A comparison of the stated capabilities of free AI visibility tools, including what each asks for, what each reports, and where the free version stops.
Of the checkers here, only CrowdReply says it shows the actual AI answer text alongside the score. Ahrefs and Semrush describe scores, mentions and citation data, while CiteGraph’s free check looks for site issues that can affect how AI systems read your pages.
This is a comparison of vendor-stated capabilities, not a live test of one domain across every tool. It explains what each checker asks for, what its report contains, and how to use the result without treating one score as the truth.
Start with the question you need answered.
If you want to know whether a brand appears across several AI products, Ahrefs gives the broadest stated platform list. Its free AI visibility checker asks for a brand name, then says it queries ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews with search-backed prompts. Its report shows total mentions, a platform breakdown, topics that trigger mentions, and domains and pages cited beside the brand.
Ahrefs also says there is no signup, no credit card and no limit on how many brands you can check. The limits of the free report are covered below, where they matter more.
Semrush takes a similar route through its free AI search visibility checker. You enter a website, and the page says it can show an AI Visibility Score, brand mentions, a platform breakdown, pages driving citations, topics and prompts where the brand appears, and estimated audience reached through AI search.
Semrush says the checker draws from a database of twenty six million plus prompts and responses across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews. Its page also says key AI visibility data is updated daily and supports analysis across two hundred and twenty plus countries and regions.
CrowdReply is the clearest option if you need to read the answer itself. Its free AI visibility checker asks for your domain and says it runs a live question against ChatGPT and Claude with web search. The report is described as including a visibility score out of one hundred, a competitor leaderboard, cited sources and snippets from the actual answers.
“No abstractions: the report includes snippets from the actual ChatGPT and Claude answers, with a clear mentioned or not mentioned verdict for your brand on each.”
CrowdReply, free AI visibility checker
The useful part of that promise is the answer snippet. A score tells you how often a brand appeared in the tool’s sample. The snippet lets you inspect the wording, the competitors named and the source pages behind it. CrowdReply says its free report tests ChatGPT and Claude, so the stated coverage is narrower than Ahrefs or Semrush.
CiteGraph’s free route is different. The free AI readiness check needs no account, runs fifteen checks and shows the fix for each. It is not a brand mention score. It checks whether your site has material an AI system can use, including crawl access, clear product facts, buyer questions and pages that can be cited.
A visibility score tells you what a tool observed in sampled answers. A readiness check tells you what may make your site easier to read and retrieve. They answer different questions.
The input tells you what the vendor thinks the tool is measuring.
Ahrefs asks for a brand name. Its page says the tool also works with product names, personal brands and competitor names. You can therefore use it as a quick entity check across the platforms listed on its page.
Semrush’s example uses a domain. That points towards site and citation analysis, although the page also describes brand mentions, topics and platforms. Its stated output includes pages from your website that drive AI citations.
CrowdReply asks for a domain and runs the check automatically from there. The stated workflow is closer to a buyer simulation: ask a market question, inspect the answer, then see whether the brand appeared and which competitors were named.
CiteGraph’s readiness check asks for a website to inspect. It does not need an account. Its output is a set of checks and fixes rather than a brand score, so it belongs beside these tools as a free AI visibility audit, not as a like-for-like answer tracker.
Three terms will recur here. A mention is the brand appearing in an AI answer. A citation is a page the answer links to or draws on. A prompt is the question sent to the AI system. A brand can be mentioned without its own page being cited, and a page can be cited without the brand winning the wording of the answer.
Before comparing tools, decide which of those signals matters. Inspect mentions if your concern is recognition, citations if your concern is evidence and traffic, and readiness if your concern is what to fix on the site.
The useful trail runs from question to answer to page.
Ahrefs says its free report shows total AI mentions, platform breakdown, triggering topics, cited domains and cited pages. The page also says the free version is a limited preview, with the top five results per section, and a one-time snapshot. It is enough to form a hypothesis about your brand, but not enough to establish a durable trend.
