Marketing and SEO teams that want to see an AI visibility tool running against their own brand before committing budget
Best AI visibility tools with a free trial
Six AI search visibility tools compared on what their own pricing pages say about trials, free tiers, entry price and the assistants covered before you pay.
Karl-Gustav Kallasmaa, Founder & CEOLast updated How this list was made
Each vendor's own pricing page was fetched on 3 September 2026 and read for four things: whether a trial is offered and whether the page states its terms, whether a free tier exists that does not expire, the lowest published price for a paid self-serve plan, and which assistants the cheapest usable plan covers without paid add-ons. A vendor qualified for a "yes" on trial only if its own page said so in words; a call-to-action button was not treated as a statement of terms. No third-party roundup was used, no vendor was contacted, and no figure was carried over from a previous version of this page. Every cell carries the date its source was retrieved, and a cell reads "not published" wherever the page does not say.
Attensira is not on this list. On the question this page answers, we are not one of the answers.
The criteria
Declared before the ranking, with how each one was measured and who wins it.
| Criterion | How it was measured | Best on this |
|---|---|---|
| Trial terms stated on the page, not just a buttonA trial you cannot evaluate before starting is a signup, not an offer: length, credit-card requirement and feature scope decide whether a two-week pilot is possible at all, and a page that states none of them moves that discovery to after you have handed over a card. | Read from the vendor's own pricing page: whether a trial is described in words, and whether those words include a duration, a credit-card requirement, or the scope of access. | Semrush |
| Free tier that does not expireAn expiring trial forces the evaluation into a fixed window, which in this category is the wrong shape — AI answers move week to week, so a tier that keeps running is worth more for judging a tool than a fortnight of full access. | Read from the vendor's own pricing page: whether a plan priced at zero appears in the plan ladder itself, as opposed to a time-limited trial of a paid plan. | Athena |
| Lowest published price for a paid self-serve planA trial ends, and the number it ends at is the real decision. The cheapest published paid plan is what a team can commit to without an approval chain, and it is the figure a trial should be evaluated against from day one. | Read from the vendor's own pricing page: the lowest currency amount against a self-serve plan that requires no sales conversation. | Otterly.AI |
| Assistants covered by the cheapest usable plan, without add-onsA trial of a plan that watches one assistant tells you almost nothing about a category defined by disagreement between assistants, so what the entry plan covers decides whether the trial is a real test. | Read from the vendor's own pricing page: the assistants named against the free or cheapest plan, excluding anything the page marks as an add-on or a higher tier. | Athena |
The tools
- 1
Semrush
A general SEO platform whose AI visibility features sit inside the standard plan ladder rather than in a separate product. Its pricing page is the only one read for this list that states a trial length and a credit-card requirement in the same sentence.
- Best for:
- A team that already lives in an SEO suite and wants to test AI visibility tracking without adding a second vendor, a second login or a second invoice.
- Where it falls short:
- The pricing page describes AI visibility as a prompt allowance per tier rather than naming which assistants are watched, so the trial answers "how many prompts" but not "which assistants" — the question that decides whether the data is comparable to a dedicated tool's.
- Trial terms stated on the page, not just a button: Seven days, no credit card required, stated on the page source
- Free tier that does not expire: Free plan listed with one demo project and a daily report cap source
- Lowest published price for a paid self-serve plan: SEO plan at $139/month, lower billed annually source
- Assistants covered by the cheapest usable plan, without add-ons: AI visibility included in every tier as a daily prompt allowance; assistants not named per tier source
Semrush · checked on
- 2
Athena
A credit-metered AI visibility tool whose entry plan is free rather than time-limited, with a billing unit the page defines precisely as one credit per AI response.
- Best for:
- A team that wants to keep a small measurement running indefinitely while it decides, rather than compress the evaluation into a trial window.
- Where it falls short:
- The free allocation is small enough to be a sample rather than a monitoring programme, and the step from the free tier to the paid one is the largest single jump on this list, so the decision arrives suddenly rather than gradually.
- Trial terms stated on the page, not just a button: No time-limited trial described; the free tier is the trial source
- Free tier that does not expire: Essential plan listed at zero in the plan ladder with an included credit allocation source
- Lowest published price for a paid self-serve plan: Starter at $295/month source
- Assistants covered by the cheapest usable plan, without add-ons: Five assistants named on the free tier source
Athena · checked on
- 3
Writesonic
A content platform with AI visibility tracking attached, offering a no-card trial with what the page describes as full access, and a plan ladder that publishes a tracked-platform count per tier.
- Best for:
- A team that wants to start looking today without a card, and whose evaluation is as much about content workflow as about measurement.
- Where it falls short:
- The trial's duration is not stated anywhere on the pricing page, and the ten-platform coverage the product advertises sits at an Enterprise tier with no published price, so the trial and the published ladder both stop short of the headline capability.
