Marketers and site owners doing AI search work with no budget
Best free AI SEO tools
Five genuinely free tools for AI search work, ranked on whether the free tier is permanent, what it costs nothing to see, and what the free limits actually are.
Karl-Gustav Kallasmaa, Founder & CEOLast updated How this list was made
A tool qualified for this list only if its own documentation states that a permanently free tier exists, rather than a time-limited trial or a free tier that requires a paid plan alongside it. Each vendor's own page was fetched on 3 September 2026 and read for four things: whether the free tier is permanent, whether it produces a signal specific to AI assistants rather than to classic search, what the stated limits of the free tier are, and whether it shows AI crawler activity. Products whose free access is a trial were excluded. Attensira is not on this list, because Attensira has no free tier. Where a page does not state a limit, the cell says so rather than guessing.
Attensira is not on this list. On the question this page answers, we are not one of the answers.
The criteria
Declared before the ranking, with how each one was measured and who wins it.
| Criterion | How it was measured | Best on this |
|---|---|---|
| Free permanently, not for fourteen daysA trial teaches you what a product looks like and then takes it away, which is worse than useless for a monitoring job that only produces value as a time series. | Read from the vendor's own page: whether it describes the tier as a free service or free version with no stated expiry, rather than a trial with a duration. | Google Search Console |
| Tells you something about AI assistants specificallyMost free SEO tools report classic search behaviour, which is useful but is not evidence about how an AI assistant answers a question, and confusing the two is the most common mistake in early AI search work. | Read from the vendor's own page: whether the free tier reports on AI assistant answers, AI crawler traffic, or another signal that would not exist without AI systems. | Athena Essential |
| Limits of the free tier, statedA free tier whose ceiling is undocumented is a tier you discover the edge of in the middle of a job, and the tools worth building a routine around are the ones that tell you the ceiling first. | Read from the vendor's own page: whether the free tier's caps are published as numbers, and how restrictive they are for a site of a few hundred pages. | Google Search Console |
| Shows which AI crawlers fetched your pagesWhether GPTBot and its equivalents can reach a page at all is the precondition for everything else in AI search, and it is the one thing you can check for free and fix the same afternoon. | Read from the vendor's own documentation: whether the free tier reports which AI services requested content from the site. | Cloudflare AI Crawl Control |
The tools
- 1
Google Search Console
Google's own free service for monitoring how a site appears in Google Search, covering indexing, search performance by query and page, structured data errors and Core Web Vitals. It is the baseline dataset almost every other tool either imports or approximates.
- Best for:
- Anyone doing AI search work at all, because AI Overviews and AI Mode sit inside Google surfaces and indexing problems show up here first.
- Where it falls short:
- It reports Google Search behaviour, not AI assistant answers, and it will not tell you how ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity describe your brand. Treating its numbers as AI visibility data is the most common category error in this work.
- Free permanently, not for fourteen days: Free service, no expiry stated source
- Tells you something about AI assistants specifically: Google Search reporting; no assistant-answer data source
- Limits of the free tier, stated: No usage cap stated for the free service source
- Shows which AI crawlers fetched your pages: Reports Google crawling and indexing, not AI assistant crawlers source
Google Search Console · checked on
- 2
Cloudflare AI Crawl Control
A Cloudflare feature for monitoring and controlling how AI services access a site, showing which AI services requested content and letting the site owner act on it. Cloudflare's documentation states it is available on all plans, which includes the free one.
- Best for:
- Any site already behind Cloudflare, where turning it on is the fastest free way to find out whether AI crawlers reach your pages and how often.
- Where it falls short:
- It requires the site to be on Cloudflare, so it is not available to everyone, and it reports requests made to your origin rather than what any assistant then said about you.
- Free permanently, not for fourteen days: Available on all plans, including free source
- Tells you something about AI assistants specifically: Reports which AI services accessed the site source
- Limits of the free tier, stated: No separate free-tier cap stated; requires the site to be on Cloudflare source
- Shows which AI crawlers fetched your pages: Shows which AI services access your content source
Cloudflare AI Crawl Control · checked on
- 3
Athena Essential
The free tier of a paid AI visibility product, giving an included credit allocation where one credit buys one AI response, across the five assistants its pricing page names against the Essential plan. It is the only entry here whose free tier reports what assistants actually said.
