The free tools to track AI visibility in 2026

You do not need a $499 per month Profound subscription to measure AI visibility. The free tools in 2026 are genuinely good, and a stack of two or three of them covers most small and mid-market brands without any budget at all. We use the same free stack with our own early-stage clients and with founders who want a baseline before committing to anything. This is the short walkthrough of what each free tool actually measures, how to set it up, where the free tier runs out, and when it is worth paying for one of the enterprise alternatives instead.

Quick reference: free and paid tools at a glance

Parse: the daily anchor

Upfront disclosure. Parse is Soar's own tool. We built it because we needed a daily monitoring layer for our client work and the paid options were either too expensive or too slow to refresh. Parse tracks brand mentions and citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot. Data refreshes daily. The index covers more than 500,000 brands. The free forever tier is not a trial. It is an actual free tier you can use indefinitely.

Setup takes about two minutes. Add your brand, add the competitors you want to benchmark against, and add the 10 to 20 prompts you care about. The dashboard starts populating within a day. For most small brands this is enough to run a real measurement program: pick your target prompts, set a baseline, check weekly. The free tier caps prompt counts below what large enterprise programs need and the custom reporting is lighter than paid tiers, but for a small brand running a focused prompt set, none of that matters.

HubSpot AEO Grader: the one-off baseline

The HubSpot AEO Grader is free forever and runs a scored audit across five dimensions: sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice, and market competition. It tests across GPT-5.2, Perplexity, and Gemini. You drop in your brand, the tool runs a prompt set, and you get a visual scorecard back.

This is the fastest way to get a single-shot baseline. We use it before the first client kickoff call to have something to show in the opening conversation. It is less useful as a daily monitoring tool because it is designed as a grader rather than a tracker. You run it, you read it, you revisit in 30 days.

Mangools AI Search Grader: broad engine coverage

The Mangools AI Search Grader has the widest engine coverage of any free tool. It tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Llama 4, and Mistral. For brands whose audience uses the less-common engines, this is the only free tool that will tell you anything about Grok or DeepSeek citation patterns. The grader is free; the continuous tracker (Mangools Watcher) is bundled inside paid Mangools plans.

Use it as a second opinion. For B2B tech brands with a developer audience that lives inside Grok or DeepSeek, this is the most valuable free tool on the list.

Ahrefs Brand Radar: custom prompt tracking

Ahrefs launched Brand Radar in January 2026. It has a free tier and a paid upgrade, backed by a database of more than 250 million tracked prompts. The free tier lets you watch custom prompts, view the engines that surface your brand, and see competitor overlap on the same prompts. If you already have an Ahrefs account for classical SEO work, Brand Radar slots into the same login and the same UI language, which cuts the learning curve to zero. For brands that do not pay for Ahrefs, the free tier is still strong enough to be worth a signup.

Semrush AI Toolkit: the cross-check

The Semrush AI Toolkit is not free in the strict sense. It is bundled into existing Semrush subscriptions, which means if you already pay for Semrush, the AI Toolkit costs nothing incremental. The toolkit includes an AI Visibility Score, sentiment analysis, mention volume tracking, and AI Overview Analysis for the queries your site already ranks in. Our standard client stack is Parse for daily monitoring plus Semrush AI Toolkit for the cross-check, because almost every client we work with already has Semrush.

When to pay instead

The paid alternatives are worth knowing about. Profound starts at $499 per month for the Lite plan (200 prompts) and is the enterprise category leader. Otterly.AI runs at $29, $189, and $489 monthly tiers, the lowest-cost continuous tracker with a real dashboard. Peec AI starts around €89 per month. Rankability's 2026 roundup of 22 AI visibility tracking tools is the current catalog if you want to compare the full paid landscape. The honest answer on when to upgrade: when the free tier stops letting you ask the questions you actually have. For most small brands that moment does not come in year one.

The stack we recommend for a small brand

If you have zero budget and no existing tools, start with Parse plus HubSpot AEO Grader. Parse gives you daily monitoring. HubSpot gives you a one-shot baseline score you can share with leadership. That is enough to run a real program for the first 90 days. If you have Semrush, add the AI Toolkit on top. If you have Ahrefs, add Brand Radar instead. If you want depth on Grok or DeepSeek, add Mangools. The trap we see repeatedly is small brands feeling pressured to buy Profound as their first tool because it shows up in every enterprise sales conversation. It is overkill for most brands under $50 million in revenue. Start free, measure weekly, upgrade only when you know exactly which question the paid tier will answer that the free tools cannot.

Conclusion

The free AI visibility tracking stack in 2026 is more capable than most marketing teams realize. Parse, HubSpot AEO Grader, Mangools, Ahrefs Brand Radar, and Semrush AI Toolkit cover ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Llama 4, and Mistral between them, at a total cost of zero if you pick the right two. The right question is not "what should I pay for" but "which free stack answers my specific prompts." Start there, run it for a quarter, then decide whether any paid tool clears the bar.

How Soar saves you time and money

Most brands who come to us for help with AI visibility measurement have already spent two or three months evaluating paid tools, sitting through demos, and negotiating pricing for a subscription they do not actually need yet. The wrong tool choice alone costs $3,000 to $6,000 in wasted subscription fees before the team realizes the free stack would have answered the same questions. Our baseline engagement uses Parse plus Semrush as the default, adds HubSpot's grader for the first audit, and only recommends a paid tool like Profound when the prompt volume or reporting depth actually requires it.

Our standard client onboarding compresses tool evaluation from three months to three days. We already know what each tool does, where it breaks, and which combination works for which brand profile. You skip the pitch decks and start measuring on day one. Request a proposal and we will run your top 20 prompts through Parse, build a baseline report, and tell you whether any paid tool is actually worth the money for your specific brand.

Related reading

• The 2026 guide to Generative Engine Optimization

• The 90-day GEO program: from audit to first citations

• How to measure AI visibility for your brand

• How to audit your brand's AI search visibility

• 12 best generative search optimization tools (GEO tools) for 2025

• How to audit whether your site is crawlable by AI bots