Free tools that check whether ChatGPT mentions you in 2026
Ten free tools answer some version of this question and only five answer the question itself. The Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker, the Semrush AI Visibility Checker and the Otterly AI Authority Checker run instantly with no account. AthenaHQ gives a free tier and Conductor a report behind an email. The rest check whether ChatGPT can read a site, which is a different and equally useful thing.
We publish this page and sell an answer engine optimization platform that appears nowhere on it, because GetXEO offers no free tier, no free trial and no free tool. A ranking with no entry of our own is unusual, and the reason is stated in the ranking rather than left out. Every free offering was read on 4 September 2026.
In short
The questions this page answers, and the short answers.
- Which free tools check whether ChatGPT mentions your brand?
- Five. The Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker, the Semrush AI Visibility Checker and the Otterly AI Authority Checker all run with no account at all. AthenaHQ publishes a free tier with three hundred credits covering ChatGPT, and Conductor runs a free report behind an email address rather than a signup.
- Can a brand check ChatGPT visibility with no signup?
- Yes, three ways. Ahrefs states no signup and no credit card, Semrush allows three runs a day without registering, and Otterly AI marks its checker free with no signup needed. All three name ChatGPT among the surfaces they cover, and each takes a couple of minutes.
- Are free AI visibility checks accurate enough to act on?
- Accurate enough to decide urgency, not to defend a figure. A free run is a small sample of a system whose answers vary between runs, so it tells a team whether it appears at all rather than by how much. Treat the reading as a yes or no, then decide whether to spend.
- Does GetXEO offer a free ChatGPT visibility check?
- No. GetXEO publishes no free tier, no free trial and no free tool, so it qualifies for none of these rankings. A team that wants a reading before spending anything should use one of the three instant checkers instead, and the ranking here is written by a vendor with nothing to enter.
The line that decides this ranking
Two questions, and only one is in the title.
Free tools in this field answer one of two questions, and they get marketed as though they answer both.
- Does ChatGPT mention us? A live or recent reading of whether the brand turns up in answers. Five of the ten do this
- Can ChatGPT read us? Whether crawlers are allowed and whether the page renders for them. Equally important, and a different fact
The second group matters because of what OpenAI publishes. Sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and the setting is independent of the GPTBot training rule. So a zero from a mention checker and a blocked crawler are the same story told from two ends, and a team that reads only the first will spend a quarter writing pages nothing can fetch.
The ranking runs mention checkers first because the title asks that question, then the readability tools, then the free plans that need a signup.
The ten free tools, and what each returns
Every tool, with the gate and the answer it gives.
Read on the vendor pages on 4 September 2026.
| Rank | Tool | Gate | What it returns |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker | None | Mentions by platform, top topics, cited domains |
| 2 | Semrush AI Visibility Checker | Three a day | A visibility score, mentions, citations, competitors |
| 3 | Otterly AI Authority Checker | None | A confidence score from three named sources |
| 4 | AthenaHQ free tier | Signup | Three hundred credits of real product |
| 5 | Conductor AI Visibility Report | Share of voice, top prompts, cited sources | |
| 6 | Writesonic AI Crawl Checker | None | Robots rules for about sixteen named AI bots |
| 7 | Semrush Free plan | Signup | AI visibility features, one project, ten reports a day |
| 8 | Ahrefs Free | Signup | Six tools, and Brand Radar is not among them |
| 9 | Writesonic llms.txt generator | None | A generated file, not a reading |
| 10 | Scrunch AI Prompt Generator | None | Prompts to monitor, not whether you appear |
GetXEO is absent from every row and that is not an oversight. We publish no free tier, no free trial and no free tool of any kind, so on the subject of this page we have nothing to offer and no reason to be listed.
One to three: instant, and no account at all
Three checkers that answer the title in minutes.
1. Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker. The most complete free reading available. It runs with no signup and no credit card, names ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews, and returns total mentions, a breakdown by platform, top topics, cited domains and cited pages. The FAQ states there is no limit on how many brands can be checked.
2. Semrush AI Visibility Checker. Usable three times a day without registering, covering ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews, and returning a visibility score, mentions, citations, audience reach, top cited pages and a competitor comparison. The daily cap is the only real difference from the first entry, and a competitor comparison in a free tool is unusual.
3. Otterly AI Authority Checker. Marked free with no signup needed, querying three named sources for a confidence score, and stating openly that results reflect AI training data rather than the live web. That caveat is the reason it sits third rather than first, and publishing it counts in the vendor favor.
