Buyer's guide
Prefer's free AI visibility checker runs 25 buyer prompts across four engines with no account. 11 free checkers compared on engines, sources, signup and depth.
The short answer
Prefer's AI Visibility Checker is the free tool to run first: one URL, no account or card, up to 25 buyer prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini, and a report with the cited sources, a crawler access check and a ranked fix list. It is our product, so weigh that. Ahrefs gives a free count across six engines with no signup, Semrush adds citations and cited pages to a score three times a day, and CitedSpy runs five engines live with no signup. Every free check is one sample; re-run before you treat a number as a rank.
Prefer AI Visibility Checker 25 prompts, four engines, sources, crawl check and fixes, no account 
Ahrefs Free AI Visibility Checker Six engines and cited domains, no signup, no limit 
CitedSpy AI Visibility Checker Five engines live with sources and a heatmap, no signup DisclosurePrefer publishes this list and is on it. We read each tool's own page in a browser on the dates shown and scored what the page states; we did not create accounts or run every tool ourselves. Every other entry says where it beats Prefer.
In short
How we evaluated
Prefer's AI Visibility Checker is the free tool to run first: one URL, no account or card, up to 25 buyer prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini, and a report with the cited sources, a crawler check and a ranked fix list. Ahrefs and Semrush give a free read of their prompt indexes; CitedSpy runs five engines live with no signup. One free run is a sample, not a rank.
A mention is the engine naming you; a citation is the engine linking a page on your site. We record which the free result reports, and whether the check runs prompts live, reads the vendor's prompt index, or, in one case we left out, estimates the answer with a model instead of asking the engines.
How many AI engines the free check covers, from the tool's own page. Buyers ask ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Copilot different questions, and a one-engine check tells you about one engine.
If the result lists the domains and pages behind the answers, you can see which page to win or fix. If it shows a score alone, you cannot. We record what each page says its result includes.
Every tool here is free in money. We record what else it takes: an email, an account, credits, a daily cap, and whether the page is honest about the paid product behind it.
The scores
Each dimension is scored 0 to 5 on the scale below and the overall is the plain average, so you can check every number against the facts on this page. Prefer is our product and is scored on the same scale.
| Tool | Engines checked | Shows cited sources | No signup needed | Depth of the check | Tells you what to fix | Leads to a paid product | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prefer (our product) | 4.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.8/5 |
| CitedSpy | 5.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 2.0 | 5.0 | 4.5/5 |
| Ahrefs | 5.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.0 | 2.0 | 5.0 | 4.3/5 |
| Semrush | 4.0 | 5.0 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 2.0 | 4.0 | 3.8/5 |
| Yogoo | 5.0 | 1.0 | 5.0 | 3.0 | 3.0 | 5.0 | 3.7/5 |
| Massive | 4.0 | 3.0 | 5.0 | 3.0 | 2.0 | 4.0 | 3.5/5 |
| RankSurf | 1.0 | 3.0 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 5.0 | 4.0 | 3.5/5 |
| GeoBuddy | 4.0 | 1.0 | 4.0 | 3.0 | 3.0 | 5.0 | 3.3/5 |
| OmniFound | 3.0 | 5.0 | 3.0 | 3.0 | 2.0 | 3.0 | 3.2/5 |
| HubSpot Grader | 3.0 | 1.0 | 4.0 | 3.0 | 2.0 | 5.0 | 3.0/5 |
How each number is set
Scored 26 September 2026 from what each tool's own page states, read in a browser on the dates in the sources list, plus HubSpot's Grader page read 6 September 2026. Prefer's row uses the same rules as every other row, from our own tool page, which names the paid product and its price. Two entries are unscored: isvisible.ai is a crawler access checker, so 'engines checked' and 'shows cited sources' do not apply to it; Rank Prompt is not on the list because its page says the result is estimated by an OpenAI model rather than taken from the engines, which fails the first dimension before scoring. We also ask ChatGPT for a free AI visibility checker and read every page it cites; in our 23 September 2026 run it cited Ahrefs, Semrush and every standalone tool on this list. That count is not used in the scores.
Three kinds of tool
Answer one question: do AI engines name you, and who do they name instead? Live runs (Prefer, CitedSpy, Massive, GeoBuddy, RankSurf, OmniFound) ask the engines now; index reads (Ahrefs, Semrush) report prompts the vendor already ran.
Run two or three. Compare them on the same brand before you trust any one number.Check whether the bots behind AI answers can read your pages at all. Plenty of absence is a robots.txt block, not a content problem, and no answer checker can explain it.
