Free AI Visibility Checkers 2026: seven tools compared, and the one thing none of them do

There are more free AI visibility checkers than there are honest pages about them. This is a roundup of the ones worth your time, written by a company that charges $25 for a report. Several of these are genuinely good and we say so. Then we explain the one thing none of them do for a local business, because that is the reason we exist.

By Tyson McKay · Published 2026-09-04 · Verified 2026-09-04 · 15 min read · How we review

Disclosure: AEOCheck sells a competing product. We write these pages under a published method, we say what the other tool does better than us, and every claim about them is read from their own material and dated.

How we checked these, and what we did not do

We read each tool's own page and, where it exists, its documentation, on 4 September 2026, and recorded four things: what you have to enter, which engines it says it queries, what it asks for in return (nothing, an email, a phone number), and whether its question is about your brand or about a local buyer search. Those four things are the table below. The date each entry was checked is printed under it, and we re-read the set quarterly because free tools change and vanish without notice.

What we did not do is run all seven against the same business and score the outputs against each other. That would be a useful study; it is not this page, and we would rather say so than imply it. Where we describe what a tool shows you, we are describing what the tool's own page says it shows.

One more thing to state plainly, because it is the reason you should read this page sceptically: AEOCheck sells a $25 report that competes with every tool here, and we appear at the bottom of the list, last and disclosed. If a page like this from a vendor does not make you slightly suspicious, it should. Our method page sets out the rules we wrote it under.

Brand-level or local: the distinction that decides whether a free tool helps you

Almost every free checker asks the engines some version of "what do you know about {brand}?" — and then reports mentions, sentiment and the domains the engines cited. That is a brand-level question. It is the right question for a software company, a consumer product or a national chain, because people do ask AI about those by name.

A local service business is not searched for by name. Nobody types "tell me about Rivera Plumbing" into ChatGPT. They type "who is a good plumber in Mesa" or "most reliable HVAC company near me", and the engine names two or three businesses. Whether yours is one of them is a local buyer-intent question, and it has a different answer for every trade and every town. A brand-level tool can tell you the engines have heard of you. It cannot tell you that when your customer asks the question that matters, the engine recommends someone else — or who.

Read the Scope column in the table with that in mind. Only two of the seven take a location as an input at all, and only one of those runs buyer-intent searches for your trade and city rather than a general brand assessment for a region.

The three ways a free tool pays for itself

None of these tools is a charity. Each is free for one of three reasons, and knowing which tells you what to expect from the output.

The depth gate. Ahrefs and Semrush give you a real snapshot with no signup and truncate it — top five topics, top five cited domains, three runs a day — then offer the full product at a subscription price. This is the honest model: the free version is useful on its own terms, and the gate is on depth, not on the door.

The agency wedge. Insites is built for agencies that sell to local businesses, and the free audit is a client-ready report designed to open a conversation. If you are the business rather than the agency, the report is still yours to read; just know who it was written for.

The lead gate. GoBIG runs a local check in under a minute and then asks for your name, email and phone number, with consent to calls and texts, before it shows the full result. That is a lead-generation form with a free tool in front of it. It may still be worth your details — the initial check is local and buyer-intent, which is rare — but the price is a sales call, not zero.

Our own free tier is an email gate on a single headline finding, which puts it somewhere between the first and third model. We say so in our entry.

Where the free tools stop, and why it matters more than it used to

Forty-five percent of US consumers used AI to get a local business recommendation in the past twelve months, up from six percent a year earlier — that is BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey, n=1,002. The question is no longer whether AI recommendations matter for a local business. It is whether you are in them.

A brand-level checker cannot answer that. Nor can any of the seven tell you the thing most likely to explain an invisible business: whether your website is quietly refusing the crawlers that AI search uses. That is a fetch-as-the-crawler check, it is not the same as reading your robots.txt, and a security layer in front of your site can cause it without anything in the page being wrong. Our technical guide to getting found by AI search walks through it; the $25 report runs it.

So use the free tools for what they are good at — a quick, honest look at brand-level visibility, especially Ahrefs' — and then ask the local question separately, whether with our report or by doing it yourself: open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, type the search your customers type, and write down who gets named. If you do it by hand, do it several times; the answers vary run to run, and a single run is not a measurement.

The seven tools, one by one

Ahrefs Free AI Visibility Checker ahrefs.com/ai-visibility-checker ↗

The best of the set, and the one we would send a friend to first. You type a brand name — "the way your audience would say it" — and it returns total AI mentions, mentions by platform, the top five topics, the top five cited domains and the top five cited pages, across six engines. Its prompts are derived from real search behaviour rather than invented questions, which the page makes a point of, and it is right to.

Good at: Six engines, zero friction, and a cited-domains list that tells you which directories and review sites the engines are actually reading — useful for any business.

The limit: It is a one-time snapshot of a brand. There is no location input and no buyer-intent query; it will tell you the engines have heard of your company, not whether they recommend it to someone in your town.

Checked 2026-09-04

Semrush AI Search Visibility Checker www.semrush.com/free-tools/ai-search-visibility-checker ↗

Enter a domain and it returns an AI Visibility Score from 0 to 100, total brand mentions, a platform-by-platform breakdown, estimated audience reach, top cited pages, best-performing topics and a competitor comparison, drawn from a database of prompts and responses rather than live queries. Three checks a day without an account.

Good at: A single score is easy to put in front of someone, and the competitor comparison is a genuine extra over most free tools.