- Best for:
- A team that wants real answer data about its own brand before spending anything, and can work within a fixed number of responses rather than continuous monitoring.
- Where it falls short:
- The allocation is small and consumed by use, so it is a sample rather than a monitor; it is also the free tier of a commercial product, which means the ceiling exists to sell the next tier.
- Free permanently, not for fourteen days: Essential tier listed as free with an included credit source
- Tells you something about AI assistants specifically: AI assistant answers across five named systems on the free tier — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot source
- Limits of the free tier, stated: 300 credits, where one credit is one AI response source
- Shows which AI crawlers fetched your pages: Not stated source
Athena Essential · checked on
- 4
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
A free tier from a paid SEO suite giving site audit, web analytics and a restricted view of Site Explorer for websites you have verified ownership of. The audit is the part that matters for AI search work, because it finds the technical problems that stop any crawler.
- Best for:
- A site owner who wants a technical audit and a backlink picture without a subscription, and is willing to verify domain ownership to get it.
- Where it falls short:
- It only works on sites you can verify, the free data views are capped, and nothing in the free tier reports on AI assistant answers, so it complements AI visibility work rather than performing it.
- Free permanently, not for fourteen days: Free for verified websites, no expiry stated source
- Tells you something about AI assistants specifically: Technical and backlink data; no assistant-answer reporting source
- Limits of the free tier, stated: 5,000 crawl credits per project per month; 1,000 rows per view source
- Shows which AI crawlers fetched your pages: Not stated source
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools · checked on
- 5
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
A desktop crawler whose free version crawls up to 500 URLs and finds broken links, redirects, title and meta problems and sitemap issues, with JavaScript rendering included. The paid licence removes the crawl limit.
- Best for:
- Auditing a small site end to end before worrying about AI answers at all, since a page an assistant cannot fetch cannot be cited by one.
- Where it falls short:
- The free version stops at 500 URLs, which excludes most catalogues and many content sites, and it tells you nothing about AI assistants — it is a crawler, and the AI-specific reading is yours to do.
- Free permanently, not for fourteen days: Free version with no expiry; licence is £199 per year source
- Tells you something about AI assistants specifically: Site crawl data only; no AI-specific reporting source
- Limits of the free tier, stated: Crawl limit of 500 URLs on the free version source
- Shows which AI crawlers fetched your pages: Crawls as its own agent; does not report other crawlers' visits source
Screaming Frog SEO Spider · checked on
What are the best free tools for AI search work?
Google Search Console, because it is genuinely free with no stated cap and every other diagnosis starts from indexing. Cloudflare AI Crawl Control, if your site is behind Cloudflare, because it is the only free way to see which AI services actually fetched your pages. Athena's free Essential tier, because it is the only free tier here that reports what assistants said rather than what crawlers did. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and the free Screaming Frog SEO Spider round out the technical half.
Attensira is not on this list. We have no free tier and no free trial, so on the question this page asks, we are not an answer.
Why "free AI SEO tool" is two different requests
Almost everyone searching this phrase wants one of two things, and the tools that serve them barely overlap.
The first request is diagnostic: can AI systems reach and read my site. This is a technical question with free answers. Whether GPTBot is disallowed in robots.txt, whether your key pages return a status code a crawler can use, whether content renders without JavaScript, whether a sitemap exists and is current. Every one of those is checkable at no cost, and getting them wrong makes everything downstream impossible. This is where the free tools are genuinely as good as the paid ones.
The second request is observational: what do assistants say about me. This is not a technical question and it does not have a good free answer, because producing one means paying for model calls, repeatedly, over time. A free tier can give you a sample. It cannot give you a trend, because a trend costs money every day it continues. Any product offering unlimited free AI answer monitoring is either sampling far less than it implies or funding it from somewhere you should ask about.
Being clear about which request you are making saves a month. If you have never checked whether AI crawlers can reach your site, do that first and spend nothing.
