Free AI Visibility Scanners: 12 Tools That Check Your Brand on ChatGPT, Gemini & Perplexity

The AI visibility category went from "doesn't exist" to "saturated with tools" in roughly 18 months. As of mid-2026, there are at least 30 platforms claiming to track how ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews talk about your brand. Most of them charge between $49 and $499 per month. A handful are genuinely free. A few sit in the awkward middle — free trials, limited beta access, or "free tool plus paid upgrade" models that obscure what you actually get.

This guide covers 12 of the most credible options across the full pricing spectrum. The goal is honest comparison, not a sales pitch. We score each tool on what it actually delivers, what it costs, and where it falls short — including DirJournal's own free AI Visibility Checker, which sits in the same "limited free runs" category as several competitors.

Before we dive in, a quick disclosure: DirJournal makes one of the tools listed below. We're including it because excluding it would be dishonest, but we're scoring it the same way we score everyone else. If you think we're being too kind to ourselves, the comparison tables make the trade-offs explicit. Skip to whichever section is most relevant to your budget.

Part 1 · Truly Free, no Signup Required The Lowest Friction Option

What You Actually Need to Know

Ahrefs Brand Radar (free version) — The most credible free tool in this category, mainly because it's backed by Ahrefs' actual prompt database derived from real Google search behavior (rather than synthetic queries that competitors invent). Covers six AI platforms in a single check. The catch: you only see a "limited preview" of the top 5 results per section. The full data lives behind their paid Brand Radar product. Still the best free starting point if you want directionally accurate data with zero friction.

Semrush AI Search Visibility Checker — Free, no signup, decent breadth. Covers ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews (notably missing Perplexity in the free version). The output includes a visibility score, prompt-level breakdown, and a "where competitors appear and you don't" view. Semrush's paid AI Visibility Toolkit is $99/month as an add-on requiring a base Semrush plan ($139.95+/month) — total minimum around $239/month — which is why the free tool exists as a top-of-funnel hook.

SUSO Digital AI Visibility Checker — Underrated. 100% free, no signup, no paywall. Their proprietary algorithm evaluates 100+ signals across six categories: brand awareness, sentiment, training data presence, prompt visibility, technical structure, and off-site signals. Outputs a 1-100 score with category breakdowns. The trade-off is the data quality varies by industry — well-covered industries (SaaS, consumer brands) get more useful results than narrow B2B niches.

Zerply AI Visibility Checker — Genuinely free, no signup, unlimited reports. Shows actual AI responses (not just counts), sentiment scoring, and auto-detected competitor rankings. The paid product (Zerply Pro) adds continuous monitoring and an AI assistant. Worth bookmarking specifically because it shows you the verbatim language each AI uses to describe your brand — useful intelligence for refining your messaging.

Part 2 · Free With Signup A Small Friction Trade-off for More Data

What You Actually Need to Know

HubSpot AEO Grader — Probably the most polished free tool in this list, which makes sense given HubSpot's resources. Evaluates your brand across five dimensions (sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice, market position) using deterministic scoring with retry logic. You enter company name, location, industry, and product/service, and it queries ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Requires a form submission to access full results, which means HubSpot will market to you afterward — that's the price. The depth of analysis is genuinely good, especially the sentiment dimension which most competing tools handle superficially.

OpenLens — Launched in March 2026 as a fully free platform. Covers five AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI, Perplexity, DeepSeek). The pitch is comprehensive monitoring at no cost — sentiment analysis, attribute scores, source citations, and competitive benchmarking. Newer entrant so the long-term sustainability of the free model is unclear, but worth using while it lasts. Strong choice if you specifically want Claude or DeepSeek coverage, which several competing tools skip.

Ubersuggest AI Brand Visibility — Available inside the Ubersuggest dashboard. Free tier exists but you'll be nudged toward paid Ubersuggest plans. Less specialized than dedicated AI visibility tools, more useful if you're already a Neil Patel ecosystem user and want one less tab to manage.

