The best free AI visibility checkers, ranked
By Philipp Kant 6 min read
An AI visibility checker is a tool that measures how a brand or website shows up in AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. Free AI visibility checkers fall into two groups: mention trackers that ask the assistants about your market and count how often you come up, and readiness checks that test whether AI can reach and read your site. The first measures the outcome, the second the cause.
We ranked the well-known free options by how trustworthy their data is and how much of the question they answer. If you only want to know whether ChatGPT names your brand, start with Ahrefs at number two.
| Checker | Type | What it covers | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance | Citation report | Real Copilot citations of your pages | Free, verified site |
| Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker | Mention tracker | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode | No signup, top-5 preview |
| Semrush Free AI Visibility Tool | Mention tracker | ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode, AI Overviews | No signup, 3 checks a day |
| HubSpot AI Search Grader | Perception grader | GPT, Perplexity, Gemini | Free, form for the full report |
| Lighthouse Agentic Browsing | Readiness check | Four agent checks, experimental | Free, Lighthouse CLI |
| Schema Markup Validator | Structured data check | Your page’s schema.org markup | Free, no signup |
1. Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance, the only real citation data
Since February 2026, Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report for verified sites. It lists how often your pages were cited in Copilot answers, which pages, and the grounding queries Copilot used to find them. It is free, and it is the only entry on this list that reports what actually happened rather than simulating prompts.
The limit is scope: Copilot only, no click data, no view of who else was cited, and you need to verify your site first. For the one assistant it covers, nothing free comes closer to the truth.
2. Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker, the widest free coverage
Ahrefs’ free checker takes a brand name and reports its mentions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode, with the topics, cited domains, and cited pages behind them. No signup, no limit on how many brands you check.
The free report is a preview: the top five results per section. Share of voice and competitor benchmarking sit in the paid Brand Radar. As a first look at whether the assistants know you, it is the best free start.
3. Semrush Free AI Visibility Tool, a score with competitors
Semrush checks ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews and returns an AI Visibility Score from 0 to 100, mentions and citations, a per-platform breakdown, and a comparison with competitors. Three runs a day work without an account.
The score is relative to others in your industry on the prompts Semrush picks, so read it as a benchmark, not an absolute. The competitor view is the part Ahrefs keeps behind the paywall.
4. HubSpot AI Search Grader, how the models describe you
HubSpot’s grader asks GPT, Perplexity, and Gemini how they characterize your brand and scores five dimensions: sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice, and market competition. It is a free one-time check; the full report sits behind a form.
It reads what the models say about you, which makes it useful for perception and positioning. It tells you nothing about why, and it moves slowly when you change your site.
5. Lighthouse Agentic Browsing, readiness for AI agents
Lighthouse 13.3 added an experimental Agentic Browsing category. It
checks four things: whether the accessibility tree is well formed,
WebMCP annotations, an llms.txt file, and layout shifts. Run it with
the Lighthouse command-line tool.
It asks whether an AI agent can operate the page, not whether a search assistant can cite it, and Google labels it as under development. Useful for sites that expect agents to fill in forms or buy things.
6. Schema Markup Validator, the structured data check
The Schema Markup Validator (validator.schema.org) reads JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa on any URL or pasted snippet and lists every type and property it finds. Free, no signup.
It tells you whether your Organization markup is valid, not whether it exists in the first place or names you well enough to be cited. Google’s Rich Results Test answers a different question: whether a page qualifies for a Google rich result.
What every free checker on this list still misses
Even the best free tools here leave out the questions that decide whether an assistant can use your site:
- Why you are missing. The mention trackers report the outcome. None of them tells you that GPTBot is blocked in your robots.txt or that your homepage is an empty JavaScript shell.
- Who you are. In our scan of the 1,000 most-linked German websites, 60.4% had no Organization or Person schema (AI visibility of German websites). A validator only checks the markup you already have.
- Training versus search. Blocking GPTBot keeps you out of training; blocking OAI-SearchBot keeps you out of ChatGPT search. Most checkers collapse the two (26% of top websites block AI crawlers).
- One snapshot is not a trend. AI answers vary from run to run, so a single free check is a rough signal, not a measurement.
Most free AI visibility checkers answer “are we mentioned”, when the question you can act on is “can the assistant read and attribute us”.
FAQ
What is the best free AI visibility checker? It depends on the question. For real citation data, Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report, for Copilot only. For mentions across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, Ahrefs. For a score against competitors, Semrush. For whether AI can read your site, a readiness check.
How can I check for free whether ChatGPT mentions my brand? Ahrefs’ and Semrush’s free tools both query ChatGPT without an account. You can also ask ChatGPT the questions your buyers ask and see who it names, but answers change between runs and accounts. Our AI Brand Check asks those buyer questions for you with web search, then lists who gets named instead and which pages the answers came from.
How do I check if AI crawlers can read my website? Check three things: whether robots.txt or a firewall blocks GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot; whether the homepage has real text before JavaScript runs; and whether an Organization schema says who you are. Our AI Crawler Check covers the first.
Are free AI visibility tools accurate? As direction, yes. The mention trackers sample prompts the vendor chose, and AI answers vary, so treat a score as a snapshot. Bing’s report is the exception: it counts real citations.
Do I need an llms.txt file? Not for Google: its guide to generative AI features says Google Search ignores the file. Lighthouse checks it for AI agents. It costs little and is optional.
The gap above is why we built our own free AI Visibility Check: it checks AI crawler access, entity schema and sameAs links, server-rendered text, and agent readiness for one URL, and names the fix for each finding. Full disclosure, it is ours. For the German numbers behind it, see AI visibility of German websites. Whether AI crawlers can read your content at all depends on how it is rendered; see can AI crawlers read JavaScript?
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