Run one before you run an answer check, so you know which engines could even reach you.Do a piece of the work rather than measure it: write a robots.txt that lets the right crawlers in, build valid JSON-LD, score one page for quotability, or turn a set of answers into a share-of-voice figure.
Use them after the check, when the fix list tells you what to change.The ranked list
Prefer first (our product, disclosed); then the free checks from Ahrefs, Semrush and HubSpot; then the standalone checkers by overall score, ties alphabetical, the unscored crawler checker last.
Prefer AI Visibility CheckerPrefer's AI Visibility Checker is our free tool. You enter a URL and nothing else: no account, no card, no analytics access. It reads your site to work out your category, generates the questions your buyers ask, runs them across four engines and sends back a report in about ten minutes as a link and a PDF. The report has five sections: answer share per engine and per prompt, the prompts with the full answer text, every domain the engines cited with the page behind each citation, which AI crawlers can reach your money pages, and a fix list ordered by the answers each action should win back. Continuous tracking is the paid product, from $24/mo with a 7-day free trial.
Ahrefs Free AI Visibility CheckerEnter a brand name and Ahrefs returns a report with five sections: total mentions, mentions by platform, the top five topics, the top five cited domains and the top five cited pages, drawn from the prompt index behind Brand Radar (the page states 451M+ monthly prompts, including 312.9M for AI Overviews and 30.9M for ChatGPT). The page says no signup, no credit card and no limit on how many brands you can check, and it defines a mention (the platform named your brand) against a citation (it linked to your site) in one line. Brand Radar's paid index is priced on the same page at $199/mo per platform or $699/mo for all of them (page read 23 September 2026).
Semrush AI Search Visibility CheckerSemrush's free tool is powered by its AI Visibility Toolkit. Enter a domain and the report shows an AI Visibility Score from 0 to 100, mentions, citations, coverage per platform, audience reach, top cited pages, best topics, topic volume and a competitor comparison, from a corpus the page describes as 26M+ prompts and responses updated daily across 220+ countries and regions. The page says you can run it three times per day without registering. Its FAQ pre-answers why the answers you see in ChatGPT yourself look different (page read 23 September 2026).
HubSpot AI Search GraderHubSpot describes the Grader on its own help page as a free one-time snapshot, alongside its free AI Search Sensor (industry-wide trend charts) and the paid HubSpot AEO ($50/mo for 25 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, with daily updates). The Grader queries ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini and returns a score out of 100 weighted across sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice and market competition, and its page states no account is needed (page read 6 September 2026; ladder read 23 September 2026). Am I Cited's September 2026 test also lists it among the checkers that need no account.
CitedSpy AI Visibility CheckerCitedSpy is a tracker priced from $19/mo with all engines included, and its free checker is the most complete of the standalone tools we read. Enter a brand name and an optional domain; it picks about five competitors and a set of category prompts, queries five engines live, and returns a 0 to 100 score, share of voice, a rank heatmap by prompt and engine, sentiment and the cited sources. Its FAQ opens with 'A full check is free and needs no signup', and its methodology section is bylined by co-founder Arshita Sharma and dated 28 June 2026 (page read 23 September 2026).
Massive AI Visibility CheckerMassive is a proxy and web-rendering API vendor, and its checker is a demo of that API. You type a prompt and a brand, pick a market (US, UK or Germany), and it queries Google organic, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini live, streaming each full answer so you can read exactly what was said. Cited URLs are listed for Perplexity and AI Overviews. The page says no credit card and no signup wall. Its long FAQ defines AEO, GEO and SEO and gives four-point tactic lists for ranking in each engine (page read 23 September 2026).
Yogoo ScoreYogoo's homepage pitches a free Yogoo Score from 0 to 100 for how often five engines cite your brand, 'in under a minute, no signup'. A free account adds ongoing monitoring, the brands cited instead of you, the prompts competitors won and a per-engine breakdown. Paid Pro and Premium plans start from $29/mo with a 14-day trial and add a weekly opportunity workflow and content drafting. The page shows a sample result for Linear (59% of answers, second of 12) and its blog publishes original studies, including rerun overlap data (page read 23 September 2026).
GeoBuddy Free ChatGPT Visibility CheckerGeoBuddy's tool page is built around a no-signup form: brand name plus what the brand does. It queries four engines in real time and returns a visibility score, sentiment and a competitor comparison in about 60 seconds. You get three free checks with no signup. The page also publishes a seven-step manual method for checking your brand in ChatGPT and an original statistic (60% of 2,556 brands measured since February 2026 scored zero; average 14.6%), and it sells a $299 Fix Pack (page read 23 September 2026).
