The best free tools for AI search and SEO

What do AI engines say when you ask them to check for you?

We track two questions a team without a budget actually types. The answer at the top of this page is Perplexity's to "free AI visibility checker" on 3 October: four free checkers, Arobis AI, Ahrefs, Visibility.AI and PromptRush, each citing the tool's own page. Across 66 answers to that question from 24 September to 4 October, ChatGPT and Perplexity named Ahrefs in 58 and Attensira in none. The second question, "check if ChatGPT mentions my brand", gets a different kind of answer: the engine says it cannot check for you and points to a checker or a how-to post. The chart above shows which pages those answers read across the month.

There are now dozens of free AI visibility checkers, and the engines name whichever ones the lists they read mention. Most do the same thing: ask a few engines a few questions once and show whether you were named. That is useful as a first look. This page ranks the free tools that cover the rest of the job as well: Google data, AI crawlers and what to change.

What can a team do for free?

More than most expect. A complete free starting kit covers four things.

Your Google data. Search Console is free, permanent and essential. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on its index, so the pages that do well in Google are the ones most likely to be cited there.

Whether AI crawlers can reach you. If your site is on Cloudflare, AI Crawl Control shows which AI crawlers visit and lets you decide which to allow, on every plan. If not, check your robots.txt by hand or with a free inspector; it is common to find a rule written years ago that blocks a crawler you now want.

What AI answers say. Ask the engines yourself, with the questions your buyers ask, more than once. Then run a free check: our audit, Ahrefs' checker, or AthenaHQ's free tier if you want to keep reading.

What to change. A site crawl from Screaming Frog or Ahrefs' free site audit finds the technical problems. Our free audit goes further on one page: it takes the question you lose most and the page that should have answered it, and writes one passage of it again, labelled safe or claim.

How do you ask AI engines about your brand by hand?

It costs nothing and teaches more than any score. Write ten questions a buyer asks before choosing a product like yours, in their words. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google in a private window, and ask each question in each, once today and once in a week. For every answer, write down who was named, in what order, and which pages were cited.

Two weeks of this, ten questions, five engines and two readings, is a hundred answers. That is enough to see which competitors are named consistently, which pages the engines lean on, and which engines ignore you entirely. It is also enough to see how much answers vary: the same question can produce a different shortlist an hour later. Keep the spreadsheet; it is your baseline, owned by nobody else.

Which free tools are worth keeping?

Search Console, every week. A crawler check after any change to robots.txt, your CDN or your hosting. A handful of AI questions asked by hand once a month, written down with the date, so you have a record that no tool owns. And a site crawl every quarter. That routine costs nothing and catches most of what goes wrong.

What it does not do is keep reading the answers every day or do the work to change them. That is where paid tools and agencies start, and where Attensira's crew works: reading the answers daily, finding why you lose, doing the work, and bringing each piece to you for approval.

How was this list made?

Seven free tools were shortlisted because each covers part of AI search work a team can do without paying. Every cell was read from the tool's own page on 4 October 2026 and links to it below. Paid trials are on our free-trial list instead. No vendor was contacted, and a cell says unknown where the page does not say. Attensira's free audit and tools are ours, and win one of the four criteria.

When is the Attensira free audit the wrong place to start?

When you want to keep reading answers every week for free, AthenaHQ's free tier does that within its credit. When you need Google data, start with Search Console. When you want to know whether crawlers can reach you and you are on Cloudflare, AI Crawl Control is the more complete view. The audit is for the team that wants to know in a few minutes who AI names instead of it, and what to change first.

If the audit shows you are named in most answers already, the free routine above may be all you need for now. If it shows competitors named and you absent, that is the moment to look at doing the work.