The 10 best free AI visibility checkers

What does a free AI visibility checker actually measure?

Every free checker answers one of three questions about your AI visibility, and knowing which one a tool answers matters more than its score. Readiness checkers crawl your site and grade whether AI crawlers can read it. Live-answer checkers send a handful of prompts to the engines and report whether you were named or cited. Database checkers look your brand up in answers the vendor has already collected at scale.

You want one of each kind over time. A readiness check tells you what to fix on your site; an answer check tells you whether buyers hear your name. Our guide to measuring AI visibility covers how to turn these into a tracking routine.

Free AI visibility checkers compared

Arobis AI is the only one here that grades your site's readiness; Ahrefs, Semrush and Goodie read from answer databases the vendor already built; the rest send live prompts. AthenaHQ is the one free plan designed for tracking the same prompts over time.

1. Arobis AI Visibility Checker: best first check for fixing your site

The Arobis AI Visibility Checker takes a domain, crawls the homepage and returns an AI Visibility Score from 0 to 100 in about 25 seconds, with no account or card1. The score is built from six weighted signal groups: AI crawler access (25%), structured data (20%), semantic structure (20%), content and entity signals (15%), llms.txt (10%) and technical health (10%). It then estimates readiness separately for ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, gives a prioritized fix plan (you fill in a short contact form to see it) and a permanent, shareable report link.

It ranks first because it's the only free tool here that tells you why an engine might skip you and what to change, which is the step most teams need before tracking mentions makes sense. It works on any public domain, so you can score competitors against yourself. The tool page says to re-run it the same day after you ship fixes.

It doesn't send prompts to the models, so it can't say whether ChatGPT names you today, and it reads only your homepage. The vendor says so directly and calls it "a diagnostic, not a rank tracker". For mention data, pair it with Ahrefs or Semrush below.

2. Ahrefs Free AI Visibility Checker: best for seeing who gets cited

Ahrefs' checker takes a brand name and reports total AI mentions, mentions per platform, top topics, and the top cited domains and pages, with no signup2. Its intro lists ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews, and its FAQ adds AI Mode. It runs on Ahrefs Brand Radar data built from what Ahrefs calls search-backed prompts.

The cited-domains list is the useful part. If the same three review sites and one Reddit thread keep appearing, those are your placement targets.

The free report is a "limited preview" capped at the top 5 results per section, and competitor comparison and history sit in the paid Brand Radar product. You also can't choose the prompts.

3. Semrush AI Search Visibility Checker: best free competitor comparison

Semrush's free checker takes a domain and returns an AI Visibility Score, total brand mentions, a breakdown across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI features, the pages on your site that earn the most AI citations, the topics and prompts where you appear, and an estimate of audience reached3. The report also includes a side-by-side comparison with your closest competitors. No account is needed.

Three free uses a day covers you and two competitors. Read the "estimated audience" figure as modeled reach rather than a head count, and note that Claude and Perplexity aren't covered.

4. HubSpot AEO Grader: best for brand sentiment

HubSpot's grader asks for your company name, location, industry and product, then scores how GPT-5.4 mini, Perplexity and Gemini represent you, out of 1004. The weights are published: sentiment 40 points, presence quality 20, brand recognition 20, share of voice 10 and market competition 10. You get a composite score, a breakdown and a written interpretation.

Because sentiment carries 40% of the score, this is the best free read on how models describe you once they do mention you.

The catch is the data source. HubSpot says the grader checks what engines say "based on their training data", so it reflects what models have learned more than what live search would surface today. A form is required for the full results, and you can't see or change the prompts.

5. Mangools AI Search Grader: best for comparing many models

Mangools takes your brand or a competitor's plus a short niche description, generates prompts and tests them across models5. Logged out, you get ChatGPT (GPT-5 Nano), Mistral Small 3.2 and Llama 3.3 70B; a free account adds DeepSeek V3, Claude Haiku 4.5 and Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite. It reports visibility (the share of prompts where you appear in the top 20), average ranking, and an AI Search Score from 0 to 100 weighted by each model's market share, in under 60 seconds.

Those are small, cheap model versions called through APIs, and they can answer differently from the consumer apps your buyers use. The page also says "seven" models while listing six, and doesn't publish usage caps.

6. Goodie AI Visibility Index: best for industry benchmarking

Goodie publishes a monthly index of which brands AI recommends across 31 industries, built from sampled answers on AI Mode, ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity and covering more than 47,700 brands6. The free brand check takes a domain and returns a visibility score, your industry rank, the brands ahead of you and gaps by model and source. Checks are unlimited and need no signup.

