# The best free tools for AI search and SEO

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> Seven free tools for AI search and SEO, ranked on being free for good, reading AI answers, showing AI crawlers and saying what to fix.

- Canonical page: https://attensira.com/best/best-free-ai-seo-tools
- Family: best
- Last updated: 2026-10-04
- Author: Karl-Gustav Kallasmaa (https://attensira.com/about)
- Claims as data: https://attensira.com/claims.json?slug=best-free-ai-seo-tools

**In short:** The best free AI SEO tools are Google Search Console, AthenaHQ's free tier and Cloudflare AI Crawl Control: one free for good, one that reads AI answers, one that shows AI crawlers. Ahrefs' free tools and Screaming Frog add audits and crawls, and Attensira's free audit shows who AI names instead of you.

## Which pages do AI engines cite when you ask how to check ChatGPT for free?

Ahrefs' free checker and Siftly's guides lead on both engines, then how-to posts from tool vendors. These are the pages to read first, and the pages to be on if you sell a free tool. No attensira.com page is cited yet.

| Name | Cited in · count of 66 answers |
| --- | --- |
| ahrefs.com | 43 |
| siftly.ai | 43 |
| frase.io | 20 |
| genrank.io | 20 |
| searchprism.io | 19 |
| rankprompt.com | 18 |
| attensira.com | 0 |

_n=66 answers · 2026-09-24 to 2026-10-04 · ChatGPT and Perplexity, the prompt "check if ChatGPT mentions my brand" · Cited sources, one tracked prompt, read over the Attensira MCP, attensira.com workspace_

### 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 were the four criteria chosen?

**Free with no time limit.** Google Search Console wins. Several others are free for good too, within limits: Cloudflare's feature on any plan, Screaming Frog up to 500 URLs, MarketMuse's free plan, Ahrefs Free for verified sites.

**Reads AI answers about your brand.** AthenaHQ's free tier wins, because it keeps reading five engines within its free credit. Our audit and Ahrefs' checker are one-off.

**Shows AI crawlers.** Cloudflare AI Crawl Control wins: it shows AI traffic and manages AI crawlers.

**Says what to change.** Attensira's free audit wins, because it produces a rewrite of one of your own passages rather than a list of issues. The rewrite is checked in code: the passage must be on your page exactly as read, or the rewrite is refused, and the change is classified safe or claim so you know what to read carefully.

### What does the Attensira free audit show?

Enter a domain and the audit proposes eight questions from your site, at least three of them the "how do I" and "X vs Y" kind buyers ask close to choosing. You can edit, delete or add before the run. Each of the four engines Starter tracks answers each question once, so every number carries its n.

The verdict is public: per engine, how many of the eight questions named you and how many named a competitor instead. One email opens the deciding-sources map, the pages and domains that decided each losing answer and whether you are on them, and the rewrite. Reports are not listed anywhere and are marked noindex. Nothing is changed on your site.

### 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.

### Where does each engine send a do-it-yourself checker?

Perplexity sends you to Ahrefs' free checker and how-to posts; ChatGPT points to OpenAI's own help pages and a long tail of new monitoring tools. Neither runs the check for you, which is the gap a free audit fills.

**Readings, 24 Sep 2026 to 4 Oct 2026**

| Measure | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Perplexity answers naming Ahrefs (16 of 33 answers) | 48% |
| ChatGPT answers naming Ahrefs (5 of 33 answers) | 15% |
| ChatGPT answers citing openai.com (17 of 33 answers) | 52% |
| answers naming Attensira (0 of 66 answers) | 0% |

_Answers to one tracked prompt, read over the Attensira MCP, attensira.com workspace · 4 Oct 2026 · n=66 answers_

### Which AI crawler rules matter?

Most AI companies run more than one crawler, and they do different jobs. Some collect pages to train models. Others fetch pages live when a user asks a question, and those are the ones that decide whether your page can be quoted in an answer today. A robots.txt rule written to block training can block the live fetcher too, if it is written broadly.

Check your robots.txt for each crawler by name, GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and the others, and decide each one deliberately. Our free robots.txt generator writes per-crawler rules, and the crawler URL inspector fetches one page as each AI crawler and shows the robots.txt verdict, the real response, and how much of the page survives without JavaScript. Our bot pages explain what each crawler is for.

### Which Attensira tools are free?

Besides the audit, the tools page lists free tools that each answer one question about one page or prompt. Among them: an answer citation check that asks one buying question of ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini and shows who each named and the pages cited; a prompt ideas tool that suggests about 25 prompts your market plausibly asks; a crawler URL inspector; a schema validator and generator; an llms.txt generator and validator; a sitemap validator; an answer passage extractor; and a brand entity check that looks at how Wikipedia, Wikidata and your homepage describe you. They are free to use, and most need nothing more than a URL.

### 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 often should a small team repeat the free checks?

A simple rhythm works. Weekly, open Search Console and look at the pages that gained or lost clicks. Monthly, ask your ten questions in each engine again and add the answers to your spreadsheet, and run a free checker on the same questions to compare. Quarterly, crawl the site, re-check robots.txt and the crawler inspector for your key pages, and validate the structured data on your main templates. After any change to hosting, CDN or site framework, re-check crawler access the same day, because that is when pages most often disappear from AI crawlers without anyone noticing.

