Tools & Comparisons
Free AI SEO Tools: 12 That Actually Cost $0 (2026)
The best free AI SEO tools as of September 2026: Google and Bing AI reports, AI visibility checks, schema and crawler tools. What each does and its limits.
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Free AI SEO tools fall into three groups: first-party reports from Google and Bing that show how your pages appear in AI answers, one-time checks that show what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini say about your brand, and technical tools that make sure AI crawlers can read your pages. All 12 below are free as of September 2026. We checked each vendor's own page, and we list the limit that comes with each free version.
An AI SEO tool is any tool that helps a site get found, read and cited by AI-driven search: Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini and similar engines. Some of these tools use AI; most of the useful free ones just measure AI.
Three of the tools below are ours: aeotime is our product, and we mark its free tools clearly.
Which free AI SEO tools are worth using?
| Tool | What it does | Free limit (as of September 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Generative AI performance report for AI Overviews and AI Mode | Free, verified sites only |
| Bing Webmaster Tools | AI Performance report: citations in Copilot and Bing AI summaries | Free, verified sites only (public preview) |
| HubSpot AI Search Grader | One-time brand check in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini | Free, one-time, no account |
| aeotime AI visibility checker (ours) | Which AI engines cite your domain, plus AI crawler access | Free, no signup |
| AthenaHQ Essential | AI visibility tracking | Free plan with 300 credits, 5 models |
| Ahrefs Free (formerly Webmaster Tools) | Site audit, backlinks, keywords for your own site | Free, verified sites, 5,000 crawl credits/month |
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Desktop crawler | Free up to 500 URLs per crawl |
| Schema Markup Validator | Checks any schema.org markup | Free |
| aeotime AI crawler checker (ours) | Shows which AI bots your robots.txt allows | Free |
| aeotime schema and llms.txt tools (ours) | FAQ/Organization/Product JSON-LD, llms.txt generator and validator | Free |
| PageSpeed Insights | Speed and Core Web Vitals | Free |
| ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini free tiers | Manual prompt testing | Free with usage limits |
Free tools that show your real AI search performance
These are the only tools on the list with first-party data. Google and Bing know when your page was shown or cited. Third-party tools can only estimate it.
1. Google Search Console: Generative AI performance report
Google announced Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console on June 3, 2026, and notes on the same page that the reports reached all websites worldwide on August 31, 2026. There are separate views for Search (AI Overviews and AI Mode) and Discover.
What you get: impressions in generative AI features, the pages that appeared, countries, devices and dates. The help center page explains the dimensions. What you don't get: the text of the AI answer or whether a competitor was mentioned next to you.
Google is direct about third-party tools in its AI optimization guide: no outside tool has access to Google's internal ranking or AI systems. That is true, and it is why this report should be your first stop for Google's AI surfaces.
2. Bing Webmaster Tools: AI Performance
Microsoft introduced AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools as a free public preview on February 10, 2026. It covers citations in Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and some partner integrations. The report's help page lists citations, grounding queries (the searches the AI ran before citing you), intents and citation share.
This is the only free tool that shows grounding queries. Those tell you what the AI actually searched for, which is often different from what the user typed. If you have not verified your site in Bing, do it for this report alone.
Free tools that show what AI says about your brand
The reports above tell you where your pages appeared. They don't tell you whether ChatGPT recommends you or a competitor when someone asks "best CRM for small agencies". For that you need to run prompts.
3. HubSpot AI Search Grader
HubSpot's AI Search Grader is free, needs no account, and runs a one-time check across OpenAI, Perplexity and Gemini models. It scores sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice and market competition, and returns a score out of 100. The page says continuous monitoring is a separate paid product.
Good for: a quick first look and a number to show a stakeholder. Limit: you don't choose the prompts, so it may not test the questions your buyers actually ask.
4. aeotime free AI visibility checker (ours)
aeotime is our product. The AI visibility checker and the other tools on the site are free with no signup: enter a domain and see which AI engines cite it and whether AI crawlers can reach it. Ongoing tracking is a paid plan with a 7-day free trial.
One honest caveat: aeotime collects answers through each engine's official API with web search turned on (Google surfaces through SERP data). API answers can differ slightly from what a logged-in user sees in the ChatGPT or Perplexity app. That is true of most tracking tools, but not all say so.
5. AthenaHQ Essential
AthenaHQ's pricing page lists a free Essential plan with 300 credits (shown as $25 of credit) covering five models: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot. That is enough to try a small prompt set. The paid Starter plan is $295/month. The free credits run out, so plan your prompts before you start.
6. The free tiers of the AI engines themselves
The cheapest method is still typing your buyers' questions into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Use a logged-out or fresh session, keep a spreadsheet of prompt, date, whether you were named, and which URLs were cited. Ten prompts a week will teach you more than a dashboard you never open.