OmniFound Free AI Visibility CheckerOmniFound is a London SEO agency. Its free checker queries three engines at the same time for one search in a market you choose, then splits the result into the brands each engine recommends and the sources it cites, with the argument that the tool 'counts the brands, not the magazines'. The page explains its mechanics per engine (ChatGPT via its web search tool, AI Overviews pulled live from the SERP, where a missing overview is itself a finding) and states the limits: first check without an email, three more with one, because each run calls three paid APIs (page read 23 September 2026).
RankSurf AI Visibility ScanRankSurf is a tracker with paid daily scans across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Its free scan auto-generates ten buying-intent prompts for your domain, runs them on ChatGPT with live web search, and returns a score out of ten, a breakdown per prompt and a ranked fix list. It is free with no signup, limited to three scans per IP per day, and its page states the limits plainly: point-in-time, ChatGPT only on the free scan, Perplexity and AI Overviews on paid. Results live at a permanent per-domain URL (page read 23 September 2026).
isvisible.aiThis is the other meaning of 'visible to AI'. isvisible.ai does not check answers; it checks whether the bots behind them can read your site. It reads robots.txt and llms.txt, runs a live homepage probe with 13 crawler user agents grouped as search engines (Googlebot, Bingbot), training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot and others) and answer engines (ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot), and scores the result with a stated formula: agent access is worth 80 points and llms.txt 20. Free, no signup, results in seconds (page read 23 September 2026). Prefer's free crawler access checker covers the same job from a pasted robots.txt, for 14 named crawlers.
Side by side
Best-for, the standout strength, and the main limitation for each tool.
| Tool | Best for | Strength | Limitation | From |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prefer AI Visibility Checker | Best overall | Sources, crawl check and fixes in one report | Four engines, one run | Free, no account, no card |
| Ahrefs Free AI Visibility Checker | Most engines, no signup | Six engines, cited domains, free | Index read, not a live run | Free, no signup, no stated limit |
| Semrush AI Search Visibility Checker | Score plus cited pages | Score, citations, cited pages | 3 a day, four engines | Free, 3 checks a day, no account |
| HubSpot AI Search Grader | One-time score | Free score, no account | Score only, three engines | Free, one run, no account |
| CitedSpy AI Visibility Checker | Five engines live | Five engines, sources, heatmap | Prompts chosen for you | Free, no signup |
| Massive AI Visibility Checker | Read the full answers | Full live answers, four AI engines | One prompt, no report | Free, no signup |
| Yogoo Score | Five-engine score | Five engines, Claude included | Score only without an account | Free score, no signup; free account for detail |
| GeoBuddy Free ChatGPT Visibility Checker | Four engines in 60 seconds | Four engines, sentiment, fast | Three checks, no sources | Free, 3 checks, no signup |
| OmniFound Free AI Visibility Checker | Brands vs sources | Brands and sources, split per engine | Email after one check | Free; first check no email, then 3 with email |
| RankSurf AI Visibility Scan | Ten prompts, ChatGPT | Ten prompts, per-prompt detail | ChatGPT only | Free, no signup, 3 scans a day |
| isvisible.ai | Crawler access | Live crawler probe, 13 agents | Access only, not answers | Free, no signup |
Red flags
Every tool here demos well. These are the questions that separate them once the trial ends.
Rank Prompt's page says its free result is 'estimated by an OpenAI model, not live answers from each assistant'. That is a guess about what the engines would say. Ask whether the tool ran the engines or a model of them.
A number out of 100 with no answer text and no cited pages cannot be verified or acted on. Ask to see one full answer with its sources before you trust the score.
ChatGPT's cited sites changed a lot between runs of the same question in our data. A single free check is one draw. Re-run it, or run two tools on the same brand, before you act.
Some free checkers take an email or an account before the second check. That is fine if the page says so up front, which the ones on this list do. Be wary of a tool that hides the wall until you have typed your brand in.
A free AI visibility tool tells you whether AI engines name your brand when a buyer asks a question in your category, and which pages they cite instead. This list covers the free checks only: no trials, no credits, no card. Prefer’s own checker ranks first because it is our product and our pick, and we say so. For the paid trackers, see the best AI visibility tools and the verified pricing index.
Here is what we did. We read each tool’s own page in a browser on 23 September 2026 (HubSpot’s Grader on 6 September), recorded what the page says the free check covers, returns and requires, and scored those facts on five dimensions with a printed scale. We did not create accounts or run every tool ourselves.
