TL;DR
- Can bots read my page? SEOmator or WordLift. Both are free for one page with no signup. Open your robots.txt by hand too.
- What do Google and Bing record for my site? Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. First-party data, including Copilot citations in Bing.
- Does AI name my brand? Ahrefs, Semrush and Frase. A free snapshot, with limits on uses or detail.
- Why a free score can mislead: one free check is one sample. Answers change from run to run.
- Where free stops: the $49 scan. Up to 50 prompts, five engines, 7 days, report kept.
Does AI name your brand? Check your site.
A free AI SEO audit tool answers one of four questions, and no single free tool answers all four. SEOmator, WordLift and RankZero check whether bots can read a page. Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools show what Google and Bing recorded for your own site. Ahrefs, Semrush and Frase give a one-time look at whether AI answers name your brand.
This matters because most "AI audits" grade your HTML. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, so a high readiness score does not mean a model names you.
Below, the tools are grouped by the question they answer. Each free limit comes from the vendor's own page, read on 2 October 2026. I include AI SEO Tracker's $49 scan in the last part. It is not free. I say so there.
Which free check answers which question
| Question | Free tools | Where free stops |
|---|---|---|
| Can bots read my page? | SEOmator, WordLift, RankZero, Semrush SEO Checker, Page Inspector | One page or a few. They grade readiness, not whether a model names you. |
| What do Google and Bing record for my site? | Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs Free | Your own verified site only. Google does not break AI features out of the Web report. |
| What does a model say about my brand? | HubSpot AI Search Grader, Mangools AI Search Grader | Small models or training data, not live search. |
| Does an answer name me for a buyer question? | Ahrefs, Semrush, Frase, Robot-Speed | Their prompts, not yours. A snapshot, with a limited preview. |
| Does it hold from day to day? | Nothing free | Free tools run once. This needs repeat scans. |
GEO work needs the last two rows. A page audit cannot supply them.
How I checked these tools
I fetched each vendor's own tool page and FAQ on 2 October 2026 and took the limits from there. Free tiers change, so treat every limit as dated. I left out AI writers and audits that say "contact sales". I did not rank the tools overall: a tool that fits one question is wrong for another.
Free page audits for crawler access
These tools fetch a page and tell you whether a machine can read it.
SEOmator renders the page in a headless browser, runs 172 checks in 16 weighted categories and pulls Lighthouse scores. You get a 0 to 100 score and a PDF, with no account. Five checks are about AI: semantic HTML, parseable structure, AI-crawler access in robots.txt, an llms.txt reference, and JSON-LD that matches the visible text. The free audit reads one page. Site-wide crawls need a free account. SEOmator says itself that one page cannot show orphan pages, site-wide duplicates or index coverage.
WordLift AI Audit is the sharpest check for JavaScript sites. It classifies a page as static, SSG, SSR or CSR, rates AI-agent accessibility, and gives an "agentic readiness score". Its FAQ says you can run a single-page audit without registration.
RankZero reads the homepage and up to 15 pages. It scores four questions at 25 points each: reach, read, recognise, answer. It says plainly what it does not measure: how often AI answers name you.
Semrush SEO Checker is free and gives a score plus a prioritized list of issues. The full Site Audit that crawls the whole site is the paid step. I could not read a free usage limit, so I state none.
Page Inspector is our free tool. You paste a public URL. It fetches the live page and shows the clean text an AI reads: title, meta description, headings and copy. You can ask follow-up questions about it. More in what ChatGPT sees on a page.
The two-minute robots.txt check
Do this by hand, whatever a tool scores. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for OpenAI and Perplexity bot names. Most checklists lump them together. They do different jobs.
OpenAI's bot documentation says OAI-SearchBot surfaces sites in ChatGPT search, and sites that opt out are not shown in ChatGPT search answers. GPTBot is for training. The settings are independent. ChatGPT-User handles some user actions, and robots.txt rules may not apply to it. Perplexity's bot documentation says PerplexityBot surfaces and links sites in Perplexity results and is not used to crawl for foundation-model training.
