Which Free AI Visibility Tools Show Scores, Topic Breakdowns, Competitors, and Citations?

What do the four features mean?

• Score: a single number summarising how visible you are, usually the share of answers that mention you.
• Topic breakdown: results grouped by theme or prompt group, so you see where you are strong and weak.
• Competitors: who is named alongside or instead of you, and how often.
• Citations: which pages and domains the answers link to as sources.

The last two are the most useful for deciding what to do; the first is the easiest to misread.

How do the free tools compare?

Which free tool is best for each feature?

For a score: Amplitude or HubSpot, but read them differently. Amplitude reflects answers from live engines; HubSpot reflects what models say about you from training data, which changes slowly.

For topic breakdowns: Ahrefs' free checker, which lists the top 5 topics, or Bing's AI Performance report for the topics of grounding queries behind Copilot citations.

For competitors: Amplitude's competitive rankings, or AthenaHQ's free tier.

For citations: Amplitude for sources in ChatGPT and AI Overviews; Bing and Clarity for which of your own pages Copilot cites; Search Console for which pages earn AI Overview and AI Mode impressions.

How should you combine free tools?

1. Start with the first-party reports: Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Clarity. They cost nothing and show your own pages.
2. Add Amplitude's report for competitors and sources in ChatGPT and AI Overviews.
3. Use AthenaHQ's free credits or Mangools' free prompts to track a handful of your most important questions for a few weeks.
4. Check five buyer questions by hand in clean sessions on Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, which the free tools cover least.
5. Write down the competitors and cited sites that keep appearing; that list is the real output of a free audit.

What might a free audit find?

Take an illustrative online furniture store. Search Console shows AI Overview impressions on three product category pages and none on its buying guides. Amplitude's report shows two competitors ranked above it on ChatGPT, with sources including a home-design magazine roundup and a review site. Bing's AI Performance report shows Copilot citing its delivery-policy page for grounding queries about delivery times. Asking five questions by hand on Perplexity shows the same magazine roundup cited again. The free tools, together, point to one clear opportunity: the roundup that cites competitors everywhere and never mentions the store. None of them said how to fix it, but the list of where to look took an afternoon and cost nothing.

How often should you rerun free tools?

• Monthly for the first-party reports, which update continuously and cost nothing to check.
• Quarterly for free checkers, since a single reading moves with normal variation and their prompt sets are small.
• After a significant change, such as a site relaunch or a new set of pages, allowing a few weeks for engines to pick it up.

Keep a simple log of what each tool showed and when, so changes over time are visible. A spreadsheet with the date, tool, competitors named and sites cited is enough, and it turns a series of free snapshots into something close to a trend.

What do free tools usually leave out?

• Your own buyer questions asked across the main engines together.
• Repeated runs, so a score may reflect a single unusual answer.
• Recommended versus listed: being named among "other options" counts the same as being put forward.
• Whether cited pages mention you, and so which are worth approaching.
• What to change, beyond general advice.

When is a paid reading worth it?

When you have used the free tools and need to decide what to fix. Kovmere's Check costs $19 once with no account. It asks up to 20 buyer questions for one market, mostly unbranded with up to two head-to-head comparisons kept apart, three times on each of OpenAI, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude and Google AI Overviews under US settings, shows the answers and the pages they cite, counts mentions, recommendations and citations separately, and drafts up to three priority fixes from your own site. It is not built around a single score or a topic dashboard, covers one market per site, does not cover AI Mode or Copilot, and samples engine APIs rather than consumer apps.

How should you read a free score?

Treat any free score as a starting point. Ask which prompts produced it, whether any named your brand, whether the engine searched the web or answered from memory, and how many times each prompt ran. A score of 60 from ten prompts asked once tells you much less than it seems; a list of the competitors and sites that appear in those ten answers often tells you more. Free scores are best used to compare yourself with the same tool next month, not with a different tool's number.

For more free options, see free, underrated SEO and GEO tools and checking AI search visibility with a free scan and no signup.

What do people ask about free AI visibility tools?

Which free tool shows citations?

Amplitude shows sources for ChatGPT and AI Overviews; Bing Webmaster Tools and Clarity show which of your pages Copilot cites.

Are free AI visibility scores reliable?

They are consistent within one tool but rarely comparable across tools, and often based on a single run of a few prompts.

Do free tools track competitors?

Amplitude, AthenaHQ's free tier and Microsoft Clarity's Topic Insights do; HubSpot gives share of voice; Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools do not.

How long can I rely on free tools?

Indefinitely for the first-party reports. For tracking your own questions, free plans are usually too small once you start making changes and need to see whether specific questions moved.