Reading the ranking
Google Search Console wins twice, on permanence and on stated limits, and it wins them almost by default: it is a free service from Google with no usage cap attached, covering indexing, search performance by query and page, structured data errors and Core Web Vitals. For AI search work it matters more than its critics allow, because AI Overviews and AI Mode live inside Google surfaces, so an indexing problem is an AI visibility problem. It also loses two criteria outright. It reports Google Search behaviour, not assistant answers, and reading its numbers as AI visibility data is the most common category error in this work.
Cloudflare AI Crawl Control wins AI crawler visibility. Cloudflare's own documentation says it is available on all plans and that it lets you see which AI services access your content. For a site already on Cloudflare, that is the single highest-value free thing available in this category: an actual list of which AI services requested your pages and how often, rather than an inference from a dashboard. The obvious limitation is that it requires the site to be on Cloudflare, and it reports requests to your origin rather than what any assistant later said.
Athena's Essential tier wins the AI-specific signal, because it is the only free tier here that reports assistant answers at all. The unit is legible — one credit is one AI response — and the free allocation is 300 of them across the five assistants the pricing page names against the Essential plan: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot. The wider ten-model list on that page is a Starter-plan line, not a free-tier one. Treat it as a sample, not a monitor: 300 responses is a snapshot of a prompt set, not a time series, and the ceiling exists to sell the next tier. That is a fair trade for zero cost.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools wins nothing here and earns its place anyway. Free site audit, web analytics and a restricted Site Explorer for domains you verify is a meaningful amount of technical tooling at no cost, and the audit finds the class of problem that stops every crawler equally. The caps are published, which is more than most free tiers manage, and the free views do not report assistant answers.
Screaming Frog's free SEO Spider is a desktop crawler with a 500-URL limit and no expiry. For a small site that is enough to find broken links, redirect chains, missing titles and sitemap problems in an afternoon. For anything with a catalogue it is not, and the paid licence at £199 a year is the only way past it. It reports nothing AI-specific, and that is fine: it is the tool you use to make sure there is something worth citing before you start measuring citations.
What did not qualify, and why
Several tools that appear on other "free AI SEO tools" lists are missing from this one deliberately, and the reasons are worth stating because they are the same reasons a reader should be sceptical of those lists.
Free trials are not free tiers. A fourteen-day trial of a monitoring product gives you a snapshot and then removes it, which is the opposite of what monitoring is for. Several AI visibility platforms offer good trials, and a trial is a sensible way to evaluate a purchase, but a page answering "what can I use with no budget" should not count them. Anything on this list whose free access had an expiry date was excluded.
Free checkers that grade you are not measurement. A form that takes a domain and returns an AI visibility score in ten seconds cannot have asked an assistant enough times to know. These are lead capture, and treating the resulting number as a baseline will make your next report wrong in a way that is hard to unwind. If you use one, use it to generate a prompt list, not a figure.
A free tier attached to a paid subscription is not free. Some suites describe features as free that are only reachable once a paid plan exists on the account. That is a discount, not a free tool, and it does not help somebody with no budget at all.
Products we could not verify were left out entirely. A handful of tools that circulate on these lists could not be confirmed as live and working from their own sites on the retrieval date. Rather than describe a product nobody opened, they are absent. That is the same rule applied to every entry above: each one was fetched, on the date shown in its row, before anything was written about it.
What free tools cannot tell you
Two things are simply not obtainable at zero cost, and knowing that in advance stops a month of searching for a tool that does not exist.
The first is a trend. Every reading of an assistant's answer costs a model call, so continuous measurement has a marginal cost that somebody pays. A free tier can give you one snapshot, or a few. It cannot give you the twelve weekly readings that would let you say whether a change in your content moved anything, and no amount of shopping around will produce a free tool that does.
The second is statistical confidence. Assistants answer the same question differently on different days, so a single reading is a coin flip and three readings are the beginning of evidence. Free tiers sample once, because sampling three times costs three times as much. That is not dishonest; it is arithmetic. It does mean a free score should be read as directional, and never quoted in a report as a percentage without saying how it was produced.
Both limits argue for the same sequence: use free tools for everything technical and for a first baseline, then buy measurement only once you have something you are actively trying to change and need to know whether it worked.
The free workflow that actually works
Spend a morning, not a budget.