### What should you check before trusting a free checker?

Three things. How many engines it asked, and which. How many times each engine answered each question; once is a sample of one. And whether it shows you the answer text, or only a score. A free checker that shows the full answers and the pages they cite is worth more than one with a neat percentage, because the answer text tells you what to do.

### 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.

## FAQ

### What are the best free AI SEO tools?

Google Search Console for your Google data, Cloudflare AI Crawl Control for AI crawlers if you are on Cloudflare, AthenaHQ's free tier for reading AI answers over time, Ahrefs' free AI visibility checker and site audit, and Screaming Frog for crawls up to 500 URLs. Attensira's free audit shows who AI names instead of you and rewrites one of your pages.

### Can I check if ChatGPT mentions my brand for free?

Yes. Ask it yourself, several times, because answers vary from run to run. For a structured check, Attensira's free audit asks four engines eight buying questions without a signup, and Ahrefs offers a free AI visibility checker. For ongoing readings, AthenaHQ's free tier has a fixed amount of credit.

### Do free tools show AI crawlers?

Cloudflare AI Crawl Control does, on every Cloudflare plan. Search Console shows Google's own crawling. Attensira's free AI crawler URL inspector checks whether a page is reachable by the main AI crawlers, and its robots.txt generator writes rules for them.

### What does the Attensira free audit include?

Four engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overview, asked eight buying questions proposed from your site, with who was named instead of you. One email adds the map of pages that decided each answer and one rewrite of one of your own pages. Nothing is changed on your site.

### When should I move from free tools to a paid one?

When you know AI answers matter for your category and you are not named, and you need answers read every day and work done to change them. Free tools tell you where you stand; changing it takes daily readings and work on pages and sources.

## Sources

Each entry below is one claim on this page. `retrieved` is the date the exporter or a human last saw the source say this, and nothing more: it is not a publication date and not a promise of re-verification. `cite` is the anchor on the canonical page where this claim is rendered.

### gsc-about

Google's Search Console help page describes Search Console as a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results.

- source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9128668 (support.google.com)
- retrieved: 2026-10-04
- cite: https://attensira.com/best/best-free-ai-seo-tools#claim-gsc-about
### athena-pricing

AthenaHQ's pricing page lists a free Essential tier with $25 of credit, reading ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot, with prompt and response analysis, competitor insights and content recommendations.

- source: https://www.athenahq.ai/pricing (www.athenahq.ai)
- retrieved: 2026-10-04
- cite: https://attensira.com/best/best-free-ai-seo-tools#claim-athena-pricing
### cloudflare-acc

Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control documentation says it is available on all plans and lets site owners monitor and control how AI services access their content, analyze AI traffic and manage AI crawlers, with pay per crawl in private beta.

- source: https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-crawl-control/ (developers.cloudflare.com)
- retrieved: 2026-10-04
- cite: https://attensira.com/best/best-free-ai-seo-tools#claim-cloudflare-acc
### attensira-audit

Attensira's free audit documentation states that it asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overview eight buying questions proposed from your site, each answered once, shows who was named, and that one email unlocks the deciding-sources map and one rewrite of one of your pages, classified safe or claim; nothing is changed on your site.

- source: https://docs.attensira.com/start/free-audit (docs.attensira.com)
- retrieved: 2026-10-04
- cite: https://attensira.com/best/best-free-ai-seo-tools#claim-attensira-audit
### attensira-tools

Attensira's free tools page lists, among others, an AI crawler URL inspector, a robots.txt generator for AI crawlers, a schema validator, an llms.txt generator and an answer passage extractor.

- source: https://attensira.com/tools (attensira.com)
- retrieved: 2026-10-04
- cite: https://attensira.com/best/best-free-ai-seo-tools#claim-attensira-tools
### ahrefs-free

Ahrefs' free AI Visibility Checker page says it shows how a brand shows up in AI search results from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google, and Ahrefs Free, formerly Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, offers free website analytics, a site audit for 170+ issues and SEO metrics for verified websites.

- source: https://ahrefs.com/ai-visibility-checker (ahrefs.com)
- retrieved: 2026-10-04
- cite: https://attensira.com/best/best-free-ai-seo-tools#claim-ahrefs-free
### screaming-frog-pricing

Screaming Frog's pricing page says the SEO Spider is free, with a licence needed to crawl more than 500 URLs and for advanced features.

- source: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/pricing/ (www.screamingfrog.co.uk)
- retrieved: 2026-10-04
- cite: https://attensira.com/best/best-free-ai-seo-tools#claim-screaming-frog-pricing
### marketmuse-pricing

MarketMuse's pricing page lists a Free plan with limited applications, 1 user and 10 queries a month, with paid plans by demo.

- source: https://www.marketmuse.com/pricing/ (www.marketmuse.com)
- retrieved: 2026-10-04
- cite: https://attensira.com/best/best-free-ai-seo-tools#claim-marketmuse-pricing