Semrush describes a wider report. It says the checker shows an AI Visibility Score, total brand mentions, a breakdown across platforms, pages driving citations, topics and prompts where the brand appears, and estimated audience reached through AI search.
CrowdReply says its report contains a score out of one hundred, competitor positions, sentiment, source pages, answer snippets and a mentioned-or-not-mentioned verdict. This is the clearest answer view in the vendor descriptions. It also says each brand mentioned is ranked side by side, which helps you see who appears instead.
The figures cannot be compared as if they came from one measurement system. Ahrefs names five platforms, Semrush names four platform groups in its free tool description, and CrowdReply names two. The prompts, platforms and answer sets differ.
CiteGraph’s AI readiness checks have been run on one hundred and twenty one sites. The check for a plain statement of what a business is, who it is for, what it costs and what it is against passed on twenty sites, failed on forty three and warned on fifty six.
| Check | Passed | Failed | Warned |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plain statement of the offer | 20 | 43 | 56 |
| Comparison or alternatives pages | 54 | 21 | 46 |
| Questions answered on the page | 56 | 0 | 63 |
Those were the weakest checks in the audit. Organization schema passed on seventy two of the one hundred and twenty one sites, while Product or SoftwareApplication schema passed on sixty. Those results were mixed, but they were not the weakest checks.
The strongest checks were more basic. AI crawlers were allowed in robots.txt on one hundred and sixteen sites, and one hundred and nineteen homepages answered a plain request. A site can be reachable and still fail to explain what it sells, who should buy it and how it compares.
A free checker can tell you that an answer happened and may show the citation. It does not necessarily tell you why your page was absent or what wording would give the system better material.
They are free within a narrow job. The free result also gives you a reason to consider the paid product, which is a normal way to fund a checker.
Ahrefs points towards Brand Radar for full data, historical tracking and competitor comparison. The free report details are set out above, so the paid difference here is the extra history and comparison rather than another snapshot.
Semrush says the checker is free to use three times per day without registering or creating an account. Its page points towards the full AI Visibility Toolkit for deeper analysis, prompt tracking, competitor insights and ongoing monitoring.
CrowdReply says no signup or credit card is needed. It offers an optional email notification and says a later account carries the report into onboarding. The shareable report is therefore both a useful artefact and a product entry point.
CiteGraph’s free readiness check gives you fifteen checks and the fix for each. If you need repeated scans, written pages, tracked rivals and runs across engines, the CiteGraph pricing page sets out the paid plans: ChatGPT Only is $19 a month and asks ChatGPT alone, Starter is $29 and Growth is $69. Each plan is paid from the day it starts, though a new account sees a readiness score and one live AI answer on its own domain free before paying.
You do not need a monitoring platform to answer one urgent question. Use a free checker to inspect the current state, then use the result to choose one page change. Pay when you need repeatable sampling, history, rival tracking or a workflow that turns findings into work.
CiteGraph can also run as an MCP server, so Claude, Cursor or VS Code can read a scan and apply readiness fixes in a repository. That shortens the distance between finding a problem and changing the site.
We checked the fifteen readiness items only. A site can pass all fifteen and still go unmentioned in a live ChatGPT answer, which is a separate problem this check does not catch.
This week, do three things:
Choose based on the question you need answered. Ahrefs is suited to a broad platform snapshot, CrowdReply focuses on live answer snippets and competitors, Semrush offers a wider stated report, and CiteGraph’s free check focuses on site readiness.
Treat it as a sample, not a stable market share measure. Scores depend on the prompts, platforms, search settings and answer set used by the tool, so the answer snippets and cited pages matter more than a single number.
No. A free check can reveal a missing statement, weak buyer answer or absent comparison page, and you can fix those issues without subscribing. Paid tracking becomes useful when you need repeated runs, history, rival monitoring or a workflow for applying fixes.
Cite this: CiteGraph, “Free AI visibility tools that actually show answers”, 14 Sept 2026, https://www.citegraph.app/blog/free-ai-visibility-tools