The best free and cheap ways to check your AI visibility

Let me get the disappointing part out of the way first.

There is no good free tool for tracking your AI visibility. Not really. There are free methods, there are cheap tools, there are trials, but the thing people usually search for (a proper dashboard that watches ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for your brand, forever, at no cost) does not exist. Anyone selling you that is either about to email you a lot or about to change the terms.

I say this as someone with a conflict of interest. I build LLM Pulse, one of the paid tools in this space. So take the whole article with that in mind. My goal here is not to funnel you into a subscription. It is to tell you honestly what you can do with no budget, where the cheap options are genuinely good, and when a paid tool starts to pay for itself.

If your honest budget is zero, you can still learn a lot. Let me show you how.

Free method one: just ask the models yourself

The single most underrated free tool is the chat box you already have open.

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode. Ask the questions your customers would ask. Not "tell me about [your brand]", that is a vanity prompt and it always looks fine. Ask the buying questions: "best CRM for a small agency", "cheapest project management tool for freelancers", "who are the top providers of X in Spain". Then read what comes back.

You are looking for three things.

Are you mentioned at all? If your category comes up and you are nowhere, that is your headline finding right there.

Who is mentioned instead of you? Those are your real competitors in AI answers, and they are often not the ones you think. I have seen brands discover a rival they had never tracked, purely because that rival had one very quotable comparison page.

What does the model say about you? The exact adjectives matter. "Affordable but limited" is a very different problem from "hard to find pricing". One is positioning, the other is a broken pricing page.

Do this across a few models, because they disagree constantly. Perplexity leans on whatever it just retrieved. ChatGPT leans on what it absorbed in training plus its browsing. Gemini and Google AI Mode pull heavily from the wider Google index. The same prompt gives you four different worlds.

Cost: zero. Time: an afternoon. This is the first thing I tell anyone to do before they spend a cent.

Free method two: turn on incognito and change your location

Two things quietly poison your manual checks.

The first is personalisation. If you are logged in and you have chatted about your own company forty times, the model knows you. It will flatter you. Run your prompts in a logged-out or incognito window so you see something closer to what a stranger sees.

The second is geography. AI answers vary by country and language more than people expect. If you sell in Spain, an answer generated from a US IP is close to useless. A cheap VPN, or even a free tier of one, lets you sanity check what a customer in your actual market gets. If you operate in several countries, this alone will show you gaps you would never have guessed.

Still zero budget, still worth doing before anything paid.

Free method three: watch the bots in your server logs

Here is a free signal almost nobody uses.

The AI crawlers announce themselves. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and others hit your site with recognisable user agents. If you have access to your raw server logs or a log tool, you can grep for them and see which of your pages the AI companies are actually reading.

This will not tell you whether you get mentioned. It tells you something upstream and just as useful: whether you are even in the running. If GPTBot never touches your pricing page, you should not be surprised when ChatGPT gets your pricing wrong.

It is fiddly, it is manual, and it breaks the moment you want history or per-page trends across dozens of URLs. But as a free diagnostic it is real, and most people have never once looked.

Where free runs out

Everything above works. It also does not scale, and that is the honest catch.

Manual prompting is a snapshot. AI answers change week to week, sometimes day to day, and you cannot eyeball forty prompts across five models across three countries every Monday morning. You will do it once, feel informed, and never do it again. I have watched this happen to disciplined people many times.

The moment you need history (is my visibility going up or down?), coverage (all my prompts, all my markets, on a schedule), or proof for a client or a boss, the free methods fall apart. That is not a sales pitch, it is just where manual work ends. So the real question is not "free versus paid". It is "how little can I spend to get tracking that actually runs without me".

The cheapest honest paid entry: Otterly at $29

If you want the lowest real price on a proper tool, Otterly.ai is the one I point people to.

Their Lite plan is $29 a month for 15 prompts, as of July 2026. Fifteen prompts is not a lot, but for a single brand in a single market it is enough to track your core buying questions on a schedule instead of by hand. You get screenshots of the real AI outputs, a Brand Visibility Index, citation and link tracking, and AI keyword research. They also ship an MCP server, a public API and a Claude skill, which is more than you would expect at this price. Some newer engines are add-ons on the lower tiers, so read the plan before you assume a specific model is included.

For a freelancer or a one-brand founder who just wants to stop doing this manually, $29 is an easy yes. It is the honest floor of this market.

The trials, and how to use one without lying to yourself

Most of the serious tools run a trial. This is where you can get real, full-featured data for two weeks at no cost, as long as you are honest that it ends.

LLM Pulse (mine) runs a 14-day trial, and I deliberately do not cripple it. You get 5 core models on the trial (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews), not one teaser model. You also get the hosted MCP server with its 45+ tools over OAuth, so you can pull your visibility data straight into Claude or ChatGPT during the trial and actually work with it. I left the MCP in the trial on purpose, because it is the fastest way to feel what the tool does.

The honest way to run any trial: pick your real prompts before you start, connect your analytics on day one, and treat the two weeks as a proper audit. Export or screenshot what matters. If you walk away at day 14, you still leave with a genuine picture of where you stand. That is a fair trade, and I would rather you use the trial that way than pay for something you did not test.

Just do not call a trial "free". It is a test drive. Plan for the day it ends.

What things actually cost

Here is the low end of the market side by side. Prices change, so check each site before you buy.

Pricing as of July 2026. All of these change their plans regularly, so treat this as a starting point, not gospel.

A note on the SEO suites, because it matters for budget. If you already pay for Ahrefs or Semrush, both now bundle AI visibility features (Brand Radar and the AI Toolkit). They are shallower than the specialists, but they are already inside a subscription you are paying for. If your needs are light, that may be your genuinely cheapest option, because the marginal cost is zero. I would not buy either suite for the AI features alone, but if you have one, use it before you add another bill.

So where does LLM Pulse actually fit

Fair question, given I build it, so let me be specific about where it does and does not make sense on a tight budget.

If you have literally no money, do not buy LLM Pulse. Use the manual methods above. If you want the cheapest possible real tool and 15 prompts covers you, Otterly at $29 is the better call and I will happily say so. If you are a team that lives inside one shared workspace with daily tracking and per-country competitor views, Peec is genuinely strong there.

LLM Pulse starts to make sense at 49 € a month when you cross a specific line: you want more than a couple of models without an enterprise call, you want unlimited seats so the whole team and your clients can look without a per-seat tax, and you want the MCP server to pull data into your own chats. The Growth plan at 99 € adds sentiment and real AI traffic analytics (connect GA4 or Plausible and see the visits and sales ChatGPT and Perplexity actually send, not just mentions), which is where "am I visible" turns into "is it worth anything". And if you run an agency, the full white-label, a separate project per client and the Looker Studio connector are the reason people move over.

That is the honest map. Free methods first, Otterly if you want cheap and simple, a trial to test the serious tools properly, and LLM Pulse when unlimited seats, more models and real traffic data start earning their keep.

Start with the chat box you already have open. The cheapest audit in this business is the one you run yourself, tonight, before you pay anyone a euro.