AEO tools in 2026, including the free ones

Answer engine optimization tools do one of two jobs. Some measure whether AI assistants mention or cite your brand. Others check whether your pages can be read and quoted in the first place. Most lists mix the two, so this one keeps them apart, quotes each vendor's own page, and includes the free options, ours among them. Prices are as the vendors' pages showed them on 23 September 2026 and will move.

Two jobs, not one

A measurement tool sends prompts to AI engines and records which brands and pages come back. It answers "do they mention us, and who else". A readiness tool reads your site the way a crawler does and reports what stands in the way. It answers "could they, if they wanted to". Google's requirement for its own AI features is the second kind: a page must be "indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet", and it needs no special files or markup, as we set out in How to appear in AI Overviews. Start with readiness, because a measurement tool cannot fix a page it cannot read.

Measurement tools

Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit. Semrush's knowledge base describes it as showing "how brands appear in AI-generated answers", and lists the price as "$99 per month" with "25 prompts for Prompt Tracking". The engines it names are "ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, SearchGPT, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews". The knowledge base says the toolkit has no free trial; Semrush's separate free AI Visibility Checker "is free to use" and "can be used three times per day for free, without registering or creating an account".

Ahrefs Brand Radar. Ahrefs describes it as a way to "Track and grow your brand's visibility across AI answers, YouTube, and Reddit." Custom prompts "Starts at $50/mo" and the AI Visibility Index is "$199/mo" for "83 prompts/day". Its index covers "AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot", with custom prompts adding Claude. Brand Radar is "Free in every Ahrefs paid plan" and there is a free preview of your AI visibility.

Profound. Profound sells to larger teams and publishes no price; its plans are a "Trial" that is "Free" and an "Enterprise" plan that is "Custom". The trial gives "50 prompts run daily for 7 days, and visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews", with a prompt set Profound chooses. The enterprise plan lists up to nine engines, including Perplexity, Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude and Exa.

Peec AI. Peec tracks "brand performance on AI search platforms through key metrics like Visibility, Position, and Sentiment". Its pricing page rendered a Starter plan at about 95 dollars a month, with "50 prompts" and a choice of three models from ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Naver AI and Gemini, and a free trial of unstated length.

Otterly.AI. Otterly calls itself "an innovative AI Search monitoring and optimization platform" covering "Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude and Perplexity.AI". The Lite plan is "$29/month" for "15 search prompts", some engines are paid add-ons, and there is "a 7-day free trial for new users" with "No credit card needed".

Scrunch. Scrunch, at scrunch.com, says it "gets your site AI-ready so you show up in answers, get cited, and grow revenue". Its Core plan is "$250/mo" for "125 unique prompts" and "5 site audits / month" across four engines, with a seven-day free trial.

Free measurement from the engines' owners

Google Search Console. Google states that "sites appearing in AI features (such as AI Overviews and AI Mode) are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console", reported "within the 'Web' search type", and that "Clicking a link to an external page in the AI Overview counts as a click." There is no separate AI report, but the clicks are real and free. How to read Google Search Console covers the report.

Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing's AI Performance preview shows "how often your content is cited in generative answers, with clear visibility into which URLs are referenced", across "Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations". Bing's own note: its Citation Share metric "does not expose competitor domains, represent traffic share, or assign quality scores to content."

Readiness tools

AI crawler checker, free, BeeRanked. Reads your robots.txt the way a crawler does and reports, for each documented AI crawler, whether it may read your site, split between the crawlers that cite you and the ones that train on you, for any site you paste in.

Structured data analyzer, free, BeeRanked. Reads a page's structured data and shows what Google and AI engines understand about the brand behind it, for any page you paste in.

Google's URL Inspection, free. Inside Search Console, the one check that settles whether a page is indexed, which is the first of Google's two conditions.

These check the prerequisites. They do not measure mentions, and no tool of ours claims to.

How to choose

If you have never measured, start with the free checks: is the page indexed, can the crawlers read it, does the structured data say who you are. Then run one measurement tool on a trial for a month, with prompts your customers would type, and keep it only if the numbers move something you decide. Prices above start at 29 dollars a month and rise past 250 for the same basic job, so the difference is prompt volume, engine coverage and reporting; the count itself is within reach of any of them. The pages that get quoted are the ones written to be quoted; Answer-first content covers that side.