Free Tools to Check Your AI Search Visibility in 2026
Crawler-access checkers, llms.txt generators, and manual prompt tests — a practical roundup of free ways to check whether AI engines can find and cite your site.
You don't need a budget to find out whether AI engines can see and cite your site. Here's a practical, free stack covering every part of the check.
1. Crawler-access checkers
Tools that check whether GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and similar crawlers can actually reach your pages. GeoReady's AI Citation Checker runs this automatically and flags exactly what's blocking access, if anything.
2. llms.txt generators
Rather than writing an llms.txt file by hand, GeoReady's free llms.txt generator builds one from your sitemap in a couple of minutes.
3. Manual prompt testing
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini directly about your product category and see if you're mentioned. It costs nothing but a few minutes, and it's the most direct signal you can get — just repeat it periodically, since answers shift over time.
4. Schema / structured data validators
Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator both check whether your JSON-LD markup is well-formed, free of charge, regardless of which AI engine eventually reads it.
Want a broader comparison?
This roundup covers free options specifically. For a broader comparison including paid platforms and ongoing monitoring tools, see our best GEO tools guide.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need paid tools to check AI search visibility?
No. Crawler-access checks, llms.txt generation, manual prompt testing, and schema validation can all be done for free. Paid tools mainly add ongoing monitoring and historical tracking on top of the same underlying checks.
How often should I re-run these checks?
Monthly is a reasonable baseline, plus immediately after any site migration, CMS change, or robots.txt edit.
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