Key takeaways
- Free GEO tools fall into four jobs: visibility checkers (does AI know my brand?), technical audits (can AI read my site?), fan-out and keyword tools (what does AI actually search for?), and crawler inspectors (who is visiting and who is blocked?).
- You can get a useful first read of your AI visibility in an afternoon without paying anything or entering a card.
- Free tools give you snapshots. They tell you whether you have a problem, not whether your fixes worked. Re-measurement is where paid tracking starts to earn its keep.
- Crawlability is the cheapest win. If a major AI crawler is large in the market but near zero in your logs, you are probably blocked.
- Product pages, landing pages and docs get the most ChatGPT citations, so audit those first.
What counts as a GEO tool, and what free actually gets you
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of getting your brand cited and recommended inside AI answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI surfaces. A GEO tool measures how those engines answer questions, diagnoses why you win or lose, and ideally helps you fix it.
Free tools do the first two jobs partially. They run a scan, hand you a grade or a list of issues, and stop there. That is genuinely useful. I would run two or three of them before spending anything on a platform, mostly because the results tell you which kind of problem you have. A brand that AI has never heard of needs different work than a brand that AI knows but cannot fetch pages from.
It helps to sort what you are shopping for. The research I pulled for this guide splits the market into checkers (one-off grades), trackers (ongoing monitoring of prompts) and full platforms (monitoring plus execution). This guide is about the first bucket, with a few notes on where the free versions of the second bucket fit.
A caveat on sources: several of the roundups I read are published by vendors who rank themselves first, Citedintel and Goodie included. They are useful for finding tools, less so for deciding who is best. I have not verified current free-tier limits for every tool below, so check each vendor's page before you build a process around it.
The four jobs free GEO tools do
| Job | Question it answers | Typical free tools |
|---|---|---|
| Visibility check | Does AI mention or cite my brand today? | HubSpot AEO Grader, Frase AI Visibility Checker, Prismic free GEO audit |
| Technical audit | Can AI systems read and understand my pages? | Citedintel free checker, Geoptie GEO Audit, Otterly GEO Audit |
| Fan-out and keyword research | What searches and prompts sit behind the answers? | Otterly Query Fan-Out and AI Keyword Research, Geoptie Keyword Finder |
| Crawler inspection | Which AI bots can reach my site, and which are blocked? | Otterly AI Crawler Simulation, bot-access checks, your own server logs |
Free AI visibility checkers
These answer the blunt first question: does AI know you exist?
HubSpot AEO Grader
HubSpot's grader is the one most marketers have already heard of. It is free, needs no signup, and looks at how your brand shows up across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. It is a one-time benchmark, not a monitor. Treat it as a screenshot you can show a boss. If you live in HubSpot already, the HubSpot SEO features sit nearby.
Frase AI Visibility Checker and GEO Score
Frase offers two free pieces: an AI Visibility Checker that shows who AI cites for your domain, and a GEO Score that grades a single page for citability. Neither needs a card, per Frase's own write-up. The page-level score is handy when you want to compare a strong product page against a weak one.
Prismic's free GEO audit
Prismic's tool reports where you appear in AI answers and which content is missing. Prismic is a headless CMS, so this is a content-gap view more than a technical one.
Free scans from Promptwatch
Promptwatch has a free AI Visibility Report that scans how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity talk about your brand, with no login. It also has an Agentic Readiness Check that shows which AI crawlers can read your site and which agent standards you support, such as llms.txt. If you decide later that you need ongoing tracking, the same company sells the paid platform.
Free technical GEO audits
Technical audits catch the boring blockers: robots rules, rendering problems, missing structured data, thin pages. Boring, but fixing them is often faster than writing anything new.
Citedintel free checker
Citedintel's free checker runs 30+ technical GEO checks and gives a 0-100 score with specific fixes in about a minute, no signup. The company also sells a platform, so expect an upsell path. The free scan itself is quick enough to be worth the click.
