AI-Visibility Tools With a Real, Ongoing Free Tier
The 16 tools in our index with a free plan you can use indefinitely with no card — not a one-time check, not a trial that expires — from unlimited bring-your-own-key monitoring to a standing $25/month hosted credit allowance.
A "free tier" checkbox on a comparison page can mean four different things: a self-hosted tool you run forever on your own API key, a standing hosted plan with real (if capped) capacity, a single one-time check with no account required, or a trial clock that starts the moment you sign up and eventually runs out. These 16 tools clear the higher bar: an ongoing free option, usable indefinitely, with no card and no expiry. Six put no vendor-imposed ceiling on use at all because the cost sits with your own API key; the other ten host the free plan themselves and cap it, but never take it away. Open any entry for its exact limits — engine coverage, prompt caps, workspace and seat counts vary by an order of magnitude between the most generous plan here and the smallest, and two tools that both say "free tier" on their homepage can mean very different things once you read the fine print.
Why this collection
A tool earns a place here only if its own CitedIndex listing documents an ongoing free option usable indefinitely without a credit card: either a self-hosted or bring-your-own-key tier with no vendor-imposed usage ceiling, or a standing $0 hosted plan with a published (or vendor-stated "forever") cap. Excluded: a one-time check or a periodic audit (once every 90 days, for example), and a time-limited trial with no ongoing free plan beneath it — both covered separately in [What 'Free' Actually Means Across 70 AI-Visibility Tools](/blog/free-tier-vs-free-trial-ai-visibility-tools-2026/), the data report this list is drawn from. Every fact below is transcribed from that report's own sourced, vendor-page-verified figures, current as of the report's 2026-08-11 update. Re-verified against the live 92-listing corpus on 2026-08-18: membership unchanged at 16; checked and excluded GetCito (a genuinely self-hosted, BYOK Self-Host tier, but capped to a single domain on a weekly refresh, which is a vendor-imposed ceiling this page's bar excludes) and reconfirmed LLMrefs, Local Dominator AI Tracker, Rankshift and ZipTie remain time-boxed trials with no standing free tier beneath them. Pricing changes; re-verify against the vendor's live pricing page before relying on any single figure for a purchase decision, and see each tool's own listing for its full pricing table and sources.
- geoSurge
A London seed-stage AI-visibility platform with a free, BYOK ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini tracker and an Enterprise-only "Corpus Engineering" toolkit — $12M raised July 2026.
Unlimited tracked prompts across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini on its free "Free (BYOK)" plan, plus a full REST API, CSV/JSON export and MCP access — you pay only your own OpenAI/Anthropic/Google API usage. The most generous unlimited-use free plan in the index; only logit-level probability analysis and real-time crawler classification sit behind a paid Enterprise tier.
- auto-geo
Free, MIT-licensed CLI that audits, generates, and fixes pages for AI-engine citation, then measures whether it worked.
MIT-licensed and free forever with no hosted plan at all — a command-line tool that audits, generates, fixes and measures citation-readiness against five engines via your own API key. No dashboard, and it does not monitor Google AI Overviews.
- Archytas AISpy
A free, downloadable desktop app that tracks brand visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews/AI Mode, bring your own API keys, no subscription.
A free Windows/macOS desktop download, bring-your-own OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/Perplexity API keys, with no seat or prompt limit.
- Canonry
Free, self-hosted, agent-first AEO platform: tracks AI-engine citations and executes the fixes.
Its self-hosted tier ships the full CLI, dashboard and API on local SQLite with your own model API key, under an FSL-1.1-ALv2 license that converts to Apache 2.0 two years after each release.
- Syntropic AI Visibility Audit
Open-source AI-visibility audit, self-hosted: see whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI answers recommend your brand or a named competitor, export a PDF.
A self-hosted Docker Compose stack under AGPL-3.0, using your own Gemini/Exa/DataForSEO keys, with a built-in sample dataset so you can explore before adding a key at all.
- GEOrank
A free, open-source GEO diagnostic-and-content-tooling workbench with a Claude Agent Skill for running a self-hosted instance from an AI agent.
Apache-2.0 licensed and self-hosted via Docker Compose, plus a separate hosted "GEORankHub" demo with company-directory and generator tools free to browse — sign-up for the deeper diagnostic tools requires a Chinese mobile number.
- AthenaHQ
YC-backed AEO platform tracking brand mentions across nine AI answer engines, credit-metered.
A standing "Essential" plan with $25 of free credit (~300 credits) across five engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude — with no time limit stated.
- CiteLens
A self-serve GEO tracker that splits brand-mention from domain-citation tracking with a disclosed confidence interval — but its own homepage confirms only ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude live today, while its own June 2026 launch press claimed five engines including Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
A genuine $0 "Free" plan: 10 tracked prompts, 3 AI engines, 100 engine calls/month, 1 workspace and 2 seats, though no API access at this tier.
- RankLens
SEO Vendor's multi-sampling AI-visibility tracker for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and Llama, free, with a DOI-registered methodology paper.
A standing Free plan with standard-sampling entity probes and one free API key, plus a "PRO (Beta)" tier that is also free for the duration of its beta — read that second one as temporary, not a permanent price point.
- Promptwatch
AI search visibility & GEO tracking for ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
An "Explore" plan at $0/month, described on its own pricing page as free forever, though the exact tracked-prompt and website caps are not published — confirm the real ceiling before relying on it.
- Ubersuggest
NP Digital's budget SEO suite bundles AI Search Visibility — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Gemini tracking — into every paid plan from $29/month.
A free $0 plan, but built around Ubersuggest's classic SEO toolset; the AI-search-visibility feature specifically is marketed on the free plan without a documented prompt allocation, and the paid Personal tier ($29/mo) is the first to state an AI-visibility number (10 prompts/project).
- Amplitude AI Visibility
A free AI-visibility feature bundled into every Amplitude analytics plan, tracking ChatGPT and Google AI Overview mentions and tying them to real traffic and revenue — but only 2 engines live today, with Perplexity, Gemini and Claude still 'coming soon.'
A $0 "Free" plan with 500 active AI Visibility prompts and 2M analytics events a month, no credit card — though AI Visibility carries no separate price at all, so the real ceiling is Amplitude's own analytics free tier rather than a GEO-specific allowance.
- SEORCE
An all-in-one SEO + AI-visibility platform with a genuine $0-forever free tier and 5-engine AI tracking — but real API access needs the $249/month Growth plan, and only one of six planned API endpoints is live.
A $0 "Free" plan, forever, no time limit stated: 1 website, 10 prompts/month, 20 keywords, 500 pages crawled/month, 50 AutoFix repairs and Google Search Console connected.
- AI Sightline
A $0-forever entry into AI-visibility monitoring with server-side AI-referral traffic attribution and a scored recommendations engine — but the free and Starter tiers cap out at 2-4 of its 6 tracked engines, and the whole product has a single public review to date.
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 stricter citation-vs-mention distinction backed by a public proof page — but read-only API access sits behind the $299/mo Concierge tier, and no independent reviews were found.
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 is no API at this tier; the read-only API is gated all the way to the $299/mo Concierge plan.
- CheckThat.ai
A free, open AI-visibility benchmark spanning ~5,983 brands, built by venture-backed marketing company GrowthX - paid tiers add depth but publish no price, gated behind a demo call.
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.