What 'Free' Actually Means Across 74 AI-Visibility Tools

“Free” on an AI-visibility vendor’s homepage can mean four different things: a self-hosted tool you run forever on your own API key, an ongoing hosted plan with real (if small) monitoring capacity, a single one-time check with no account required, or a 4-to-30-day clock that starts the moment you sign up. All four get the same badge. We went through the pricing data behind every AI-visibility and GEO software tool in our index and sorted each “free” claim into what it actually is.

The index holds 75 listings outside the managed citation-services category. One of them, Big Leads, is a growth agency that sells a program run by its own team rather than a plan you sign up for, so “free tier” doesn’t apply to it any more than it does to the 15 citation-services agencies we exclude for the same reason. That leaves 74 software tools classified below.

17 have a real, ongoing free tier you can use indefinitely. 31 offer only a time-limited trial of published length, and three more advertise a trial without saying how long it runs. 18 offer nothing free at all. The remaining five give you a single free look and nothing more. The bigger finding is inside that first number: a “free tier” ranges from geoSurge’s literally unlimited, bring-your-own-key monitoring to VisibAI’s one audit every 90 days: two products checking the same box on a comparison page for entirely different levels of usefulness.

The three kinds of “free”

1. Free forever: self-hosted or bring-your-own-key, no usage cap from the vendor

Six tools in the index put no ceiling on ongoing use, because the cost sits with you (your own API key) rather than the vendor’s infrastructure:

• geoSurge: unlimited tracked prompts across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, full REST API, CSV/JSON export and MCP access, on its “Free (BYOK)” plan. You pay only your own OpenAI/Anthropic/Google API usage. The most generous unlimited-use free plan in the category: everything except logit-level probability analysis and real-time crawler classification, which sit behind a custom Enterprise tier.
• auto-geo: MIT-licensed, free forever, no hosted plan at all. A command-line tool: audit, generate, fix and measure citation-readiness against five engines via your own API key. No dashboard, and it doesn’t monitor Google AI Overviews.
• Archytas AISpy: a free Windows/macOS desktop download, bring-your-own OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/Perplexity keys, no seat or prompt limit.
• Canonry’s self-hosted tier: full CLI, dashboard and API, local SQLite, your own model API key, FSL-1.1-ALv2 licensed (converts to Apache 2.0 two years after each release).
• Syntropic AI Visibility Audit: a self-hosted Docker Compose stack (AGPL-3.0), your own Gemini/Exa/DataForSEO keys, with a built-in sample dataset so you can explore before adding any key at all.
• GEOrank: Apache-2.0 licensed, self-hosted via Docker Compose, plus a separate hosted “GEORankHub” demo with company-directory and generator tools free to browse (account sign-up for the deeper diagnostic tools requires a Chinese mobile number).

None of these six report a mentions/citations dashboard the way a paid SaaS does by default. You are trading a monthly bill for running infrastructure and paying LLM-API costs directly. Worth it if a team has the technical comfort; not a drop-in replacement for a hosted product if it doesn’t.

2. A real, ongoing hosted free tier: capped, but usable indefinitely without a card

Eleven tools host the free plan themselves and cap it, rather than passing the cost to your own API key:

• AthenaHQ: a standing “Essential” plan: $25 of free credit (~300 credits) across five engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude), no time limit stated.
• CiteLens: a genuine $0 “Free” plan: 10 tracked prompts, 3 AI engines, 100 engine calls/month, 1 workspace, 2 seats, 5 GEO audits/month. No API access at this tier (every paid tier above it also includes its own 14-day free trial).
• RankLens: a standing Free plan (standard-sampling entity probes, one free API key) plus a “PRO (Beta)” tier that’s also free for the duration of its beta, so read that second one as temporary, not a permanent price point.
• Promptwatch: an “Explore” plan at $0/month, described on its own pricing page as free forever, but the exact tracked-prompt and website caps are not published; confirm the real ceiling before counting on it for anything beyond a first look.
• Ubersuggest: a free $0 plan, but read the fine print: it’s built around Ubersuggest’s classic SEO toolset (keyword research, rank tracking). The AI-search-visibility feature specifically, the reason it’s in this index, is marketed on the free plan without a documented prompt allocation; the paid Personal tier ($29/mo) is the first one with a stated AI-visibility number (10 prompts/project). Don’t assume the free plan gives you AI-answer monitoring just because the product does.
• Amplitude AI Visibility: a $0 “Free” plan with 500 active AI Visibility prompts and 2M analytics events a month, no credit card. It sits oddly in this group for a good reason: AI Visibility carries no separate price at all, so the ceiling you are really working against is Amplitude’s own analytics free tier rather than a GEO-specific allowance.
• SEORCE: a $0 “Free” plan, forever, no time limit stated: 1 website, 10 prompts/month, 20 keywords, 500 pages crawled/month, 50 AutoFix repairs, Google Search Console connected. Every paid tier above it ($49/month and up) also includes its own 7-day free trial.
• AI Sightline: a genuine $0 “Free” plan, forever, no card required: 2 platforms (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews), 3 prompts scanned every 7 days, and 100 API calls/month. Unusually, API access ships even at $0, where most rivals in this index gate it behind a paid plan entirely.
• EdenRank: a genuine $0 “Free” plan, forever, no card required: 1 workspace, 5 active prompts, and 3 engines (Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot, notably not ChatGPT or Perplexity). Unlike AI Sightline, there’s no API at this tier; EdenRank gates its read-only API all the way to the $299/mo Concierge plan.
• CheckThat.ai: a genuine $0 free workspace, forever, no card required: 50 custom prompts tracked daily across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Mode, plus 100,000+ pre-built industry prompts and browsing access to the full open benchmark index. One of the larger hosted free allocations in this group; paid tiers add more prompts and history but publish no price.
• Addlly AI: a “Starter Pack” tier priced at Free on a monthly period, sitting below Basic ($99/mo, 10 Addlly credits) and Pro ($249/mo, 30 credits). What the free pack actually includes is not itemised on the tier, so treat it as confirmed to exist and unconfirmed in size: ask for the credit allocation before planning around it.

Eleven ongoing free tiers, and three of them come with a caveat worth checking before you rely on one: Promptwatch’s undisclosed caps, Addlly AI’s unitemised Starter Pack, and Ubersuggest’s split between its SEO toolkit and the AI-visibility feature you came for. The rest cap engine count, prompt volume or workspace/seat count in ways that make them a real evaluation tool rather than a production monitoring setup for anything beyond a single brand at low volume.

3. A free look, not a free tier: one-time, not ongoing

Six tools offer something genuinely free with no card required, but it’s a single event, not a standing plan:

• GEO Tool: a “Free GEO Score”: a one-time 0-100 technical AI-readiness check (schema, llms.txt, entity-linking, FAQ markup), no signup, no card, results in about 47 seconds per the vendor. There’s no ongoing free monitoring behind it. The next step is a paid one-time audit or a custom retainer.
• Directree GEO Monitor: a “Free GEO Check”, one-time and cached for 30 days: 3 buyer questions against 1 AI engine, no signup required. Its ongoing plans start paid, so this is a sample of the output rather than a way to monitor anything.
• VisibAI: its “Free” tier is one audit every 90 days: ChatGPT only, 20 queries, a visibility score plus the top 3 issues. Technically standing (it resets), but at one check per quarter it’s a periodic snapshot, not monitoring.
• HubSpot AEO: its AI Search Grader is free with no signup at all: a one-time composite visibility score out of 100 across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Ongoing prompt tracking starts at $50/month, so the free part is a diagnostic rather than monitoring.
• Sleepwalker: 10 free signup credits, no card required, enough for roughly one full 4-engine visibility run, per the vendor’s own accounting. After that, it’s pay-as-you-go at €0.02/credit.
• AI Visibility Report Group: a “Free AI Check” at €0, priced as a one-time item on its own tier table: 28 technical checks (up to 32 for webshops) returning three improvement points on screen, no PDF and no payment details. Everything past that is a one-time PDF purchase (€29 / €79 / €149) or a 12-month prepaid block of twelve reports, so there is no ongoing plan for the free check to sit below. It is the only vendor in this group that sells reports rather than access to a dashboard.

Five of these six offer nothing else free; HubSpot AEO also runs a trial, counted below. If a comparison table just checks “has a free tier: yes” for this group, it’s stating something technically true and practically different from AthenaHQ’s standing credit or geoSurge’s unlimited BYOK plan.