Geoptie free tools
Geoptie bundles the widest free set I found: a GEO Audit, Content Checker, Keyword Finder, Rank Tracker (with separate trackers for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude), a GEO readiness checklist, a cannibalization checker and a backlink finder, all available without a subscription according to Geoptie's own review.
Otterly's free GEO toolkit
Otterly.AI offers a free GEO Audit, AI Crawler Simulation, AI Keyword Research and Query Fan-Out tools that anyone can use without a contract. Paid monitoring starts around $29 a month according to Goodie's comparison, which makes it one of the cheaper steps up from free.
Otterly.AI
Traditional audit tools still count
Do not skip the classic crawlers. A site that is slow, broken or half-rendered is a bad candidate for AI citation too. Screaming Frog has a free tier for small crawls, and Google's free tools show you what Google itself sees.
Bing Webmaster Tools matters more than people assume, since several AI products lean on Bing-style indexes. Verify both and compare what pages are indexed.
Query fan-out and prompt research tools
AI engines do not run your prompt as one search. They split it into several web searches, a behavior called query fan-out. Knowing those sub-queries tells you which pages you need.
Promptwatch's data shows how much this varies. On August 8, 2026, ChatGPT started using the site: operator at scale, jumping from about 0.4% to about 17% of fan-out queries overnight, with searches per response nearly doubling. The details are in Promptwatch's ChatGPT site: operator report. If your fan-out assumptions are from early 2026, they are stale.
Free options for this job:
- Otterly's Query Fan-Out tool
- Promptwatch's free ChatGPT Query Fan-Out Generator
- Promptwatch's GEO Inspector Chrome extension, which shows fan-outs and fetched versus cited sources for ChatGPT and runs locally
- Classic question tools such as AnswerThePublic and AlsoAsked for the human-phrasing side
For wider reading on how fan-outs behave, see how to use ChatGPT query fanouts in 2026.
Crawler inspectors: can AI actually reach you?
This is the category marketing teams skip, and I think it is the highest-return one.
Promptwatch's crawler data (June 8 to September 6, 2026, IP-verified requests only) shows OpenAI at 79.8% of verified AI crawler requests in the week of August 31 to September 6, down from 94.8% in the week of June 8 to 14. The mix is shifting toward other providers. The full chart is in Promptwatch's AI crawler traffic report.
Their advice is practical and worth copying:
- Check robots.txt, CDN and WAF rules for every provider, not just Google.
- Compare your own server logs with the market mix. If a provider is big in the chart but near zero in your logs, you are probably blocked or unreachable.
- Separate training crawlers from answer-time fetchers. They are different bots and need different decisions.
Also worth knowing: Meta-WebIndexer grew from about 2% to nearly 38% of tracked crawler requests between mid-July and August 9, 2026, per Promptwatch's Meta-WebIndexer data. A robots.txt written in 2024 probably does not mention it.
Free tools for this job
- Otterly's AI Crawler Simulation
- Promptwatch's AI Crawler URL Inspector, Robots.txt Generator for AI and its AI Bots and Web Crawlers Directory (440+ bots, at promptwatch.com/bots)
- Your CDN's raw logs, if you can get at them
For log-level visibility without paying a platform, Siteline AI and Scriptbee both focus on AI agent traffic. Check their free tiers directly.
What to audit first, based on what AI cites
A free audit will hand you 30 issues. You will not fix 30 issues. Start where citations actually land.
Promptwatch's data for September 28 to October 4, 2026 shows product pages as 22.4% of ChatGPT citations and landing pages as 16.8%, so roughly 39% of citations go to pages describing what a company sells. Listicles are 13.6%, how-tos 8.7% and documentation 7.5%. For commercial prompts, product and landing pages plus listicles and comparisons make up almost 70%. See the full ChatGPT citation share by content type report.
So when a checker returns a long list, sort it like this:
- Fix anything blocking crawl access on product, landing and docs pages.
- Complete the specs, prices and positioning on product pages.
- Keep documentation public and easy to crawl.
- Add an FAQ page.
