How to Get a Free GEO or AEO Visibility Audit for a Website

What free options exist, and what does each give you?

What do the official reports show?

Google Search Console. Google's generative AI performance report launched in June 2026 and reached all sites on 31 August 2026. It shows how often your pages appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by page, country and device. It does not show the queries, the answer text or competitors. Use it to see which pages Google's AI features already use, and to watch trends after changes.

Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing's AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026 and extended in June 2026, shows how often your pages are cited in Copilot and Bing's AI experiences. It also shows the grounding queries, the key phrases the AI used when retrieving your content. That is the closest thing to query data any AI platform gives site owners for free.

Both are free and first-party, so they are the most reliable numbers you will get. Neither tells you what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini say about you.

What do free vendor checkers show?

Several tool vendors offer free one-time checks. HubSpot's AI Search Grader, for example, is a free check without an account. It reports what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini say about a brand based on their training data, scored on sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice and market position. Ahrefs offers a free AI Visibility Checker powered by its Brand Radar data.

These are useful as a first look, with caveats:

• They are brand-level. They say whether and how you are mentioned, not which of your pages are used or what to fix.
• Some reflect training data, not live search. An answer from what a model remembers can differ from the same assistant answering with web search.
• The prompts are usually chosen by the tool, and may not match what your customers ask.
• One run is a sample of one. AI answers vary between runs, so a single snapshot can be misleading.
• Scores compress too much. A single number hides which questions you win and lose, as covered in why GEO tools show visibility scores but do not tell you what to fix.

How do you run a free audit yourself?

Set aside three to four hours.

1. Write 20 questions your customers actually ask, in their words. Mix discovery ("best [category] for [need]"), comparison ("[you] vs [competitor]"), brand ("is [you] any good?") and factual questions ("does [you] offer [feature]?"). Use sales calls, support tickets and search queries as sources.
2. Choose the assistants that matter to your customers, usually ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews or AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot.
3. Run each question at least twice in a logged-out or clean session, with web search on where available.
4. Record five things per answer: whether you appear, where in the answer, what is said about you and whether it is accurate, which competitors appear, and which sources are cited.
5. Check technical access: your robots.txt rules for OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot, your CDN's bot settings, and whether key pages show their main content without JavaScript.
6. List the cited sources for questions you lose, and note which of them mention you, mention you wrongly, or leave you out.
7. Pick three fixes with the most questions behind them.

A simple recording sheet works:

A fuller version of this method, starting from a URL, is covered in how to audit a website for AI visibility gaps using its URL.

How should you judge a free agency audit?

Free audits are marketing, which does not make them useless. Ask for:

• The question list, and why those questions.
• How many runs per question, in which assistants, and on what dates.
• The raw answers, or screenshots, not only a score.
• Sources cited in the answers you lose.
• Page-level fixes tied to specific findings, not a generic checklist.

Be wary of guaranteed placements, a single proprietary "AI score" with no method, or requests for full analytics and admin access before any findings. An initial audit can be done from public information, as covered in whether an AI visibility audit needs access to your website or analytics. Low-cost audit services have similar trade-offs, covered in whether low-cost GEO audit sites are reliable.

Should you post your URL publicly to ask for a free audit?

It can bring quick opinions, but weigh the costs. Anyone, including competitors, can see your site and the discussion. Volunteers usually run a question once, in their own account and location, so their results may not match what your customers see. And a public request often brings a wave of sales pitches. If you do it, say what you sell and to whom. Ask people to share the exact question and the full answer rather than a verdict, and check anything important yourself.

What should you do with the results?

• Fix access problems first, since blocked or empty pages are much less likely to be cited and cannot be quoted accurately.
• Correct wrong facts on your own pages and on the sources assistants cite.
• Fill specific gaps: questions where you are missing because no page of yours answers them.
• Target the sources that decide the questions you lose, such as review sites, directories and comparison articles.
• Re-run the same questions monthly, so you can see whether changes worked.

What might an illustrative case look like?

Consider an illustrative bookkeeping firm that ran a free vendor check and got a middling score with no explanation. It then ran its own audit: 20 questions, five assistants, two runs each. It appeared in 9 of 40 ChatGPT runs and in no Perplexity runs. Perplexity's crawler was being challenged by the firm's CDN. Its Search Console report showed impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode for two service pages, and Bing's report showed the grounding query "bookkeeping for landscapers", which the firm had never targeted. The firm unblocked the crawler, corrected an outdated fee in a directory listing, and wrote a page for landscaping businesses. Two months later, it appeared in 17 of 40 ChatGPT runs and began showing up in Perplexity.

What do people ask about free GEO audits?

Is a free audit enough?

For a small business, a careful do-it-yourself audit plus the official reports is often enough to find the main problems.

How often should I repeat it?

Monthly for your core questions, and after major site changes or launches.

Why do my results differ from the tool's?

Assistants vary by run, location, account and whether search is on. Compare several runs, not single answers.

Do I need to pay to track AI visibility?

Not to start. Paid tools save time at scale, running many questions often and tracking competitors.