A free check is one sample. When Prefer asked 80 questions three times each on 13 September 2026, two ChatGPT runs of the same question shared 37% of the sites cited across both; Gemini shared 35%, Claude 68% and Perplexity 96% (do AI answers change when asked twice?). A live checker gives you one draw from that spread. Run it twice, or run two tools on the same brand, before you treat a score as a rank.
Index reads and live runs measure different things. Ahrefs and Semrush report prompts their paid products already ran, so the number is steadier, but it is their prompt set. Prefer, CitedSpy, Massive, GeoBuddy and RankSurf ask the engines when you click, so the result is about your category today, and it will move. Rank Prompt says its free result is estimated by an OpenAI model rather than taken from the engines. That is a guess, so it is not on the list.
A mention is not a citation. The engine naming you and the engine linking your page are different findings, and only the second tells you which page is doing the work (mention vs citation). Prefer, Ahrefs, Semrush, CitedSpy and OmniFound list the cited sources in the free result.
Prefer’s AI Visibility Checker is our pick because the free report contains the receipts: up to 25 buyer prompts run across four engines, every answer with the brands named, every cited domain with the page behind it, which AI crawlers can reach your money pages, and a fix list ordered by the answers each action should win back. One URL, no account, no card, about ten minutes. It covers four engines where Ahrefs covers six, and one run is a snapshot; ongoing tracking is the paid plan, from $24/mo.
Ahrefs is the free check to run beside it: six engines, the top cited domains and pages, no signup and no limit on brands. Semrush gives a score with citations, cited pages and a competitor comparison, three times a day with no account, and it covers Google AI Mode. HubSpot’s Grader is a one-time score from three engines, useful if your team already lives in HubSpot.
Among the standalone tools other than ours, CitedSpy scored highest on our rules: five engines run live, cited sources, a prompt-by-engine heatmap, no signup, and the paid price stated on the page. It gives up points on one dimension only: the result shows the sources, not what to do about them. Massive streams the full answer text from four AI engines for one prompt. Yogoo and GeoBuddy return a score across five and four engines in under a minute; neither lists the cited sources in the no-signup result. OmniFound splits recommended brands from cited sources per engine, and takes an email after the first check. RankSurf runs ten prompts with per-prompt detail and fixes, on ChatGPT only.
Half of low visibility is access, not content. Before an answer check, confirm the bots behind the answers can read you. isvisible.ai probes your homepage live with 13 crawler user agents and scores the result. Prefer’s Crawler Access Checker reads a robots.txt you paste and gives an allowed or blocked verdict for 14 named crawlers, separating search crawlers like OAI-SearchBot from training crawlers like GPTBot, in your browser with no signup.
The rest of Prefer’s free tools do a piece of the work rather than measure it, all in your browser with no account: a robots.txt generator with AI crawler presets, an llms.txt generator, a schema generator and FAQ schema generator for valid JSON-LD, an Answer Readiness Scorer that grades one page out of 100 on ten checks, a share of voice calculator that ranks the brands named across the answers you checked, and calculators for the ROI and the monthly cost of AI search visibility, using your own numbers.
A free check answers “where do we stand today?”. It cannot answer “did the page we shipped last week change the answer?”, because that needs the same prompts run again on a schedule. Move to tracking when you are shipping changes. Prefer’s plans track your prompts across five engines from $24/mo for 30 prompts, with a 7-day free trial; see plans and pricing, or start with the free checker and read the fix list first.
Every fact about another tool comes from that tool’s own page, read in a browser on the date in the sources list, and the scores use only those facts and the printed scale. Prefer’s facts come from our tool pages and our published pricing. We did not test the tools hands-on; two vendor listicles that did (Am I Cited and Foglift, both September 2026) are in the sources. We re-read these pages monthly and will update the scores when a page changes.
The questions buyers ask next.
Enter your URL in Prefer's free checker, or ask ChatGPT a buying question in your category from a signed-out chat and note who it names and which sources it links. Do not put your own brand in the question; that biases the answer. Repeat the question two or three times, because ChatGPT's cited sites changed between runs on most of our questions.
Run the free check →A mention is the engine naming your brand; a citation is the engine linking your page as a source. Prefer's free report records both and lists the cited domains and pages. Only some free checkers show the sources, which is why it is one of our five scoring dimensions.
