You don't need a subscription to find out whether AI search engines can see your brand. A growing set of free tools covers the first diagnostic layer: can AI crawlers read your site, do you appear in AI answers at all, and how do you compare to competitors on a spot-check basis.
Here are the eight free tools worth using in 2026 — including our own and our competitors', because they're genuinely useful and this list would be dishonest without them. For each: what it does, what it's good for, and where the free version stops.
1. Geonimo Free AI Visibility Audit
Our free audit runs your brand across five engines — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews — and delivers a baseline visibility score with first insights within 24 hours: where you're mentioned, where competitors win instead, and which sources drive your category's answers.
Best for: getting a real multi-engine baseline without doing 150 manual queries. Limit: it's the entry point to a paid platform (7-day trial follows) — but the audit itself costs nothing. Start here.
2. Geonimo AI Crawlability Checker
Enter a domain and see in seconds whether the 11 AI crawlers that matter — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and friends — are allowed or blocked by your robots.txt, plus whether you publish an llms.txt. One forgotten Disallow rule can silently remove you from AI answers while your Google rankings look fine.
Best for: the 10-second technical sanity check every site should run once. Limit: crawlable ≠ cited — it checks access, not content quality. Check your site.
3. Geonimo llms.txt Generator
Generates a spec-compliant llms.txt — the plain-text content map AI systems can read directly — from your site structure in about a minute. Best for: shipping an llms.txt without reading the spec. Generate yours.
4. Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker
Ahrefs offers a free checker that shows how visible a brand is across AI surfaces, drawing on its index-scale data. Best for: a quick market-level look at brand presence, especially if you like Ahrefs' data style. Limit: index-based estimates rather than live answers to your specific buyer prompts, and the depth sits behind Brand Radar / Ahrefs subscriptions.
5. Otterly.AI Free AI Visibility Checker
Otterly's free checker gives a quick read on brand visibility in AI search, and their free GEO email course is a solid primer for teams new to the space. Best for: a lightweight first look plus structured learning. Limit: spot-check depth; continuous monitoring is paid.
6. SE Ranking AI Visibility Tracker (Trial)
SE Ranking's AI toolkit tracks mentions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews inside its SEO suite, with a free trial. Best for: teams already considering the suite who want AI monitoring bundled with classic SEO. Limit: trial-gated rather than permanently free, and mention-level rather than citation-level depth.
7. AI Peekaboo Free Tools
AI Peekaboo runs a whole shelf of free utilities: an AI crawlability checker, a visibility gap analyzer, a sentiment checker and a free AI visibility report. Best for: hands-on operators who want to poke at multiple angles before paying anyone. Limit: each tool is a snapshot; the daily tracking is the paid product.
8. The Manual Method (Genuinely Free)
Still underrated: open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, ask each your 10 most valuable buyer questions in fresh sessions, and write down who gets named. Thirty minutes, zero euros, and for most brands the moment AI visibility becomes real. Our ChatGPT tracking guide covers how to do this properly.
Where Free Tools Stop
Every free tool above shares the same ceiling: snapshots. AI answers are non-deterministic and shift with every model update, so a one-off check tells you where you stood at one moment on one sample. The things that actually drive strategy — trends, competitor share of voice, citation sources, per-prompt gaps — require repeated daily sampling, which is what the paid platforms (ours included) fundamentally sell.
The rational path: run the free checks this week, fix what they surface, and if AI search matters to your pipeline, graduate to daily tracking. Our free audit is the bridge — it shows you what continuous data looks like on your own brand before you pay anything. Get your free audit or browse all our free tools.