- Trial terms stated on the page, not just a button: "Start free. No credit card needed." with full access; duration not published source
- Free tier that does not expire: Free start described as a trial, not as a plan in the ladder source
- Lowest published price for a paid self-serve plan: Starter at $79/month billed annually source
- Assistants covered by the cheapest usable plan, without add-ons: Three platforms on the three published tiers; ten only at Enterprise source
Writesonic · checked on
- 4
Otterly.AI
An AI search monitoring tool with the lowest published paid entry price on this list, and a pricing FAQ that states a free trial in plain words without attaching terms to it.
- Best for:
- A solo marketer or small team whose constraint is the price after the trial rather than the trial itself.
- Where it falls short:
- The trial is stated but unquantified — no duration, no card requirement, no scope — and three of the assistants the product can watch are priced as add-ons rather than included, so the trial covers less than the marketing implies.
- Trial terms stated on the page, not just a button: Free trial stated for new users; no duration, card requirement or scope published source
- Free tier that does not expire: No free plan in the ladder; cheapest plan is paid source
- Lowest published price for a paid self-serve plan: Lite at $29/month source
- Assistants covered by the cheapest usable plan, without add-ons: Four assistants on every plan; three more sold as add-ons source
Otterly.AI · checked on
- 5
Profound
An AI search visibility platform sold in three published tiers, with the answer engines stated tier by tier rather than as one blanket list, and no trial described on the pricing page.
- Best for:
- A team that already knows which answer engines it needs and would rather read a precise tier table than test the product first.
- Where it falls short:
- The pricing page describes no free trial and no free tier, so the only way in is a paid plan, and the cheapest one tracks a single assistant.
- Trial terms stated on the page, not just a button: No trial described; two months free is an annual billing discount source
- Free tier that does not expire: No free plan in the ladder source
- Lowest published price for a paid self-serve plan: Starter at $99/month billed yearly source
- Assistants covered by the cheapest usable plan, without add-ons: ChatGPT only on Starter; three engines on Growth source
Profound · checked on
- 6
Peec AI
An AI visibility tool aimed at SEO teams, whose pricing page names a plan ladder but publishes neither prices nor trial terms, routing every plan to a signup or a sales conversation instead.
- Best for:
- A team willing to start a conversation to find out what a tool costs, typically because the evaluation is already funded.
- Where it falls short:
- Neither a price nor a trial is stated anywhere on the pricing page, so nothing about the cost or the terms of an evaluation can be established before signing up — which is itself the finding this page reports.
- Trial terms stated on the page, not just a button: Peec AI does not publish trial terms source
- Free tier that does not expire: No free plan named in the ladder source
- Lowest published price for a paid self-serve plan: No price published against any plan source
- Assistants covered by the cheapest usable plan, without add-ons: Three assistants referenced; not attributed to a plan source
Peec AI · checked on
Which AI visibility tools can you try before paying?
Three of the six read for this page state a way in without payment, and they state it in three different ways. Semrush publishes a seven-day trial and says no credit card is required. Writesonic says the start is free and no card is needed, and does not publish how long it lasts. Otterly.AI's pricing FAQ says a free trial is provided for new users and attaches no terms to the sentence. Athena does something else again: instead of a trial it lists a free plan inside the ladder, with an included credit allocation and a stated unit of one credit per AI response. Profound describes no trial and no free tier on its pricing page. Peec AI does not publish trial terms, or prices, at all.
That spread is the useful finding, more than any ranking of it. "Has a free trial" is a single checkbox in most roundups and it hides four genuinely different offers: a timed trial with stated terms, a timed trial with unstated terms, a free plan that never ends, and a button with nothing behind it that a buyer can read in advance.
Why the terms matter more than the trial
A trial in this category is not a demo. You are not checking whether the software runs; you are checking whether its numbers describe your brand in a way you would be willing to repeat to somebody else. That takes a specific kind of access, and three variables decide whether you get it.
Duration decides whether you can see movement. AI assistants answer the same prompt differently across days, and the size of that drift is the single most important thing to learn before you buy anything in this space. A one-week window shows you a number. A month shows you a range. A tool evaluated on a single reading will look far more precise than it is, and that impression survives the purchase.
Card requirement decides who can start. A trial that takes a card is a purchase with a cancellation deadline attached, and in most companies it needs the same approval a subscription does. A trial without one can be started this afternoon by the person who actually has the question. Two vendors on this page say in words that no card is needed; the rest do not address it.
Plan scope decides whether the test is real. A trial runs on a plan, and plans in this category differ mostly in which assistants they watch. Testing a tool on a plan that covers one assistant tells you about that assistant, not about the tool, and certainly not about the category — whose defining property is that different assistants disagree about the same brand in the same week.
