Free AI visibility tools: what you can do without paying

By the Variask team · Updated

In short

You can do a lot of AI visibility work for free: check whether AI crawlers can reach your site, see what AI reads on your pages, fix robots.txt, write llms.txt and schema, and find the questions buyers ask. Measuring how often AI actually recommends you across engines usually needs a paid tool or a trial.

  • Free checkers cover access, structure and schema.
  • Tracking real AI answers costs money, because every answer is a paid AI request.
  • Several paid tools offer free trials or limited free plans.

At a glance

ToolFree optionPaid from
Variask free tools18 free tools, no signup: crawler checks, What AI sees, citation readiness, prompt ideas, schema, llms.txt and more$99 a month, 7 day trial for $1
ProfoundFree trial: 50 set prompts for 7 days on 3 enginesCustom pricing (Enterprise)
Peec AIFree trial, length not stated$95 a month (Starter, 50 prompts)
Otterly.AIFree trial, no card needed$29 a month (Lite, 15 prompts)
AthenaHQFree plan with limited credits$295 a month (Starter, 3,600 credits)
AirOpsFree Solo tier to startNot published
RankscaleFree trial, length not stated$20 a month billed yearly (Essentials, 120 credits); $99 a month for Pro

From each tool's public pricing pages, checked October 2026. Free offers change often, so check each site.

What you can do for free

  • Check AI crawler access in robots.txt and your firewall.
  • See a page the way AI crawlers read it, without JavaScript.
  • Score how easy a page is for AI to quote.
  • Find the questions buyers ask AI in your category.
  • Write llms.txt, FAQ, Product and Organization schema.
  • Check sitemaps, meta tags, hreflang and Product schema.
  • Ask a few AI engines your questions by hand and note who they name.

When free is not enough

  • You need to know how often AI names you, not what one answer says.
  • You track many questions, engines or countries.
  • You need to see change over time and prove results.
  • You want to know which sources AI cites for each answer.

Questions

Common questions

Some tools have limited free plans or trials. Tracking many answers across engines is a paid AI cost for every provider, so fully free unlimited tracking is rare.

No. They run without signup, with a fair use limit per hour.

Go further

Keep going

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