The limit: Brand-level and database-driven. The page says it supports 220+ countries and regions but does not describe city-level or buyer-intent queries, and a database snapshot is not a live run for your trade.

Checked 2026-09-04

HubSpot AI Search Grader www.hubspot.com/ai-search-grader ↗

The most location-aware of the brand tools. It asks for your location alongside company, industry and offering — "a city, country, region, or global" — and returns a composite score out of 100 built from sentiment (40 points), presence quality (20), brand recognition (20), share of voice (10) and market competition (10), with a written interpretation. It accepts any brand name, so you can run a competitor through it.

Good at: Takes a city as an input and explains its scoring weights, which almost nobody else does. Running yourself and a competitor side by side is a real use.

The limit: It is still a graded assessment of a brand for a region, not a set of buyer-intent searches. Forty of a hundred points are sentiment, which for a small business the engines barely know is close to noise.

Checked 2026-09-04

Insites Free AI Visibility Audit insites.com/resources/free-ai-visibility-audit ↗

Enter a business website and in under a minute you get a report showing whether each engine knows the business exists, describes it accurately, and recommends it, plus sentiment, prioritised issues to fix and the competitors the engines recommend instead. It is explicitly built for "digital marketing agencies, SEO consultants and web professionals who sell to local businesses", and the output is designed to be handed to a client.

Good at: Fast, no gate, four engines including Grok, and it names competitors the engines prefer — closer to the local question than any of the brand tools.

The limit: The page does not describe the query method — whether it runs buyer-intent searches for your trade and city or a general assessment of the business — and the audience is the agency, not the owner. Read it as the opening move of a sales conversation.

Checked 2026-09-04

Backlinko AI Brand Visibility Checker backlinko.com/tools/ai-visibility-checker ↗

Runs 150 live queries about your product category and scores you on presence, position, citation, sentiment and confidence, against one competitor you name, with a step-by-step improvement checklist. Backlinko is a Semrush property, and the deeper version is Semrush's paid product.

Good at: 150 live queries is a real sample, and naming a competitor up front makes the comparison concrete.

The limit: Category-level, with no location input. Whether an email is required is not stated on the page, so we cannot tell you.

Checked 2026-09-04

GoBIG AI Visibility Checker gobig.systems/ai-visibility-checker ↗

The one free tool in this set that asks the local question: business name, website, your service and your city, and it "searches the queries your customers are asking AI" across ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity in 30 to 60 seconds, showing who shows up. Then, to unlock the full report, a form asks for your name, business, email and phone, with this consent text: "By submitting this form, you consent to receive calls, texts, and emails from GoBIG Systems at the phone number and email provided."

Good at: Local and buyer-intent by design, which almost no free tool is. Claude coverage is unusual.

The limit: The full result costs a phone number and consent to be called. That is not free; it is a sales lead. If you are happy to take the call, the check itself looks like the right kind of check.

Checked 2026-09-04

AEOCheck free headline check (ours) aeocheck.app/#run ↗

Disclosed, and last on purpose. Our free tier runs the same eight buyer-intent searches for your trade and city that the paid report runs — "who is the best roofer in Phoenix", not "tell me about Smith Roofing" — across ChatGPT/OpenAI, Perplexity, Google Gemini and Google organic, and emails you the single most important finding. One free check per business per day. The full report is $25, one time, no subscription: whether you were named per engine, who was named instead, where you rank on Google, an on-page audit including whether AI crawlers can fetch your site, five prioritised fixes per lens, and copy-paste starter files.

Good at: Local buyer-intent searches, three AI engines plus Google, the competitor names, and the crawler-access check — the things the brand tools do not do.

The limit: The free tier is one finding by email, not a dashboard, and the full report costs $25. It is a one-time snapshot rather than ongoing tracking; if you want a trend, one of the subscriptions on our comparison pages is the better fit.

Checked 2026-09-04

The bottom line

Start with Ahrefs if you want the honest brand-level snapshot with no strings; it is excellent and it costs nothing. Use HubSpot's grader if you want a region-aware score you can compare against a competitor. If you run an agency, Insites will make you a client-ready report in a minute.

Then ask the local question, because none of those did. Whether you use our $25 report, take GoBIG's sales call, or spend twenty minutes typing your customers' searches into three engines by hand, find out who gets named when someone in your town asks for what you do. That is the number that decides whether AI is sending you customers or sending them to someone else, and it is the only one on this page a brand-level tool cannot give you.

If you are choosing a paid tool instead

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Ahrefs Free AI Visibility Checker — https://ahrefs.com/ai-visibility-checker (read 2026-09-04)
• Semrush AI Search Visibility Checker — https://www.semrush.com/free-tools/ai-search-visibility-checker/ (read 2026-09-04)
• HubSpot AI Search Grader — https://www.hubspot.com/ai-search-grader (read 2026-09-04)
• Insites Free AI Visibility Audit — https://insites.com/resources/free-ai-visibility-audit/ (read 2026-09-04)
• Backlinko AI Brand Visibility Checker — https://backlinko.com/tools/ai-visibility-checker (read 2026-09-04)
• GoBIG AI Visibility Checker — https://gobig.systems/ai-visibility-checker/ (read 2026-09-04)
• BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 — 45% used AI for a local business recommendation, up from 6% (n=1,002) — https://www.brightlocal.com/research/lcrs-ai-trust/ (read 2026-09-04)

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