None of those three is visible from a "Start free trial" button. All three are visible, or conspicuously absent, on a pricing page.
Reading the ranking
Semrush wins on stated terms. Its pricing page is the only one read here that puts a duration and a credit-card requirement in the same sentence, and it lists a free plan alongside the trial with an explicit daily report cap. The cost of that clarity is specificity elsewhere: AI visibility is presented as a prompt allowance that grows with the tier rather than as a named list of assistants, so the trial answers how much you can ask and not who is being asked. For a team already inside the suite that trade is usually acceptable. For a team choosing between a dedicated AI visibility tool and a general SEO platform, it is exactly the wrong question left unanswered.
Athena wins the free tier, and the base-plan coverage. A plan priced at zero inside the ladder is structurally different from a trial: nothing expires, so the evaluation can run alongside the decision instead of ahead of it. Its page also names five assistants against that free plan, which is more than any paid entry tier here covers except Otterly.AI's four. The limitation is scale. The included allocation is a sample rather than a monitoring programme, and the step up to the paid tier is the largest single jump on this page, so the moment of decision arrives all at once rather than gradually.
Otterly.AI wins the lowest published paid entry price, which is the number the trial is really deciding about. It states a trial in plain words and then says nothing else about it — no duration, no card requirement, no scope — so what you learn from the pricing page is that a trial exists, not whether it fits your evaluation. Three of the assistants it can watch are priced as add-ons, so the trial and the entry plan both cover less than the product's headline.
Writesonic offers the least friction to starting: no card, and the page describes full access. It publishes no duration, and its ten-platform coverage lives at an Enterprise tier with no published price, so the trial demonstrates a smaller product than the one being marketed. If the evaluation is about content workflow as much as measurement, that matters less; if it is a coverage test, it matters a great deal.
Profound describes no trial and no free tier. The two months free it advertises are an annual billing discount, not a way to look first. What it gives instead is precision: the answer engines are stated tier by tier, so a buyer can tell exactly what each price buys without starting anything. That is a coherent trade — read carefully, then pay — and it is a poor fit for a team whose question can only be answered against its own brand.
Peec AI does not publish trial terms, and does not publish prices either. Its plan ladder is named, its assistants are referenced, and every route from the page is a signup or a sales conversation. This is not evidence of a weak product. It is evidence about who the vendor expects to sell to, and if your evaluation has to begin before a conversation, it decides your shortlist before you have compared a single feature.
Comparing a trial against a competitor's trial
Two trials are only comparable if they were run the same way, and the default is that they are not. Different vendors ship different starter prompt sets, sample them at different frequencies, and count a mention by different rules, so the same brand can come out of two trials with two numbers and no way to reconcile them. If you plan to run more than one trial, fix the variables you control before starting either: the same prompt list, written by you, in the same wording, run over the same calendar window, and read on the same day of the week. Anything left to the vendor's defaults becomes a difference between the tools in your notes when it was really a difference between the trials. This costs an hour of setup and it is the only thing that makes a side-by-side evaluation mean anything at the end of the month.
What a trial cannot tell you, however good the terms
Three things decide whether an AI visibility subscription is worth renewing, and no trial on this page surfaces any of them by default.
How often each prompt is asked. The quantity you are buying is prompts multiplied by sampling depth multiplied by assistants. Trials advertise the first number. The second is rarely published at all, and it is the one that decides whether a week-on-week change is a signal or noise. Ask it directly during the trial, and treat a vendor who cannot answer as having answered.
What counts as a mention. A brand named in prose, a brand linked as a source, and a brand named inside a third-party page the assistant cited are three different events. Vendors count them differently and almost none say which on a pricing page. This is the largest single reason two tools disagree about the same brand in the same week, and a trial will show you the disagreement without explaining it.
What happens after the number moves. Every product here reports a state. The difference between a subscription that generates work and one that generates a screenshot is whether the tool tells you which pages were cited instead of yours, and what to do about them. A trial short enough to show one reading cannot show you this at all.
How to use this page
Start from the constraint, not the list. If nobody will approve a card, two vendors here state that none is needed. If the evaluation has to outlast a fortnight, only Athena's free plan is built to. If the price after the trial is the real blocker, Otterly.AI publishes the lowest paid entry on this page and Athena's free tier costs nothing until it stops being enough.
Then check which plan the trial actually runs on, because that is what decides whether you are testing the product or a slice of it. Then run your own prompts, record the wording and the date, and repeat them a week later before drawing any conclusion from a single reading.
Finally, treat every cell here as perishable. Trial terms in this category are re-cut more often than prices, and every statement above was read from a vendor's own page on 3 September 2026. Where a vendor's page said nothing, this page says so rather than guessing — and that absence is usually as informative as anything the page does say.
