Free AI Visibility Tools: What's Free and What You Still Pay For

For a quick first look, use a free checker. For a purchase decision, use a trial. For ongoing application access under your own provider accounts, evaluate Rankwize by FullSession’s free BYOK offer, with external AI and search-data usage billed separately. These routes solve different jobs.

How we compared

FullSession makes Rankwize. This guide uses official product/pricing pages checked November 5, 2026 and FullSession source inspection for Rankwize; it is source research, not a comparative product test. Prices use monthly USD brand offers unless a row states otherwise.

Every free route we could verify

Free AI visibility offers, terms as published on 5 Nov 2026

Offer	Kind of free	What you get	Where it stops
Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker	Snapshot	A one-time report, no signup or card; top five results per section1	No history or custom prompts; those are Brand Radar, a paid add-on
Semrush AI Visibility Checker	Snapshot	Three checks a day without registering; ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, AI Mode2	Reports only; ongoing tracking is the paid AI Visibility Toolkit
HubSpot AI Search Grader	Snapshot	A score out of 100 from GPT, Perplexity and Gemini answers; a form unlocks full results3	One-time; ongoing tracking is HubSpot AEO at $50 a month
OtterlyAI trial	Trial	7 days, 50 prompts, 1,000 API and 1,000 MCP calls, no card4	Ends automatically; paid plans from $29 a month
Profound trial	Trial	7 days, 50 suggested prompts daily on ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews; limited agent credits5	Prompts not editable; no history, exports or API; then an Enterprise quote
AthenaHQ Essential	Credits	Free plan with a $25 credit (300 credits), five engines, content recommendations6	Renewal of the credit is not stated; Starter is $295 a month
Rankwize by FullSession	Free app, paid usage	BYOK application access, MCP included	Every provider call is billed to your accounts; no free-call allowance

Promptwatch and Peec AI both offer free trials on their pricing pages, but neither page states the length or limits.⁷ Check the signup screen before you plan an evaluation around them.

Checkers: a fast first look, not a baseline

A checker answers one question quickly: when an AI system is asked about your category, does your brand come up, and which sources does it lean on? That is worth knowing on day one, and it costs nothing.

What a checker cannot give you is a trend. Ahrefs and HubSpot describe theirs as one-time checks, and running Semrush's three daily reports again does not create a controlled series with fixed prompts. HubSpot's grader also reads what models say from their training data, which is a different question from what a live answer cites today. Save the report and its date, note the sources it shows, and use them to decide what to look at next.

Trials: test the work you would actually buy

A trial is the paid product with a clock on it. Seven days goes fast, so decide before you start what would make you buy: a specific engine, a prompt count, recommendations your editor can act on.

The two trials we could verify behave differently. OtterlyAI's help center describes 50 prompts of your choosing and no card, and the trial simply ends.⁴ Profound's trial picks 50 prompts for you from your industry and does not let you change them, with one language, one region and no exports.⁵ That is fine for seeing how Profound thinks, but it rules out a like-for-like test against another tool on your own prompts. If you are weighing Profound, our Profound alternatives guide compares the trial with what Enterprise adds.

Credits: a full workflow until the balance runs out

AthenaHQ's free Essential plan comes with a $25 credit, worth 300 credits, and covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot with unlimited users and content recommendations.⁶ That is more of a workflow than a checker gives you. The pricing page does not say whether the credit renews, so treat it as a fixed balance and spend it on the prompts that matter most.

Free app, paid usage: how Rankwize works

Rankwize by FullSession has no app fee in bring-your-own-key mode. You connect your own provider accounts and Rankwize runs its work on them: OpenAI for ChatGPT answers, DataForSEO for Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Copilot and Perplexity, a web-search capability for research, embeddings to match evidence to your pages, and whichever models you choose for analysis and drafting.

You can use that access for an evidence-to-edit workflow. Rankwize shows the answer, every URL it cited, and whether your domain was cited or only your brand named. It matches the evidence to the page that should answer the question, drafts the change to that page, and prepares it for GitHub or Webflow with anything it cannot deliver listed. When the right fix is a new page, you get a writer's brief instead of a generated article.

The honest cost of "free" here is that the bill moves, it does not disappear. Two practical consequences. First, there is a real first payment: DataForSEO is pay as you go with a $50 minimum top-up, and a funded balance does not expire.⁸ Second, your monthly cost depends on how many prompts, engines and drafts you run, and someone on your team owns the keys and the budget. If that sounds like overhead rather than control, a vendor-billed tool from the table above will suit you better.

What one manual check can tell you

You can also just ask ChatGPT or Perplexity yourself. Record the exact prompt, the date, any location setting, the answer and the URLs it cites. If it names your brand but links to someone else's page, note those as two separate findings.

One answer shows what happened once. It does not tell you how often your brand appears across buyers, and the next answer may differ. Use it to spot something specific, such as an outdated product fact, then confirm the fact before changing your page.

Choose your first free step

To get oriented this week, run two checkers on the same day and compare which sources each shows. To decide on a purchase, start a trial only when your editor has time in the same week to judge its recommendations. To keep tracking without a subscription, try Rankwize on your own keys with a small prompt set, read the provider bills after the first runs, and scale from there.

Questions buyers ask

Comparing paid tools next? See the best AI visibility tools or, if you are pricing OtterlyAI, OtterlyAI alternatives.

Sources

1. Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker, checked 5 Nov 2026
2. Semrush AI Visibility Checker, checked 5 Nov 2026
3. HubSpot AI Search Grader, checked 5 Nov 2026
4. OtterlyAI free trial and trial expiry; pricing, checked 5 Nov 2026
5. Profound pricing, checked 5 Nov 2026
6. AthenaHQ pricing, checked 5 Nov 2026
7. Promptwatch pricing and Peec AI pricing, checked 5 Nov 2026
8. DataForSEO pricing and OpenAI API pricing, checked 5 Nov 2026

Use a cost worksheet

Record the applicable provider tariff, actual usage and team effort in the editable evaluation worksheet (TXT). A prepaid balance, a usage charge and a recurring application fee are different cost components.