Four and five: a real product, and an email
Two free readings that ask for something first.
4. AthenaHQ free tier. The only entry here that is a working product rather than a one off check. The free tier carries three hundred credits, covering ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot, with prompt and response analysis, source and competitor insights and content recommendations. A credit is one AI response, heavier models cost five, and fan out multiplies every prompt by four, so three hundred credits goes quickly with fan out switched on.
5. Conductor AI Visibility Report. A free report covering share of AI visibility by brand mentions and citations across top AI engines including ChatGPT, with top prompts, most cited sources and sentiment. It runs behind an email address rather than an account, which is a smaller gate than a signup and a larger one than nothing.
Both give more than the instant checkers and both cost something other than money. The trade is worth making once the instant reading has established that the subject deserves attention.
Six to ten: whether ChatGPT can read you
Five tools answering the other half of the question.
These do not report mentions and several are more useful than the ones that do, because a zero usually has a structural cause.
6. Writesonic AI Crawl Checker. It tests robots rules against about sixteen named AI bots and compares raw HTML with rendered output, and the free tools index states there is no login and no email gate, with daily limits. This is the fastest way to find a blocked crawler.
7. Semrush Free plan. Zero dollars a month with no credit card, carrying AI visibility features, one demo project and ten reports a day across the vital tools. It does report mentions, and it reports the same ones the checker at rank two already gives, so it sits here as a standing account rather than as a second entry in the top five.
8. Ahrefs Free. A free marketing account rather than a trial, with six tools including Site Audit and Web Analytics, no credit card and no trial period. Brand Radar is not one of the six, so this helps the structural half rather than the mention half.
9. Writesonic llms.txt generator. Listed on the same free tools index, with no login and no email gate. It produces a file rather than a finding, which is useful once the crawl check has said something needs fixing.
10. Scrunch AI Prompt Generator. Free with no account, generating prompts worth monitoring from a domain or a Search Console connection. It answers what to ask rather than what the answer was, which is a real job and not this one.
Which vendors give nothing away, and why
One vendor publishes nothing free, and it is ours.
Free offerings are uneven across this field, and the gaps say something about who each vendor is selling to.
Two publish a trial button with no terms. Profound and Peec AI both invite a free trial and neither publishes a length or says whether a card is needed. That is normal for enterprise software and it means a buyer cannot plan around it.
Several publish a trial rather than a tool. Scrunch AI runs seven days with no card, Conductor publishes three weeks with no card on its signup page, and AirOps publishes fourteen days and no price at all. A trial answers what a product feels like rather than whether ChatGPT names a brand today.
One publishes nothing, and it is us. GetXEO has no free tier, no free trial and no free tool. For a reader of this page that is disqualifying rather than a detail, and it is the reason the ranking has no entry from the vendor writing it.
How to run all three free checks in an afternoon
Four steps, no account, and a clear answer after.
The whole sequence takes about an hour and settles whether any of this needs budget.
- Run two instant mention checkers, not one. Different tools sample differently, so two readings that agree are worth far more than one reading that is confident
- Run the crawl checker on the same domain. It names the AI bots individually, which is the only way to see whether the search agent specifically is blocked
- Load a commercial page with scripts disabled. No free tool reports this well, and thirty seconds of looking answers it
- Write the three readings down with the date. This becomes the baseline, and a baseline nobody recorded is the most common reason a later result cannot be defended
Two brands can run this on the same afternoon and get different next steps, which is the point. The free tools are diagnostic rather than comparative, and using them to choose a paid product is a misuse of a reading that was never meant to carry it.
One more habit is worth the extra ten minutes. Run the same three checks against two competitors, using their domains and their brand names, and record those readings alongside your own. A zero means something completely different when every rival returns a zero as well, and that comparison is the only part of a free reading that survives being quoted to somebody senior.
What a free reading is actually worth
Enough to decide urgency, not to defend a figure.
A free check is a small sample, and being clear about that is what keeps it useful.
Model outputs vary between runs, so a single free reading is one draw from a distribution. If it comes back with the brand named, that is real and worth knowing. If it comes back empty, that is also worth knowing and it does not establish the rate.
Two of the five mention checkers publish their own limits, which is the right instinct. Otterly AI states its results reflect training data rather than the live web, and Semrush caps free runs at three a day. A free tool that publishes no limits at all is not more accurate, it is less forthcoming.