Part 3 · Free Beta or Limited Free Runs Free With Usage Caps

What You Actually Need to Know

DirJournal AI Visibility Checker — Yes, this is our tool, so apply the appropriate skepticism. Here's what it actually does: it runs 15 real buyer-style queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini — the four engines that drive nearly all AI search traffic — and checks whether your business name appears, where it ranks, which competitors are being recommended instead, and which third-party sources AI engines trust most for your category. You get a 0-100 AI Visibility Score, the exact prompts and responses, a breakdown by engine, and a list of cited sources you can act on. No signup required. One free scan per email every 7 days. Most scans complete in under a minute.

What it does better than most: shows you the actual cited sources, which is what we call "source intelligence" — the directories, review platforms, and content sources AI engines pulled from to build their answer. This matters because it tells you where to invest your AEO effort, not just whether you have a problem. What it doesn't do (yet): continuous monitoring, historical trend data, or hallucination accuracy detection. If you need those, look at LLMClicks or one of the paid platforms below.

LLMClicks.ai — 50 free credits with no credit card required. The differentiator is hallucination detection — it specifically flags when AI is describing your brand incorrectly (wrong pricing, fabricated features, inaccurate comparisons). This is genuinely valuable for SaaS brands where ChatGPT confidently inventing your pricing can poison demo calls. The founder built it specifically because his own product was being misquoted by ChatGPT. After the free credits, paid plans range from $49 to $399/month.

Visiblie — Tracks brand mentions across up to 8 AI models (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, Meta AI, Mistral) on the Enterprise plan. The Starter plan covers ChatGPT only. Free trial available but the meaningful tier requires payment. Visiblie's accuracy tracking feature is similar to LLMClicks — it detects when AI hallucinates incorrect information about your brand. Worth a free trial if you specifically need broad multi-model coverage including the less common engines.

Part 4 · Paid Tools With Free Tiers or Trials Subscription Products With Try-before-you-buy

What You Actually Need to Know

Otterly.AI — One of the more established players, used by 20,000+ marketing professionals and recognized by G2 and Gartner. Tracks brand mentions and website citations across six AI platforms simultaneously. The dashboard surfaces both linked and unlinked mentions, which matters because most AI engines mention brands without linking out. Strong for marketing teams that need a polished dashboard rather than a one-time check. Free trial gives you a real sense of the product before you commit.

Peec AI — Designed for marketing teams that want daily monitoring with a 24-hour refresh cadence. Tracks both "used" sources (where your content informed an AI answer) and "cited" sources (where your URL is explicitly mentioned). Has a Google Looker Studio connector for piping data into custom dashboards. Best fit for content marketing teams already running structured reporting workflows.

LLMrefs — Trusted by 10,000+ marketers. Their pitch is keyword tracking instead of prompt tracking — you bring your existing SEO keyword list and they automatically generate fan-out prompts based on real conversations. Covers more AI models than almost anyone (10+ including ChatGPT GPT-5, Claude, Grok, Meta, DeepSeek). Claims to be the most affordable serious AEO tool on the market, though specific pricing requires a quote.

Part 5 · Enterprise & Premium Paid Tools For Teams With Budget and Serious Requirements

What You Actually Need to Know

Profound — Serves 700+ enterprise customers including 10% of the Fortune 500. Raised $96M in Series C funding at a $1B valuation in February 2026. The Starter plan ($99/month) covers ChatGPT only, the Growth plan ($399/month) covers 3 models, and the Enterprise plan covers 10 AI models including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Meta AI, Grok, DeepSeek, and Claude. Profound also offers AI traffic attribution via Cloudflare and Vercel integrations — measuring how many site visits originate from AI responses. Overkill for small businesses; appropriate if you have a $50K+ annual marketing budget and AI search is a strategic priority.

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit — Add-on to existing Semrush subscriptions. The minimum total is around $239/month. Includes 25 custom prompts and tracks millions of prompts daily across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and SearchGPT. Makes sense if you already pay for Semrush; rarely worth it as a standalone.