Index scores are averaged over six months of sampled answers, so last month's fix won't show up quickly, and you're measured on Goodie's prompts instead of your own.

7. ZeroRank AI Brand Visibility Report: best for a quick emailed report

ZeroRank's free report takes your website URL and sends an AI visibility score, competitive positioning and recommendations for how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini see your brand, with results in about 30 seconds and no card7. The same free tools page includes an AI Crawler URL Inspector that shows what ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity crawlers receive from a page, which is a handy companion check.

You have to hand over an email to get the report, and the page doesn't say which prompts run or how the score is calculated.

8. RightBlogger AI Visibility Checker: best for publishers and bloggers

RightBlogger reads your homepage and about page, suggests three questions your readers would ask, and sends each one live to ChatGPT and Perplexity with web search turned on8. For each question you see whether the answer names or cites your site, which other sites it names and in what order, and which sources the AI relied on. No signup is needed.

Three auto-generated questions is a small sample, and you can't write your own. Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews sit in the paid product.

9. Frase AI Visibility Checker: best for checking whether AI links to your domain

Frase's checker asks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini link back to your domain in AI answers, using three search-style phrases generated for your industry per engine9. The ChatGPT result is free without signup; giving an email adds Perplexity and Gemini.

Because it counts links, a brand that gets named without one can look invisible here. Frase itself calls one check a snapshot.

10. AthenaHQ Essential: best free plan for ongoing tracking

AthenaHQ's Essential plan is free and includes 300 credits plus a $25 starting credit, unlimited team members, prompt and response analysis, source and competitor insights, and content recommendations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot10. On its paid plans AthenaHQ counts one credit as one AI response, so 300 credits is enough to run a small prompt set a few times. Starter costs $295 a month and adds more models, including Claude.

The pricing page doesn't state prompt limits for the free plan, and 300 responses go fast: 20 prompts on five engines, run three times each, uses all 300.

Two trials worth knowing about

Two paid trackers are free to try. Otterly.AI offers a free trial with no card and paid plans from $29 a month, covering ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude11. Allmond, which tracks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, offers a trial with 40 free scans12. Both need an account, so they sit outside the ranked list. Once you're re-running the same prompts every week, you've outgrown free checks; our comparison of paid AI visibility tracking platforms covers what the next step costs.

How should you read the results?

Read every score as "what this tool's method saw today", then look past the score at the specific gaps it names. Three rules keep you from misreading them:

• Don't compare scores across tools. HubSpot puts 40% of its score on sentiment; Arobis AI puts 25% on crawler access; Mangools weights by model market share. A 62 in one tool and a 40 in another can describe the same brand.
• Act on the named items. The cited domains (Ahrefs, Goodie), the competitors named ahead of you (Semrush, Goodie, RightBlogger) and the failed checks (Arobis AI) are the parts you can do something about.
• Split mentions from citations. Being named in the answer text and being linked as a source are different results, and tools count them differently.

Here's a decision rule. If the readiness check flags blocked AI crawlers or content that only renders with JavaScript, fix that first; nothing else matters until engines can read the page. Our robots.txt AI checker and the list of AI crawler user agents help there. If your site passes but answer checks show competitors named and you absent, the gap is off-site: reviews, roundups and comparisons on the domains the engines cite.

What can a single check not tell you?

A single check can't tell you your real mention rate, because AI answers change from run to run. SparkToro and Gumshoe had volunteers run 12 brand-recommendation prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI features 2,961 times in late 2025. The odds of the same list of brands coming back twice were under 1 in 100, and the same list in the same order appeared under 0.1% of the time13.

The same study found a more stable signal. When 142 people wrote their own headphone prompts, Bose, Sony, Sennheiser and Apple still appeared in 55% to 77% of the 994 answers13. That's the case for measuring visibility as a percentage across many runs, and against reading anything into a position number from one run.

A free check also can't tell you about the prompts your buyers really type, how answers differ by country or logged-in user, or whether a change you made caused a shift. For that you need a fixed prompt set re-run on a schedule. A simple sheet does the job:

date | engine | prompt | run # | brand named (y/n) | position in answer | competitors named | sources cited (domains) | our page cited (url)
2026-10-12 | ChatGPT | best [category] software for [use case] | 1 | n | - | CompA, CompB | g2.com, reddit.com | -

Run 20 to 30 buyer prompts, three times each, on the engines your buyers use, once a month. Report the share of runs that name you, your share of voice against two or three named competitors, and the domains cited most often. That's what paid prompt tracking tools automate.

Frequently asked questions

Sources