Questions people ask
- Which AI visibility tools offer a free trial?
- Of the six tools read for this page on 3 September 2026, three describe a way to start without paying. Semrush states a seven-day trial with no credit card required. Writesonic states a free start with no credit card and full access, without publishing a duration. Otterly.AI states in its pricing FAQ that a free trial is provided for new users, without stating terms. Athena offers something different — a free plan in the ladder rather than a trial. Profound describes no trial, and Peec AI does not publish trial terms.
- Is a free tier better than a free trial for evaluating an AI visibility tool?
- For this category, usually yes. AI answers change week to week, so a fortnight of full access can show you a snapshot while a small allocation that keeps running shows you movement. A trial is the better choice only when the question is whether the product's workflow fits your team, which is answerable in an afternoon.
- Does a free trial mean the tool watches every assistant during the trial?
- Not necessarily, and this is the most common surprise. A trial normally runs on a specific plan, and coverage in this category is tiered. Profound's cheapest plan is described as ChatGPT tracking only, Writesonic's three published tiers track three platforms with the full set reserved for Enterprise, and Otterly.AI sells three assistants as add-ons rather than including them. Check which plan the trial runs on before treating its output as a coverage test.
- What should I actually do during a trial of an AI visibility tool?
- Run your real prompts, not the vendor's suggestions, and record the exact wording and the date. Then ask the same prompts again a week later and see how much the answers moved on their own. That movement is the noise floor of the whole category, and a tool that does not let you see it is not measurable against a competitor's numbers.
- Do these trial terms change?
- Frequently. Every statement on this page was read from the named vendor's own pricing page on 3 September 2026, and trial terms in this category are re-cut more often than prices. Open the vendor's page before acting on anything here.
Sources
Every cell above, with the page it came from and the date that page was read.
Semrush's pricing page states a seven-day free trial with no credit card required, alongside a free plan offering one demo project and ten reports per day across its tools.
semrush.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source
“Try Semrush free for seven days. Cancel anytime”
Semrush's pricing page lists an SEO plan at $139/month, discounted to $117.33/month billed annually, with higher Starter, Pro+ and Advanced tiers above it.
semrush.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Semrush's pricing page describes AI visibility features as included in every plan tier rather than sold separately, expressed as a daily prompt allowance that rises with the tier.
semrush.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Athena's pricing page lists a free Essential plan carrying a $25 free credit and 300 included credits, and defines one credit as one AI response. No time-limited trial is described.
athenahq.ai · retrieved · changes often, check the source
“1 credit = 1 AI response”
Athena's pricing page lists Essential as free, Starter at $295/month with 3,600 monthly credits, and Enterprise on request.
athenahq.ai · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Athena's pricing page names ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot against the free Essential plan, with a longer list on Starter.
athenahq.ai · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Writesonic's pricing page offers a free start with no credit card and describes full access during it, and states no trial duration.
writesonic.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source
“Start free. No credit card needed.”
Writesonic's pricing page lists Starter at $79/month billed annually, Basic at $199/month and Growth at $399/month, with Enterprise on request.
writesonic.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Writesonic's pricing page states that the Starter, Basic and Growth plans track three platforms, with all ten tracked only at the Enterprise tier.
writesonic.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Otterly.AI's pricing page FAQ states that a free trial is provided for new users, without stating a duration, a credit-card requirement or what the trial includes.
otterly.ai · retrieved · changes often, check the source
“Yes, we provide a free trial for new users”
Otterly.AI's pricing page lists no free plan; the cheapest is Lite at $29/month, then Standard at $189/month and Premium at $489/month, with Enterprise from $1,000/month.
otterly.ai · retrieved · changes often, check the source
“$29/month”
Otterly.AI's pricing page includes ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot on all plans, and prices Claude, Google AI Mode and Google Gemini as paid add-ons.
otterly.ai · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Profound's pricing page describes no free trial and no free tier; the two months free it advertises apply to yearly billing on paid plans.
tryprofound.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Profound's pricing page lists Starter at $99/month and Growth at $399/month, both billed yearly, with Enterprise on request.
tryprofound.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Profound's pricing page states ChatGPT only on the Starter tier, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews on Growth, and up to nine answer engines at Enterprise.
tryprofound.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source
“ChatGPT only”
Peec AI's pricing page does not mention a free trial or a free plan, and states no trial terms of any kind.
peec.ai · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Peec AI's pricing page names Starter, Pro, Advanced, Enterprise and Custom plans and publishes no currency amount against any of them, directing visitors to sign up or talk to sales.
peec.ai · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Peec AI's pricing page references tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini without attributing coverage to a specific plan.
peec.ai · retrieved · changes often, check the source