Ahrefs Brand Radar (paid) — The full version of the free tool listed in Part 1. $199/month per individual AI platform index, or $699/month for all six platforms bundled, on top of an Ahrefs base subscription. Minimum total is $328/month for Perplexity-only tracking. Built on 190+ million real search-backed prompts, which is the industry's largest database. Aimed at enterprise SEO teams already on Ahrefs.

SE Ranking AI Visibility — Mid-market option. Integrated AI tracking starts at a $52/month base plan with the AI Visibility add-on costing $71-276/month depending on prompt volume. Their standalone SE Visible product starts at $189/month for 450 prompts. Good middle ground if Profound and Ahrefs are too expensive but you need more than what free tools provide.

Part 6 · Which Tool Should You Actually Use? Decision Framework by Situation

Part 7 · the Honest Limitations of Every Free Tool What None of Them Tell You Upfront

Every free AI visibility tool — including ours — shares the same structural limitations. It is worth knowing them before you act on any single result.

Limitation 1: Statistical reliability. AI responses are nondeterministic. The same query at 9 AM and 9 PM can produce completely different results. A single check captures roughly 15% of the actual variability. To get a meaningful picture, you need 30-50 queries across at least 3 platforms, repeated over time. Free tools that run a small number of queries once give you directional data, not definitive answers.

Limitation 2: No source mapping in most tools. Most free tools tell you whether AI mentions your brand. They don't tell you why. The "why" is buried in which directories, review platforms, and content sources AI is actually pulling from when generating its answer. DirJournal's tool exposes the cited sources for exactly this reason — it's the difference between knowing you have a problem and knowing how to fix it. A few paid tools (Profound, Peec AI) also surface this. Most don't.

Limitation 3: Competitive context is shallow. Knowing AI mentions you in 3 out of 5 queries sounds OK until you discover your top competitor appears in 5 out of 5 and is recommended first every time. Free tools rarely surface this contrast clearly. The HubSpot AEO Grader does it best in the free tier; most others surface competitor data only in paid tiers.

Limitation 4: Industry coverage varies. AI training data is not evenly distributed. SaaS brands and consumer products get rich, accurate data. Narrow B2B industries, regional businesses, and recently founded companies often get incomplete or stale data. If your brand is in a thin niche, a free tool might tell you "AI doesn't mention you" when the real answer is "AI doesn't mention anyone in your category yet."

Limitation 5: No tool fixes the problem for you. Every tool in this guide tells you whether AI sees your brand. None of them automatically improve your AI visibility. The actual fix is structural: structured schema markup, presence on the directories AI engines cite (which is a different topic — see our guide to the best web directories for the full list), consistent NAP information, content that directly answers buyer queries, and earned media on sites AI training pipelines actually crawl.

Part 8 · Practical Next Steps What to Do Today

1. Run two free checks back-to-back — pick one tool from Part 1 (Ahrefs, Semrush, SUSO, or Zerply) and one from Part 2 or 3 (HubSpot, OpenLens, or DirJournal). Compare the results. The differences will tell you more about each tool's blind spots than any review can.
2. Screenshot every result — AI responses change. You need a baseline you can refer back to in 30, 60, and 90 days.
3. Note which sources are cited. If your scan shows AI is citing a competitor's Wikipedia page, your fix is "get on Wikipedia or Wikidata," not "buy a monitoring subscription."
4. Don't pay for a monitoring subscription before establishing a baseline. Most brands need a one-time discovery audit before they need ongoing tracking. Subscriptions earn their keep when you're actively running optimization campaigns and need weekly feedback.
5. Re-check in 90 days. AI training data updates periodically. Whatever you do today won't show up in AI responses tomorrow.
6. If the result shows you're invisible, the fix is structural — see the "What actually moves the needle" callout above. No scanning tool fixes the underlying problem. They diagnose it.

If you want to start with the DirJournal tool, it's at dirjournal.com/tools/ai-visibility-checker. One free scan per email every 7 days. No signup. Most scans complete in under a minute. The output includes the cited sources, which is the part most tools paywall.

Disclosure: DirJournal makes one of the tools in this guide. We've tried to evaluate it on the same criteria as everyone else. If you think we missed a tool worth including, or scored one unfairly, the contact link is in the footer.