three AI platforms: ChatGPT (using GPT-4o), Perplexity, and Gemini. The tool runs automatically, meaning you enter your brand information and business details, and it runs dozens of test queries across those platforms to generate a report.

The report breaks brand performance into several dimensions including brand recognition strength, competitive positioning, contextual relevance, sentiment analysis, and citation frequency. It also categorizes your brand as a Leader, Challenger, or Niche Player based on how AI platforms position you relative to competitors.

What the AEO Grader Provides

• Free with no credit card. No subscription, no trial, no hidden cost.
• Automated query execution. The tool runs the queries for you rather than requiring you to copy prompts manually.
• Sentiment analysis. Most free tools skip sentiment; the AEO Grader includes it.
• Competitive benchmarking. Positions your brand against competitors in AI-generated answers.
• Share of voice view. Shows how often your brand is mentioned relative to others in similar queries.

Limitations to Know

The AEO Grader covers three AI platforms. Brands that need visibility data from Claude, Google AI Mode, or agent-category tools like Codex or GitHub Copilot will not find that here. The tool is also a report generator rather than an ongoing monitoring system; it does not automatically re-run monthly or send you updates when AI responses change.

Advanced AEO strategy features, including more granular readiness scoring and content recommendations, are available only through HubSpot's paid products.

Best for: Marketing teams that want a structured report on AI visibility for a brand presentation or internal kickoff, without committing to a monitoring subscription.

Prompt Eden offers three standalone free tools on its marketing site. These tools are separate from its paid monitoring platform and require no account to use. Each addresses a distinct part of the AI visibility picture.

AI Robots.txt Checker

The AI Robots.txt Checker analyzes your site's robots.txt file and tells you whether AI crawlers can access your content. Several major AI platforms use their own crawlers to index content, and a misconfigured robots.txt can inadvertently block them, limiting your site's influence on what AI says about your brand.

The checker identifies which AI crawlers your current configuration blocks and which it allows. For many teams, this is a quick diagnostic that reveals an unintentional problem.

llms.txt Generator

The llms.txt Generator helps you create an llms.txt file for your website. The llms.txt format is a structured text file that tells AI models what your site is about, what content is most important, and how to understand your brand in context. It is an emerging standard designed to give AI systems a cleaner signal than scraping raw HTML.

The generator produces a ready-to-deploy llms.txt based on your site's information. You paste it into your root directory and AI crawlers that support the format can read it.

AI Query Generator

The AI Query Generator generates a set of test prompts based on your brand and product category. These prompts represent the kinds of questions real customers might ask AI platforms when researching your category. The output is a starting list you can use for manual querying or import into a monitoring tool.

This tool is useful for teams that know they want to track AI visibility but are not sure which prompts to start with. Getting prompt selection right matters: tracking the wrong queries means collecting data that does not reflect real customer behavior.

Using These Tools Together

The three tools form a practical starting kit. Check your robots.txt to confirm AI crawlers can reach your content. Generate and deploy an llms.txt to give AI systems cleaner context about your brand. Use the Query Generator to build your initial prompt list. None of this requires a Prompt Eden account or any payment.

Beyond the standalone tools, Prompt Eden offers a free plan on its monitoring platform at no cost. The free plan includes one project, ten prompts, and weekly data refresh.

Those ten prompts run across Prompt Eden's AI platform coverage, which spans search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini), API models (Claude), and agent-category tools on paid tiers. The free plan accesses the platforms available to all plans and produces a Visibility Score (from zero to one hundred) based on four components: Presence, Prominence, Ranking, and Recommendation.

Weekly refresh means Prompt Eden re-runs your ten prompts once per week and updates your score and response data. This is not real-time monitoring, but it is sufficient for understanding your baseline and catching meaningful shifts month over month.

What the Free Plan Includes

• One project and one monitor
• Ten tracked prompts with weekly refresh
• Visibility Score with four-component breakdown
• Citation Intelligence to see which sources AI models cite
• Organic Brand Detection to discover competitor mentions
• Fifty monthly credits (one credit equals approximately one thousand tokens; most AI responses use one to two credits)
• One team seat

What the Free Plan Does Not Include

• Daily refresh (requires Starter plan at $49/month or above)
• More than ten prompts (requires Starter for one hundred prompts)
• More than one project
• API access (requires Pro plan at $129/month or above)
• Agent-category monitoring for Claude Code, Codex, and GitHub Copilot (requires a paid plan)

The free plan is an honest starting point. Ten prompts is not enough for thorough tracking, but it is enough to get real data and understand what the platform does before deciding whether to upgrade.

Each free option has a different use case. Here is how they compare on the factors that matter most.

Coverage: How Many AI Platforms?

• Manual querying: As many as you choose to query manually. No technical limit, just time.
• Semrush free checker: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and SearchGPT.
• HubSpot AEO Grader: ChatGPT (GPT-4o), Perplexity, and Gemini.
• Prompt Eden free tools: Not applicable (tools address robots.txt, llms.txt, and prompt generation rather than monitoring).
• Prompt Eden free plan: Search-category platforms plus Claude; agent platforms require a paid plan.