Mention vs citation →Because the engines do not give the same answer twice. Prefer's September 2026 study found two ChatGPT runs of the same question shared 37% of the sites cited across both. Index-based checkers like Ahrefs and Semrush aggregate many runs the vendor already made, so their number is steadier but reflects their prompt set, not yours.
Do AI answers change when asked twice? →Yes. Prefer's Crawler Access Checker reads a robots.txt you paste and returns an allowed or blocked verdict for 14 named crawlers, in your browser with no signup. isvisible.ai probes your homepage live with 13 crawler user agents and scores the result. Both are free.
Check crawler access →Prefer's paid plans start at $24/mo for 30 prompts across five engines. Of the tools here with a stated price, CitedSpy starts at $19/mo, Yogoo at $29/mo, HubSpot AEO at $50/mo for 25 prompts on three engines, and Ahrefs' Brand Radar index at $199/mo per platform (all read in September 2026).
AI visibility tool pricing, verified →Questions
Yes. Prefer's AI Visibility Checker is free and needs no account or card: enter one URL and it runs up to 25 buyer prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini, then reports your answer share, the cited sources, which crawlers can reach you and a ranked fix list. Ahrefs and Semrush both run free checkers off their prompt indexes without an account (Semrush caps it at three a day), HubSpot's AI Search Grader is a free one-time score, and CitedSpy, Yogoo, GeoBuddy and RankSurf return a result with no signup. All of them are one-off snapshots; ongoing tracking is the paid product in every case.
Prefer's free checker is our pick if you want the evidence behind the number: it is the only tool on this list whose free report pairs the cited sources with a crawler access check and a ranked fix list, from one URL with no account. It is our product, so weigh that. On our scoring, Ahrefs is the best free count across the most engines (six, no signup, no limit), and CitedSpy is the best standalone checker (five engines run live, sources and a heatmap, no signup). If you want to read the full answer text, Massive streams it live for one prompt.
The fastest way is to enter your URL in Prefer's free checker and read the report: it runs your category's buyer questions across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini and records who was named and which pages were cited. By hand, open a signed-out chat, ask a buying question in your category rather than a question about your brand (naming yourself in the prompt biases the answer), note the brands named and ask for the sources, then repeat in the other engines. Whichever way you check, run it more than once: in Prefer's September 2026 study, two ChatGPT runs of the same question shared 37% of the cited sites.
No, and Prefer's data shows how much they move: when we asked 80 questions three times each on 13 September 2026, two ChatGPT runs shared 37% of the sites cited across both, Gemini 35%, Claude 68% and Perplexity 96%. A live checker (Prefer, CitedSpy, GeoBuddy, RankSurf, Massive) gives you one draw per run. An index read (Ahrefs, Semrush) is steadier because it aggregates prompts the vendor already ran, but it measures their prompt set, not yours. Semrush's own FAQ explains why the answer you see in ChatGPT yourself looks different.
A mention means the engine named your brand in its answer; a citation means it linked to a page on your site as a source. Prefer's free report records both, and lists the cited domains and pages so you can see where the engine went instead of your site. Ahrefs puts the same one-line definition on its tool page, and Rank.ai's checker draws the same distinction. A tool that reports mentions alone cannot tell you which page to win or fix, which is why 'shows cited sources' is one of our five scoring dimensions.
When you have shipped a fix and need to know whether it moved the answer. Prefer's paid plans track your prompts from $24/mo for 30 prompts across five engines, with a 7-day free trial; the free checker gives you the first reading and the fix list, and the plan tells you whether the next reading changed. Until you are shipping changes, a free check every month or so is enough to see direction. HubSpot's paid step is $50/mo for 25 prompts on three engines, CitedSpy starts at $19/mo, Yogoo at $29/mo, and Ahrefs' Brand Radar index at $199/mo per platform.
References
How to choose
For the evidence (answers, sources, crawl status, fixes), run Prefer's checker. For a fast number across the most engines, run Ahrefs. For both, run both; they are free.
If you have never checked your robots.txt, run a crawler checker first (isvisible.ai probes live; Prefer's reads the file you paste for 14 crawlers). A blocked OAI-SearchBot explains absence that no answer checker can.
Ahrefs covers six, CitedSpy and Yogoo five, Prefer and Semrush four (Semrush with AI Mode, Prefer with Perplexity), RankSurf only ChatGPT. Pick the check that includes the engine you are being asked about.
Then a monthly free check will not tell you whether they worked. Move to tracking on a fixed prompt set; Prefer's plans do that from $24/mo with a 7-day trial.
Keep going
See how answer engines describe your brand today, and where the openings are to outpace the competition.
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