The limit is scale and noise. AI answers vary between runs, so one manual check can mislead you. Our query fan-out tool helps here: it shows the sub-queries an engine may run behind one prompt, which gives you better prompts to test.
Free technical tools that help AI crawlers read your site
An AI engine can't cite a page it can't fetch. These tools cover access, structure and markup.
7. aeotime AI crawler checker (ours)
Our AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt and shows which AI bots are allowed: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others. The distinction matters. OpenAI's crawler documentation says OAI-SearchBot is the bot for ChatGPT search, and sites that block it won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. GPTBot is for model training and is a separate setting. Many sites block both by accident.
Related: the AI crawler view shows the raw HTML a bot receives without JavaScript, which is how you spot content that only appears after client-side rendering.
8. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
The Screaming Frog pricing page lists the free version at up to 500 URLs per crawl. A licence is $279 per year and removes the limit. For a small site, the free version finds broken links, missing titles, redirect chains and thin pages, all of which also hurt AI retrieval.
9. Ahrefs Free
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is now called Ahrefs Free. It is free for verified sites and includes Site Audit (5,000 crawl credits per month), Site Explorer for your own backlinks and keywords, and web analytics. Its AI visibility product, Brand Radar, is not part of the free plan.
10. Schema Markup Validator and aeotime schema tools (ours)
The Schema Markup Validator checks any schema.org markup, not just the types Google turns into rich results. That matters now: Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026, so a FAQ-specific check in Google's own tools is no longer the point. We explain that change in our FAQ schema guide.
Our schema markup generator writes Organization, LocalBusiness and Product JSON-LD, the FAQ schema generator writes FAQPage markup, and the schema validator finds every JSON-LD block on a live page and checks required fields.
Keep expectations right. Google's AI optimization guide says structured data isn't required for its generative AI features and there is no special markup to add. Structured data is still useful for rich results and for any system that reads it, but it won't lift you into AI Overviews on its own.
11. aeotime llms.txt generator and validator (ours)
llms.txt is a proposed file, described at llmstxt.org, that gives language models a Markdown map of your site. Our llms.txt generator builds one and the validator checks it against the format.
Be clear about its limits: Google's AI optimization guide says Google Search ignores llms.txt and that the file neither helps nor harms visibility there. Build it if you want it for other tools and agents, and spend five minutes, not five days. Our llms.txt explainer covers the tradeoffs.
12. PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights measures load speed and Core Web Vitals. AI crawlers fetch pages under time limits; a page that takes eight seconds to return HTML is a worse candidate for any retrieval system. Fix the obvious problems here and move on.
What free AI SEO tools can't do
Free tools cover three jobs well: first-party impressions (Google, Bing), one-time snapshots, and technical checks. They fall short on one job: repeated measurement across many prompts, engines and competitors over time.
That gap exists for a cost reason. Every tracked prompt is an API call to an AI engine, repeated across engines and days. 100 prompts across 8 engines once a day is 24,000 answers a month. Somebody pays for those calls, which is why ongoing tracking is paid in every tool we know of, including ours.
If you need that tracking, compare options in our best AI visibility tools roundup. aeotime's paid plan is $99/month ($79 billed yearly) for 250 prompts across all eight engines we support; see pricing.
How to use these tools together
A free setup that covers most of what a small team needs:
- Verify your site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Open the Generative AI performance report and the AI Performance report once a week.
- Run a one-time AI visibility check (HubSpot's grader or our free report) and write down which competitors appear instead of you.
- Check robots.txt with the AI crawler checker. Make sure OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Bingbot can reach your key pages.
- Crawl the site with Screaming Frog (up to 500 URLs) or Ahrefs Free and fix broken links, redirect chains and missing titles.
- Validate the structured data you already have. Don't add markup you can't keep accurate.
- Test 10 buyer prompts by hand each month in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and log the results.
Start with step 1. It takes ten minutes, costs nothing, and gives you data no paid tool can.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best free AI SEO tool?
For most sites, start with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Both are free, both now report on AI features (Google's Generative AI performance report and Bing's AI Performance report), and both use first-party data no third-party tool can see. Add a free AI visibility check to see what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini say about your brand.
Can I track my brand in ChatGPT for free?
You can run one-time checks for free: HubSpot's AI Search Grader and aeotime's free AI visibility report both show how AI engines describe a brand today. Ongoing, daily tracking across many prompts and engines costs money everywhere, because every tracked prompt is a paid API call on the vendor's side.
Are free AI SEO tools accurate?
First-party reports from Google and Bing reflect real impressions and citations, but only for their own surfaces. One-time AI visibility checks are snapshots: AI answers change between runs, so treat a single check as a starting signal, not a benchmark.
Do I need llms.txt or special schema for AI search?
Not for Google. Google's AI optimization guide says Google Search ignores llms.txt and that no special schema.org markup is needed for its generative AI features. Other AI systems may read llms.txt, so it can still be worth a few minutes, but it is not a ranking lever in Google.