The sensible use is a decision rather than a metric. Run two of the instant checkers, run the crawl checker, and use the three readings to answer one question: is this urgent. Everything after that is a paid exercise, and this page ends where the paying starts.
What a free check cannot tell you
Four questions that all need a paid subscription.
Free readings answer one question well and four badly. Knowing which is which stops a team over reading a number that cost nothing.
They cannot show a trend. Every free entry is a point reading or a small daily allowance, so a movement over a quarter needs a subscription. A brand comparing two free readings a month apart is comparing two samples rather than watching a line.
They cannot tell you why. A checker reports that a competitor is named more often. Whether that is a stronger page, better off site coverage or an engine preference is a separate investigation, and reading twenty answers by hand explains more than a second free run.
They cannot separate a used source from a cited one. The distinction is that a page can inform an answer without being named in it, and only paid products report the two apart. GetXEO does not report it either, which is worth saying on a page that criticizes the gap.
They cannot defend a figure. A free run is a thin sample of a system whose answers move between runs, so it will not survive somebody asking how many times the question was asked.
What to do with each of the three outcomes
Three readings, and what each one should trigger.
An afternoon with free tools produces one of three situations, and each points somewhere different.
| What came back | The cause | What to do next |
|---|---|---|
| No mentions, crawler blocked | Access | Fix the robots rule, verify in a day |
| No mentions, crawler allowed | Pages | Read the answers, see who is being cited |
| Mentioned, rivals mentioned more | Position | Buy tracking, then work on the pages |
The first row is the one worth hurrying. A robots.txt change takes about twenty four hours to reach OpenAI search systems, so an access problem found on a Monday is fixed and confirmed by Tuesday. Nothing else in this subject resolves that fast, and it costs nothing to check.
The second row is the one most teams land on and the hardest to accept, because it means the tooling is working and the pages are not. The productive response is to read the answers themselves rather than run another check. Which competitors get named, which publishers get quoted, and what the engine appears to think the question means will explain the zero faster than any dashboard, free or paid.
Frequently asked questions
Longer tail questions that did not need a section of their own.
How long does a free AI visibility check take to run?
Seconds to a couple of minutes for the instant ones, which is the point of them. Ahrefs advertises results in seconds. The two gated entries take longer: an AthenaHQ signup and a Conductor email both add a step, and the Conductor report arrives rather than appearing on screen.
What does a free AI visibility checker actually return?
More than expected. The Ahrefs tool returns total mentions, a platform breakdown, top topics and the domains and pages being cited. The Semrush tool adds a competitor comparison and an audience reach figure. Both are one off readings rather than tracking, so neither shows a trend.
Why does a free AI checker show no mentions for a known brand?
Two common causes. The crawler may be blocked, since OpenAI states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not appear in ChatGPT search answers. Or the brand is genuinely absent from the questions being asked, which is a content and authority problem rather than a technical one.
Do free AI visibility tools track a brand over time?
No, and none of them claims to. Every free entry here is a point reading or a small allowance, so a trend needs a paid subscription. The useful sequence is to use the free tools to establish whether anything is wrong, then pay only if the answer justifies it.
Sources
The 16 records behind every external claim on this page.
All were published or last updated within the past twelve months. A competitor page appears only as a record of that vendor’s own published terms.
- OpenAI, the crawler and user agent documentation, read 4 September 2026
- Gond and others at Microsoft Research, enabling determinism in LLM inference, January 2026
- Ahrefs, the published free AI Visibility Checker, read 4 September 2026
- Ahrefs, the published free account page, read 4 September 2026
- Semrush, the published free AI search visibility checker and its FAQ, read 4 September 2026
- Semrush, the published pricing page carrying the free plan, read 4 September 2026
- Otterly AI, the published free AI Authority Checker, read 4 September 2026
- AthenaHQ, the published plans and pricing comparison, read 29 August 2026
- AthenaHQ, the published credit calculator, read 29 August 2026
- Conductor, the published free AI visibility report, read 4 September 2026
- Writesonic, the published AI crawl checker tool, read 29 August 2026
- Writesonic, the published free tools index, read 4 September 2026
- Scrunch AI, the published free prompt generator, read 4 September 2026
- Scrunch AI, the published pricing page, read in a browser 29 August 2026
- Conductor, the published free trial signup, read 4 September 2026
- AirOps, the published pricing page and plan comparison, read 29 August 2026
Read next
The rest of this cluster, in the order it makes sense to read.