So blocking GPTBot does not remove you from ChatGPT search. Blocking OAI-SearchBot does. This is an illustration, not advice on training:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
Many free audits also score llms.txt. Google's page says you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in AI features, and there is no special schema.org markup to add. SEOmator notes that llms.txt is a proposal. Treat that score line as optional.
Free first-party data for your own site
Third-party checkers guess. These tools show what the search engines recorded.
Google Search Console is free and the only source for the queries Google shows you for. Google counts pages in AI Overviews and AI Mode in the Web search type of the Performance report. It does not break them out. It will not show Perplexity or ChatGPT citations. See how to track AI in Search Console.
Bing Webmaster Tools added an AI Performance report. Bing's 10 February 2026 announcement says it shows how your content is cited across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. The dashboard has Total Citations, Average Cited Pages, page-level citation counts, a trend over time, and the grounding queries the AI used to retrieve your pages. Bing calls grounding queries "a sample of overall citation activity", and the counts do not show placement. A June 2026 update added Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare. The report was a public preview when I read these posts. It is the only first-party citation data in this list.
Ahrefs Free (the renamed Webmaster Tools) allows unlimited verified websites. Its Site Audit gets 5,000 crawl credits per verified project per month.
Screaming Frog crawls up to 500 URLs for free. A licence removes the limit.
PageSpeed Insights gives lab data from Lighthouse and field data from the Chrome User Experience Report, for any URL.
Free AI visibility checkers and what each one runs
This is the group most readers want. It is also the group where "free" hides the most. The question to ask is what the tool actually runs.
| Tool | What it runs | Free limit |
|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. Prompts come from its Brand Radar database, not yours. | No signup. Limited preview: top 5 topics, cited domains and cited pages. |
| Semrush | ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode for a domain. | Three uses per day, no account. |
| Frase | Three AI-search-style phrases for your domain. | ChatGPT result needs no signup. An email unlocks Perplexity and Gemini. |
| HubSpot AI Search Grader | Asks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini how they describe you, from training data. | Free, one time. A short form unlocks full results. |
| Mangools | Smaller models, with brand prompts generated for you. | Three models free. Three more need a free login. |
| Robot-Speed | Perplexity, ChatGPT with web search and AI Overviews, for a keyword you give. | 3 audits per hour per IP. Results cached 24 hours. |
| AI SEO Tracker (ours) | ChatGPT, for one buyer question and a brand name you give. | 2 checks a day, no account. |
Three details no ranking page states.
Mangools' own FAQ lists the models in its free tier: ChatGPT on GPT-5 Nano, Mistral Small 3.2 24B and Llama 3.3 70B Instruct. DeepSeek V3, Claude Haiku 4.5 and Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite need a login. Two of the three are small models, and none is the ChatGPT app a buyer opens.
HubSpot's grader asks models what they say about you "based on their training data". That tests brand recognition. It does not test whether a live answer names you.
Ahrefs' free report shows only the top 5 of each section. It is a snapshot. History, competitor comparison and custom prompts sit in paid Brand Radar.
Two vendors run free trials of their trackers. HubSpot AEO offers a 28-day trial with 25 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, with no card. Mangools' AI Search Watcher says "Get started FREE" and "No credit card required". Its page does not state the free limits, so check them before you plan around it.
Does AI name you?
See if AI mentions your brand. Then get the pages to fix.
Why one free check is one sample
A free checker runs once. AI answers do not repeat.
SparkToro and Gumshoe published research in January 2026. 600 volunteers ran 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI, 2,961 runs in all. For ChatGPT and Google's AI, there is a less than 1 in 100 chance of getting the same list of brands in any two responses. The author's conclusion: track a visibility percentage across many prompts, each run several times.
The vendors say the same. Frase calls its result a snapshot because engines rewrite answers constantly. Mangools' Watcher runs each prompt several times because results are not consistent. Robot-Speed caches a result for 24 hours, so a second run on the same day is not a second sample.
