"What can I use for free?" is the most reasonable first question in this category, because most of these tools do not publish a price at all - you have to book a call to learn what they cost. That makes a free tier or a no-card trial the only honest way to find out whether an AI visibility tool is worth your money before you spend any. This page sorts every tool we track by exactly that: how much you can actually do without paying. If cost rather than free access is your lens, the AI SEO tools ranking ordered by cost to start is the companion page, and the pricing and terminology notes explain why vendors price the same job so differently.
"Free" is doing a lot of work in searches like "free AI visibility tools" and "free AI SEO tools", so it helps to separate what it can mean. A permanent free tier lets you keep using the tool for nothing, forever, within limits. A free trial gives you full or near-full access for a fixed number of days, then stops. A limited free account exists inside a bigger paid suite and usually strips out the AI-answer tracking you came for. And some tools have no free path at all - the only way in is a paid plan or a sales call. Reading a tool as "free" without knowing which of these it is the fastest way to waste a week.
Which AI visibility tools are actually free
| Tool | Free access | What the free path gets you | What it costs after |
|---|---|---|---|
| LLM Brand Boost | Permanent free tier | 10 tracked prompts across 3 engines, no card, kept forever | $39/mo Starter (50 prompts) |
| Semrush AI Visibility | Limited free account | A Semrush login with heavy caps; AI prompt tracking is a paid add-on, not in the free account | From $117/mo (annual SEO plan) |
| Trakkr | 14-day trial | Full Growth plan - 8 engines, 50 daily prompts, one brand | $100/mo (Growth) |
| Scrunch AI | 7-day trial, no card | Starter features across 5 engines for a week | Not published (enterprise, sales-led) |
| Otterly.AI | Free trial | A short look at the Lite plan - 4 engines, 15 prompts | $29/mo (Lite) - cheapest published paid entry |
| Profound | Free trial | A one-time ChatGPT-only look with roughly 10 prompts | $99/mo Starter (billed yearly) |
| Peec AI | Free trial | A trial of a clean 3-engine product | Not published on the product page |
| Rankscale | Not stated | No free tier or trial confirmed on the product page | Not published |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | No free access | Included only inside a paid Ahrefs plan - no standalone free path | From ~$50/mo add-on on top of an Ahrefs plan (~$179 to start) |
The only permanent free tier in the category
If you want to keep checking your AI visibility for nothing rather than for a week, there is exactly one option today: LLM Brand Boost runs 10 tracked prompts across three engines on a free tier that never expires and never asks for a card (disclosure: it is our own tool, and we score it against the same criteria as every other tool on the site). Ten prompts is not a monitoring programme, but it answers the only question that matters on day one - is my brand showing up in AI answers, or am I invisible - and it lets you keep watching that answer month after month without a subscription. When ten prompts stops being enough, the paid step is $39 a month for fifty. The methodology page explains how we weigh a free tier against paid coverage so it does not simply reward the cheapest option.
Free trials: what each one actually lets you test
A trial is a legitimate way to try a tool for free as long as you treat it as a stopwatch, not a subscription. Trakkr gives the most generous look - fourteen days of the full $100 Growth plan, so you can watch eight engines at once and judge coverage properly before deciding. Scrunch AI offers a seven-day trial that does not ask for a card up front, which is the cleanest kind of trial because it cannot quietly bill you. Otterly.AI lets you trial its Lite plan and, if you decide to stay, has the cheapest published paid entry at $29. Profound is the most limited of the trials: it is a one-time ChatGPT-only look, which tells you almost nothing about your presence in Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews. Peec AI offers a trial too, but since it does not publish a price you cannot value what comes after it.
The practical move with any trial is to load your real prompts on day one, not day six. Put in the questions a buyer would actually type - your brand name, your category, your two closest competitors - and let the tool run them for the full window so you see change over days rather than a single snapshot. A trial spent poking at the interface teaches you the menu; a trial spent on your own prompts teaches you whether you are the answer.
What free won't tell you
Free tiers and trials are built to show you the shape of the problem, not to run a programme. The limits are deliberate: a handful of prompts, a short window, or a single engine. That is enough to confirm whether your brand appears in AI answers and roughly where the gaps are - and for most people starting out, that is the entire question. What free will not give you is scale and history: hundreds of prompts, months of trend data, competitor benchmarking and exports. Those are the things you pay for once you have found a gap and are fixing it. Buying that scale before you have confirmed you have a problem is the most common and most expensive mistake in this category, which is why starting free is almost always the right first step. When you are ready to compare two tools head to head on price and coverage, the side-by-side comparisons line them up directly.
How to run a free evaluation from scratch
Start with the permanent free tier so you have a baseline that does not expire, then use one trial to test the breadth you think you need. Concretely: open the LLM Brand Boost free tier, load ten prompts that a real buyer would ask, and note whether your brand is named, recommended or cited as the source. If those ten prompts show a gap, start a fourteen-day Trakkr trial to see whether the gap holds across all eight engines or only one. That two-step sequence costs nothing, answers both the "am I visible" and the "where am I visible" questions, and leaves you with a clear reason to pay - or a clear reason not to yet. Only then does a paid plan make sense, and the cost-to-start ranking shows the cheapest ways in.