How long the 34 trials actually run

Time-limited trials cluster tightly around two lengths. Of the 34 tools offering one with a published length (3 of which, Ubersuggest, CiteLens and SEORCE, also have an ongoing free tier above, so a trial there unlocks a higher paid tier rather than being your only free option):

Length	Tools
3 days	AIclicks, BabyLoveGrowth
4 days	Mentionable
7 days	Otterly AI, Peec AI, Scrunch AI, Frase, Writesonic, Surfer SEO, GeoRankers, Vismore, Goodie AI, LLMrefs, Gauge, Rank Prompt, RadarKit, Dageno AI, SEORCE, Ubersuggest, Rankfender, Local Dominator AI Tracker‡
10 days	SE Visible
14 days	Nightwatch, Morningscore, LLM Pulse, Trakkr, ZipTie, Qwairy, CiteLens*, Omnia, TrueRanker, Keyword.com AI Visibility
28 days	HubSpot AEO†
30 days	Rankshift

*also has a standing free tier, listed above.

† HubSpot’s own AEO page does not state a trial length. The 28-day figure comes from independent coverage of its April 2026 launch event, so confirm current terms before planning an evaluation around it.

‡ Local Dominator’s 7-day trial is published as a “Trial Mode” tier at $0/month (“7-day free trial, no credit card required”, limited scans across all features including AI Tracker). It was missing from the structured trial-length field the rest of this table is built from when this census first ran, and has since been recorded there, so the tier table and the field now agree.

A week is the modal length by a wide margin, at 18 of 34, with 14 days second at 10. The long end belongs to HubSpot AEO at 28 days and Rankshift at 30, roughly four times the norm; the short end belongs to AIclicks and BabyLoveGrowth at 3 days. If you need more than a week to evaluate against your own prompts, HubSpot AEO and Rankshift are the only tools in the index offering that runway without a sales call, and only Rankshift publishes its own trial length.

Three more advertise a trial without publishing its length

Profound, Similarweb AI Search Intelligence and Analyze AI each advertise a free trial but state no duration we could find. Profound’s $399/month Growth tier lists “Free trial available” among its features; Similarweb shows a “Try for free” call-to-action on its tiers; Analyze AI’s pricing page offers “Start Free Trial”. None states a length or a card requirement, so we count them as offering a trial of unknown length rather than assigning a figure that isn’t confirmed, and rather than filing them with the tools that offer nothing.

The 18 with nothing free at all

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, RankScale, Knowatoa, Evertune, Bloomiro, Searchable, Mangools AI Search Watcher, Local Falcon, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Conductor, Adobe Brand Visibility, Meltwater GenAI Lens, Cision AI Visibility Dashboard, Brandlight, Cognizo, CiteMentor, Rankability and Webglazer publish no free tier and no free trial on their own pricing pages. For most of them the only way to see the product is a sales conversation. Cognizo’s two mid tiers publish a fixed monthly price ($499, $899), but still route through “Book a demo”. CiteMentor publishes no prices at all, its pricing page saying plans “are not available to display right now” and directing buyers to contact it for a walkthrough. Webglazer and Rankability are the exceptions to the sales-call framing: Webglazer sells self-serve from €79/month and Rankability from $99/month billed annually, and neither offers a way to try it first. Our buyer checklist already flags this as a real evaluation-timeline factor; several of these (Evertune, RankScale, Brandlight) are enterprise-anchored tools where a demo-first motion is a deliberate sales choice rather than an oversight, so budget for a scheduled call rather than a same-day signup if one of these is on your shortlist.

Adobe Brand Visibility and Meltwater GenAI Lens are the most explicit in this group: Adobe’s tier states “No self-serve signup, no free trial”, and Meltwater’s states it offers “no self-serve signup or free trial; a free human-guided demo is offered instead”.

What to check before you count on “free”

• Ongoing or one-time. GEO Tool’s score, Directree’s cached GEO Check, VisibAI’s quarterly audit and Sleepwalker’s signup credits are each free once (or on a long cycle), not a standing monitoring plan. Read the plan name, not just the price.
• Which feature the free plan actually covers. Ubersuggest’s $0 plan is real, but it’s an SEO-toolkit free plan first; its AI-visibility prompt allocation is only documented once you’re paying. Check that the free tier covers the AI-monitoring capability you came for, not just that the product has one somewhere.
• Whether the cap is published at all. Promptwatch’s Explore plan is free forever by its own description, and Addlly AI’s Starter Pack is priced Free, with neither publishing what you actually get. Both are worth confirming directly before you build a workflow around them.
• Whether “free trial” comes with a number. Three vendors advertise a trial without saying how long it runs. That’s not a reason to rule them out, but it is a question to ask before you schedule an evaluation window around one.
• Who pays the ongoing cost. The six BYOK/self-hosted tools are free of a subscription, not free of cost. You are paying your own LLM API usage per query, which scales with how much you actually monitor.

