AI visibility tools with a free plan: what each free tier includes in 2026

Free plans with no end date

A free plan keeps working after the first week; a trial stops and asks for a card. On the day we checked, two tools in this category had the first kind.

Promvia's Free plan is ours, so read the next list as the maker's description. Every figure is the limit the product enforces, not a marketing summary:

• 1 site and 5 tracked questions.
• One engine: Perplexity. The other default surfaces (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode) start on the paid plans.
• Checked on demand, up to one check run a day; no automatic schedule.
• A GEO readiness audit of up to 8 pages, up to three audits a day.
• The one-line snippet that records the visits AI assistants send to your site, the same as on the paid plans.

Paid checkout had not opened on 7 October 2026, so for now the Free plan is the only Promvia plan you can start. Our pricing page lists the paid tiers and their prices.

Free trials, tool by tool

A trial gives you the paid product for a fixed time. These are the terms each vendor's own page stated on 7 October 2026:

• Peec AI offers a free trial; its pricing page does not state the length. Paid plans start at €85 a month for 50 prompts on three models of your choice, daily.
• Otterly.ai offers a free trial for new users; its pricing page does not state the length. Paid plans start at €29 a month for 15 prompts on four platforms, daily.
• Writesonic offers a free trial with no credit card; its pricing page does not state the length. Paid plans start at $79 a month, billed annually, for 50 prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
• Ahrefs Brand Radar has no standalone free tier: custom prompts are included with every paid Ahrefs plan (5 on Lite, 10 on Standard, 20 on Advanced) or start at $50 a month.
• Semrush states that its AI Visibility Toolkit ($99 a month) has no free trial.

Sources for the list above, each read on 7 October 2026: the full comparison links every vendor's pricing page next to its figures.

Free checks that need no account

Several vendors also run one-off checkers. None of them tracks anything over time, but each gives a first reading in minutes.

• Ahrefs' Brand Radar page has a free "preview your AI visibility" check for any brand.
• Otterly.ai lists free GEO tools, among them AI keyword research, an AI referral traffic check, a query fan-out tool, a GEO content check and an AI crawler simulation.
• Promvia (ours) has five free tools with no signup: a citability score for any homepage, a head-to-head against a competitor, a content-readiness check for a draft, a sample-size calculator and a checker that reads your traffic sources for the AI share. All are listed on the tools page.
• The AI Source Index publishes every week which domains ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode cite for 40 fixed buyer questions; the ChatGPT page lists that engine alone.

What a free tier can tell you

• Whether AI answers name your brand at all for the questions you picked. Zero mentions across five unbranded questions is a finding: the category is being answered without you.
• Who is named instead, and which pages the answers cite, if the tool shows sources. That list is the most useful output of a free tier: it is the set of third-party pages you can study this week.
• Whether the product fits how you work: the dashboard, the export, the reports, the time it takes to add a question.

What a free tier cannot tell you

A visibility rate is a proportion, and a proportion on a handful of questions has a wide interval. On five questions, 1 of 5 (20%) has a 95% interval of 3.6% to 62.4%, and 0 of 5 has an interval of 0% to 43.4%. On Otterly's 15-prompt entry plan, 3 of 15 has an interval of 7.0% to 45.2%. None of those can tell a real change from a different draw of answers. How many prompts to track has the full table from 5 to 220 questions.

• A trend. A 7-day trial ends after one or two weekly runs. In our six-week persistence study, 48.0% of the domains an engine cited for a question were cited again for the same question one run later (the study), so two runs are not enough to separate movement from churn.
• Other engines. A free tier on one engine says nothing about the others: in our engine comparison, Gemini drew on the widest range of domains and Google AI Mode the narrowest, for the same 40 questions.
• Revenue. Free answer trackers stop at the answer. Whether AI assistants send visits or orders is measured on your site, not in the answer.

How to get the most out of a free plan or trial

• Spend your few questions on unbranded buyer questions ("best X for Y", "X alternatives"). Asking an engine about your brand by name and hearing your name back measures very little.
• Run the same questions through two tools on the same day, so the difference you see is the tools and not the week.
• Record the cited sources, not only the yes/no. The source list is what you can act on before you pay for anything.
• Repeat the run before reading anything into it. One answer is one draw; a single run that names you is not a result yet.
• Start a trial when you have a free week to look at it. A 7-day clock on a busy week is a trial wasted.

Frequently asked questions