The same brand also sits at a different rank in each engine. This is the public AI SEO Tracker leaderboard for "best SEO tool", scanned on 24 September 2026 across five engines. Rank in each answer:
| Product | ChatGPT | Perplexity | Gemini | AI Overviews | Copilot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs | 1st | 2nd | 6th | 2nd | 2nd |
| Semrush | 2nd | 1st | 5th | 1st | 1st |
| Google Search Console | 3rd | not named | 7th | 7th | 11th |
| Screaming Frog | 4th | not named | not named | 4th | 6th |
The question was "best SEO tool", not "free AI SEO audit tool". It is one question, not a verdict on the tools in this post. Within it, Ahrefs is 1st in ChatGPT and 6th in Gemini. Google Search Console is named by four of five engines. Screaming Frog, which has the free 500-URL tier, is 4th in ChatGPT and AI Overviews. None of SEOmator, WordLift, RankZero, Frase or HubSpot's grader appears among the 14 products. A checker that reads one engine shows you one column of this table. Browse more in the leaderboard.
What to do with a free score:
- Run it on different days and keep each result.
- Record the share of prompts that name you, not one rank.
- Compare engines, not just the average.
When free is not enough
If you need the same prompts run on five engines, every day for a week, a free checker cannot do it. AI SEO Tracker does that job, and it is not free.
The $49 report is one time:
- Up to 50 prompts written from your site. You confirm them.
- Daily scans for 7 days on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews, for one brand.
- Mentions, citations, position in the answer, competitor gaps and the sources each engine cited.
- A prioritized action plan.
- Read, print and export access after day 7.
There is no free scan and no free trial. You can type a domain, review the suggested prompts in a free account, and browse public rankings. It does not scan Google AI Mode, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek or Meta AI. Ahrefs and Semrush free checkers include AI Mode. HubSpot offers a free 25-prompt trial. Those are fair reasons to use them first.
Weekly tracking is separate: Basic $79/mo, Pro $199/mo. MCP (OAuth, no API keys) is for agents that need to read the same project. Page Inspector is on the higher plan.
It is not a 172-rule technical crawler. For that, use SEOmator or Screaming Frog. For the mention gap, see how to measure AI brand visibility, and for the paid tool field, best AI SEO tools.
A free-first order to run them
- Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, if you own the site. Fix indexing first.
- Your robots.txt by hand. Allow OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot unless you have a reason not to.
- SEOmator or WordLift on the homepage and one template page.
- Ahrefs, Semrush or Frase for a first look at whether AI names you. Save the result with the date.
- The $49 scan if you need your own prompts, sources and a week of data. Subscribe only if you will re-run every week.
That order matches how you rank in ChatGPT: the model has to reach you, then choose you.
FAQ
What is the best free AI SEO audit tool?
It depends on the job. For crawler access, SEOmator or WordLift. For first-party data, Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. For a first look at AI mentions, Ahrefs, Semrush or Frase. No single free tool covers all three.
Is there a free way to check if ChatGPT mentions my brand?
Yes. Ahrefs' free checker covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews with no signup. Semrush allows three uses per day, and Frase gives a ChatGPT result free. All three are one-time snapshots on their own prompts.
Do I need an llms.txt file to pass an AI SEO audit?
Some tools score it. Google says you do not need AI text files or special markup to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. What does matter for ChatGPT and Perplexity search is that you do not block OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot in robots.txt.
Does Search Console show AI Overviews traffic?
Yes, but not separately. Google counts pages shown in AI features inside the Web search type of the Performance report.
Is there a free scan on aiseotracker.com?
No full scan. The free AI Visibility Checker asks ChatGPT one question and shows if it names your brand. You can also type a domain, review the suggested prompts in a free account, and browse public rankings. The audit is $49. About and pricing pages both say there is no free trial.
How often should I re-audit?
Technical: after deploys, and monthly. Visibility: weekly if the category moves. The $49 product is a one-week snapshot you keep. Ongoing tracking starts at $79/mo.