Start with robots.txt and read it yourself. If AI crawler user agents are disallowed, either deliberately or as a leftover from a blanket rule somebody added in a hurry, nothing else on this page matters. Fix that first.
Then confirm reachability. Crawl the site with the free Screaming Frog version if it fits under 500 URLs, or run the free Ahrefs audit if it does not, and look only for the things that stop a fetch: server errors, redirect chains, pages that need JavaScript to show their main content.
Then look at demand. If you are on Cloudflare, turn on AI Crawl Control and let it run for a week; the list of AI services hitting your site is the first real evidence you will have about which assistants care about your content.
Then, and only then, look at answers. Ask your ten most important buying questions in two assistants, twice, a week apart, and write down which brands and which sources appear. Athena's free tier will do a structured version of the same thing. Two readings a week apart is not a trend, but it will show you whether the answers are stable enough to be worth paying to monitor — which is the actual decision the paid tools exist to serve.
Re-check every limit on this page before you rely on it. All of them were read on 3 September 2026, and free tiers are the fastest-moving numbers in this category.
Questions people ask
- Is there a free tool that shows how ChatGPT describes my brand?
- The closest on this list is Athena's free Essential tier, which includes a fixed credit allocation where one credit buys one AI response across the five assistants its pricing page names against that plan, ChatGPT among them. It is a sample rather than continuous monitoring. Beyond that, asking the assistants yourself and recording the answers in a spreadsheet costs nothing and is more honest than most free scores.
- Why is Attensira not on this list?
- Because Attensira has no free tier and no free trial. This page answers the question "what can I use without paying", and on that question we are not an answer. Putting ourselves on a list we do not qualify for would make the whole ranking unreadable.
- Can free tools replace a paid AI visibility platform?
- For the technical half, largely yes. Whether AI crawlers can reach your pages, whether your site has indexing problems, and whether your content is structured enough to be quoted are all answerable with free tools. What free tools do not give you is a repeated, comparable measurement of what assistants say over time, which is the part that costs money.
- What should I do first if I have no budget at all?
- Confirm AI crawlers can reach you, then find out what the assistants currently say. The first is a robots.txt check plus, if you are on Cloudflare, AI Crawl Control. The second is twenty minutes asking your ten most important buying questions in two assistants and writing down which brands and sources appear. That baseline costs nothing and outperforms any free score.
- When were these free tiers last checked?
- Every limit and cost statement here was read from the named page on 3 September 2026. Free-tier caps move faster than paid pricing does, so check the vendor's page before relying on any number on this page.
Sources
Every cell above, with the page it came from and the date that page was read.
Google's documentation describes Google Search Console as a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results.
support.google.com · retrieved
“Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google”
Google's Search Console documentation describes an index coverage report, a search performance report covering queries, pages and countries, rich result status reports and a Core Web Vitals report, all scoped to Google Search.
developers.google.com · retrieved
Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control documentation states that the feature is available on all plans.
developers.cloudflare.com · retrieved
“Available on all plans”
Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control documentation describes monitoring and controlling how AI services access your website content, and seeing which AI services access your content from the dashboard.
developers.cloudflare.com · retrieved
“See which AI services access your content”
Athena's pricing page lists an Essential plan as free with a $25 free credit covering 300 credits, and defines the unit as one credit equals one AI response.
athenahq.ai · retrieved · changes often, check the source
“1 credit = 1 AI response”
Athena's pricing page splits monitored systems by plan — the free Essential plan names ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot; Starter states visibility across 10 models, adding Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI, with additional models available on request; Enterprise carries the same model coverage as Starter with custom configuration.
athenahq.ai · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Ahrefs describes Webmaster Tools as free website analytics, technical audit and SEO metrics for your verified websites.
ahrefs.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source
“Free website analytics, technical audit & SEO metrics for your verified websites”
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools states free limits including 5,000 Site Audit crawl credits per project per month and viewing up to 1,000 backlinks or keywords at a time, with unlimited verified websites.
ahrefs.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Screaming Frog's pricing page states a crawl limit of 500 URLs on the free version against an unlimited crawl limit on the paid licence, which costs £199 per year.
screamingfrog.co.uk · retrieved · changes often, check the source
“Crawl Limit - 500 URLs”