- Only then worry about blog polish.
One more data point that changes priorities: sites with domain rank 46-75 earned almost half of ChatGPT citations in August 2026, while DR 91-100 fell to about 3% (domain rank report). You do not need a giant domain to get cited.
Comparison of free GEO tools
| Tool | Best free use | Signup needed | Catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot AEO Grader | One-time brand benchmark across 3 engines | No | Single snapshot, ongoing version is paid |
| Frase AI Visibility Checker and GEO Score | Domain citations plus page-level citability | No card | Content-focused, not a crawler check |
| Citedintel free checker | 30+ technical checks with a score | No | Vendor upsell to its platform |
| Geoptie free tools | Audit, keyword and tracker bundle | No subscription | Verify current limits |
| Otterly free toolkit | Audit, fan-out, crawler simulation | No contract | Ongoing tracking is paid |
| Prismic free GEO audit | Content gap view | Check page | CMS vendor, light on technical depth |
| Promptwatch free tools | Visibility report, readiness check, fan-out generator, crawler inspector | Varies by tool | Paid platform is the upsell |
| Search Console and Bing Webmaster | Indexing and search baselines | Account verification | No AI citation data |
A one-afternoon audit routine
Here is how I would spend about three hours.
- Run two visibility checkers (HubSpot and one other) and screenshot the results. Different tools give different grades, and that disagreement is information.
- Run one technical audit (Citedintel or Geoptie) on your homepage and your top product page.
- Open robots.txt and check it against a current AI bot list. Look for blanket disallows left from a security review.
- Run a crawler simulation on three URLs: a product page, a docs page and a blog post.
- Write down 10 prompts a buyer would ask. Run them in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini by hand. Note who gets cited. Use the fan-out tools to see what searches sit behind them.
- Pull the pages that rank in Google Search Console but never appear as citations. Those are your best rewrite candidates.
- Build a short fix list of five items, owner and date on each.
That is it. Resist the urge to schedule a quarter of work off a free scan.
Where free tools stop
Free tools have three limits you will hit quickly.
First, they are snapshots. AI answers move. Promptwatch's data shows reddit.com's share of ChatGPT citations falling from about 4% to 0.5% on August 14, 2026 (report), and a one-off grade would never have told you why your numbers changed. If you rely on a channel like that, you need history.
Second, they cannot verify fixes. You publish a rewrite, and then what? Free checkers rarely re-run on a schedule or show whether the page got crawled and cited afterward.
Third, they do not connect AI activity to traffic and conversions. Seeing a mention is not the same as seeing a visitor.
When those limits start to hurt, move to a tracker or platform. Budget options start around $29 to $95 a month (Otterly, Peec AI), while platforms that also act on the data cost more. Promptwatch sits in the second group: real-UI tracking, IP-verified crawler logs, visitor analytics and a Content Agent that publishes to your CMS, with paid plans starting at $95 a month and a free tier limited to 10 prompts on ChatGPT. Confirm current pricing at promptwatch.com/pricing.
If you want to compare more options before buying, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com lists a wide range, and ai-rank-tools.com focuses on trackers.
Questions teams ask
Are free GEO tools accurate?
Accurate enough for triage, not for reporting. Scores differ between tools because each samples different prompts and weighs different signals. Run two and look for overlap.
Do I need all of these?
No. One visibility checker, one technical audit, one crawler check and your own manual prompt test cover most of the value.
Is llms.txt worth doing?
It is cheap, so generating one is fine, but do not expect it to move citations on its own. Promptwatch's data found markdown files are only 0.05% of AI search citations (report). Crawl access and strong product pages matter more.
How often should I re-run these?
Monthly is enough for most teams, and after any major site change or robots.txt edit. If you want it weekly or daily, that is the point to pay for monitoring.
Bottom line
Start with crawl access, because nothing else matters if the bots cannot get in. Then audit the product, landing and docs pages that AI cites most. Use free tools to find the problem, and only pay for a platform when you need history, verification and traffic attribution.