Methodology

Counted on 2026-08-16. Every figure above comes from CitedIndex’s own gate-passed listing data. The index holds 75 published listings outside the managed citation-services category; Big Leads is excluded from the classification because it sells an agency program rather than a software plan, leaving 74 tools. The 15 citation-services agencies are excluded for the same reason.

Free-tier and free-trial status are read from each listing’s own structured pricing fields and cross-checked against its published pricing-tiers table, with the tier table taking precedence where the two disagree. Every trial length and free-tier limit named above is transcribed from the vendor’s own pricing page as verified for that listing; Webglazer’s absence of any free offering was re-checked against its homepage, pricing page and FAQ on 2026-08-12. See each tool’s own page for its full pricing table, source citations and verification date.

The counts partition the 74 tools as follows: 17 with an ongoing free tier, 31 offering only a time-limited trial of published length, 3 advertising a trial of unpublished length, 5 offering only a one-time free look, and 18 offering nothing free. Tools appear in more than one section where they offer more than one thing (three of the 34 published-length trials sit above a standing free tier, and HubSpot AEO pairs a trial with a one-time grader), so the section headings and this partition are counted differently on purpose.

This piece complements the aggregate free-trial/free-tier count already published in our buyer checklist with the per-tool detail behind it, the same way our engine-coverage census expanded on that checklist’s engine-coverage bullet. For the full ranked comparison with pricing and engine coverage side by side, see the best AI visibility tools. For a browsable view of the tools tagged with a free tier, see the collection.

2026-08-16 update: rebased from 72 listings / 71 classified tools to 75 / 74. Three tools were added to the index since the last count and each is classified here for the first time. Rankability joins the nothing-free group: its pricing page publishes three annual tiers (Core $99, Scale $299, Advanced $799 per month) and no trial or free tier. Keyword.com AI Visibility joins the 14-day trial row, which moves from 9 tools to 10, and the published-length trial table from 33 to 34. AI Visibility Report Group joins the one-time group, which moves from 5 tools to 6. The summary partition moves accordingly: trial-only 30 to 31, one-time-only 4 to 5, nothing-free 17 to 18; the ongoing-free-tier group and the three unpublished-length trials are unchanged. No listing left the index and no existing classification changed: every trial length in the table above was re-checked against the structured field it is built from this session, and all 33 previously published lengths still agree, as does every member of the nothing-free group.

2026-08-12 update: corrected four listings that this article previously placed in the “no free option” group against their own published pricing tables. Local Dominator AI Tracker publishes a $0 “Trial Mode” tier with a 7-day free trial and no card required, and moves to the 7-day trial row. Addlly AI publishes a Starter Pack priced Free, and moves to the ongoing-free-tier group. Directree GEO Monitor publishes a one-time “Free GEO Check”, and moves to the one-time group. Profound lists “Free trial available” on its Growth tier, and moves to the new unpublished-length group alongside Similarweb AI Search Intelligence and Analyze AI, which were previously counted as offering nothing. Three listings the article had never covered are added: Webglazer and CiteMentor to the nothing-free group, and Big Leads as an agency excluded from the classification. Base moves from a declared 70 (which counted one more tool than the article actually enumerated) to 72 listings and 71 classified tools; the ongoing-free-tier group moves 16 to 17, the nothing-free group 21 to 17, trials 32 to 33, and trial-only 29 to 30. A later pass the same day fixed the summary sentence at the top of this article, which listed 17, 30, 17 and “the remaining four” and so accounted for 68 of the 71 tools: the three vendors advertising a trial of unpublished length were missing from it. The per-tool sections, the trial table and the methodology partition were unaffected and already counted all 71.

2026-08-11 update: added Rankfender, an AI-visibility-plus-content-generation platform from agency 361 DEV, to the 7-day trial row: its own pricing page confirms a 7-day free trial with no credit card required across every tier (Essential, Professional, Business, Agencies), and no separate, ongoing free tier.

2026-08-10 update: added TrueRanker, a bootstrapped SEO rank tracker (est. 2019) with an AI-visibility module, to the 14-day trial row: its own pricing page confirms a 14-day free trial with no credit card and no separate, ongoing free tier.