Ongoing Monitoring vs. One-Time Snapshot

• Manual querying: Ongoing only if you maintain the discipline to repeat it.
• Semrush free checker: One-time snapshot only.
• HubSpot AEO Grader: One-time report only.
• Prompt Eden free tools: Not applicable (they are generators and checkers, not monitors).
• Prompt Eden free plan: Ongoing, with weekly refresh.

Trend Data Over Time

• Manual querying: Only if you save every response in a spreadsheet.
• Semrush free checker: No trend data.
• HubSpot AEO Grader: No trend data.
• Prompt Eden free tools: Not applicable.
• Prompt Eden free plan: Yes, daily rollup data for historical visibility tracking.

Competitor Visibility

• Manual querying: Yes, if you write prompts that include competitor comparisons.
• Semrush free checker: Yes, basic competitive positioning.
• HubSpot AEO Grader: Yes, Leader/Challenger/Niche Player categorization with share of voice.
• Prompt Eden free tools: The Query Generator helps you write competitor comparison prompts.
• Prompt Eden free plan: Yes, Organic Brand Detection automatically discovers competitor mentions.

Citation Tracking

• Manual querying: Manual only; you note URLs that appear in responses.
• Semrush free checker: Limited citation mention data.
• HubSpot AEO Grader: Citation frequency patterns in the report.
• Prompt Eden free tools: Not applicable.
• Prompt Eden free plan: Yes, Citation Intelligence shows which domains AI cites.

Account Required?

• Manual querying: Free AI accounts required for each platform, but no paid subscription.
• Semrush free checker: No account required for the basic check.
• HubSpot AEO Grader: Free with no credit card required.
• Prompt Eden free tools: No account required.
• Prompt Eden free plan: Free account required.

The right free tool depends on what question you are trying to answer.

"Does AI even mention my brand?"

Start with the HubSpot AEO Grader or the Semrush free checker. Both run automatically, require minimal input, and produce a report within minutes. The HubSpot tool goes deeper on sentiment and competitive positioning; the Semrush tool is faster and requires no account at all.

"What is blocking AI from understanding my site?"

Use Prompt Eden's AI Robots.txt Checker and llms.txt Generator. These are the only free tools that address the technical side of AI accessibility. A robots.txt check should take minutes. Generating and deploying an llms.txt file is a one-time task that does not require ongoing tooling.

"Which prompts should I be tracking?"

Use Prompt Eden's AI Query Generator to build your initial list. This is particularly useful if you have not done AI visibility monitoring before and are not sure what kind of queries customers use when researching your category.

"I want to track visibility over time without paying"

The Prompt Eden free plan is the only option here. Ten prompts with weekly refresh is a genuine (if limited) ongoing monitoring setup. The Visibility Score gives you a single metric to track over time. Manual querying is also an option if you are disciplined about saving responses and recording results.

"I need a report to share with stakeholders"

The HubSpot AEO Grader produces the most presentation-ready output of the free options. Its multi-category scoring and competitive positioning framing translates well into a slide deck or internal memo.

When to Move to a Paid Tool

Free tools are a starting point, not a long-term strategy for brands where AI visibility matters. The main limitations of every free option are prompt volume (manual querying excepted), refresh frequency, and trend data depth. When you find yourself manually running the same queries weekly, or when you want daily data on more than ten prompts, the economics of a paid plan start to make sense.

Prompt Eden's Starter plan at $49/month increases the prompt count to one hundred and switches refresh to daily. That is a meaningful jump in coverage and frequency for a relatively modest cost if AI visibility is a real priority for your team.

If you want to build a real understanding of your AI visibility without spending anything, here is a four-week workflow using only the free options covered in this guide.

Week One: Technical Setup

Run Prompt Eden's AI Robots.txt Checker on your domain. If any AI crawlers are blocked that should not be, fix the robots.txt. Generate an llms.txt file using Prompt Eden's generator and deploy it to your root directory. These steps ensure AI platforms can access your content and have clean context about your brand.

Week Two: Baseline Report

Run the HubSpot AEO Grader for a structured snapshot of how AI platforms currently position your brand. Save the report. Run the Semrush free AI checker for a secondary data point. Note where the two tools agree and where they differ. Record the date.

Week Three: Build Your Prompt List and First Manual Pass

Use Prompt Eden's AI Query Generator to build a list of twenty to thirty prompts. Run each prompt manually across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Record in a spreadsheet: brand mentioned (yes or no), position in the response (first, middle, end), and what the AI said. This is your manual baseline.

Week Four: Set Up Ongoing Monitoring

Create a free Prompt Eden account and set up your ten most important prompts. Let the weekly refresh run. At the end of the month, compare your Visibility Score to the manual baseline from week three.

After thirty days, you will know whether AI mentions your brand, how it positions you relative to competitors, and whether your Visibility Score is moving. That is enough data to decide whether ongoing free monitoring is sufficient or whether a paid plan is worth the investment.