Search “AI visibility checker” right now and you will not have any trouble finding one.

Some are free. Some will give you a score in under a minute. Some will tell you whether ChatGPT knows your business exists. Others check Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, Claude, or some combination of all of them.

Some scan your website for technical readiness signals. Others actually run prompts through AI systems and show you whether your business appears. And if you want ongoing monitoring, there are increasingly sophisticated platforms ready to track hundreds or thousands of prompts, competitors, citations, models, and changes over time.

So let’s get the obvious question out of the way.

If you can check your AI visibility for free, why would you pay $27 for the Momentive Media AI Visibility Workbook?

That is a fair question.

And honestly? Rather than pretending those tools do not exist, I am going to give you the links.

Go test them.

Seriously.

I have included the resources at the bottom of this article because the more I have researched AI visibility—and the more I have tested these tools on my own business and in client work—the more convinced I have become that the problem is not a lack of scores.

The problem is understanding what the score actually means.

What did the tool test?

What did it not test?

What is it using as evidence?

What is it weighting more heavily than something else?

What does a “good” score actually mean for your business?

And once you have the report in your hand, what the hell are you supposed to do next?

Those are not the same problem.

 

First, understand what you are testing

This gets confusing very quickly because there is no universally standardized AI Visibility Score.

Different companies are measuring different things, using different methodologies, looking at different models, testing different prompts, weighting different signals, and then putting a number on the result.

That does not mean the tools are bad. It means you need to understand what is inside the number before you decide how much meaning to assign to it.

For example, HubSpot’s free AI Search Grader gives businesses a score out of 100 across five dimensions. Sentiment alone can account for 40 points. Presence quality and brand recognition can each account for another 20 points, while share of voice and market competition account for 10 points each.

That means a business could have a relatively decent score because AI systems speak positively about it, even if it is not showing up nearly as often as competitors in the conversations that matter.

That is useful information.

But it is not the same thing as being widely recommended.

Ahrefs approaches the question differently. Its free AI Visibility Checker queries platforms including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google’s AI search experiences using search-backed prompts based on real search behavior. The free report can surface information such as total mentions, mentions by platform, topics associated with your brand, cited domains, and cited pages.

Search Atlas offers another version. Its report looks at visibility across multiple AI engines and may show visibility, sentiment, competitors, and prompts where your brand appears to be missing.

Again: useful.

But they are not all measuring the same thing.

If HubSpot gives you a 72 and another platform gives you a 41, it does not automatically mean one is wrong and one is right. It may mean they are looking at your business through different lenses.

And that distinction matters.

 

There are different kinds of AI visibility

This is one of the things I do not think is being explained clearly enough in the rush to sell AI visibility tools.

Some tools are evaluating whether your website appears technically prepared for AI discovery.

Other tools are evaluating what AI systems actually say when someone asks a question related to your business.

Those are two very different questions.

One question might be:

Can AI systems crawl, access, parse, and understand the information on my website?

Another might be:

Does my business actually appear when a potential customer asks an AI system who they should hire, where they should go, what they should buy, or who is known for solving this problem?

And another might be:

How often does my brand appear compared with competitors across hundreds or thousands of relevant prompts over time?

Those are not interchangeable.

Ahrefs, for example, describes running queries across multiple AI platforms and checking whether a business appears in the resulting answers.

Pixelmojo’s free AI Visibility Checker is looking more at website-readiness signals: crawler access, structured data, content accessibility, llms.txt, and whether the technical and content signals on your site are clear and consistent.

Arobis describes its free checker as a diagnostic rather than a rank tracker. It looks at things such as entity clarity, structured data, content answerability, llms.txt readiness, and third-party corroboration. To be clear about what that means: the free checker does not run prompts through AI systems and show you what they say. Arobis distinguishes that automated readiness check from a deeper audit process where buyer-style prompts are actually run through AI systems.

None of that is automatically good or bad.

They are simply answering different questions.

The trouble begins when we take one score from one tool and treat it like an objective, universal verdict on whether AI can “see” our business.

It is not.

It is evidence.

And evidence needs interpretation.

 

Let’s talk about llms.txt for a second

llms.txt is a perfect example of why methodology matters.

Several AI-readiness tools look for whether a website has an llms.txt file and include it in their scoring.

Pixelmojo, for example, currently assigns llms.txt a meaningful portion of its AI Crawl Checker methodology. Arobis includes llms.txt readiness in its visibility diagnostic as well.

But Google has also been very clear about its own position. Google’s guidance says files like llms.txt are not needed for Google Search or its AI features, and that maintaining one for another service is fine but will neither help nor hurt your visibility or rankings in Google Search

So does that mean llms.txt is useless?

No.

It means you need to be more thoughtful than “the tool says I need one, therefore I need one.”

A tool can include llms.txt as part of its readiness methodology. That is a choice made by the company building the tool. It may be reasonable as one small signal of intentional AI-readiness. But it is not proof that every AI platform reads it, uses it, values it, or gives it the same importance.

This is exactly why I want business owners to understand what they are looking at.

A score is never just a score.

It is a result created by a set of assumptions.

And sometimes the gap you are trying to solve is real. Sometimes the score is being influenced by a variable that may not matter much to the actual outcome you care about.

Those are very different situations.

 

Side by side: what you actually get

Checked September 18–19, 2026. These products change plans, prices, and free tiers often, so confirm current details with each provider before you decide.

Tool	What it tests	What free gives you	Paid or ongoing option
Ahrefs	ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google AI search experiences, using search-backed prompts	No signup at the time of writing. A limited, one-time preview (top results per section)	Brand Radar: from $199/month per AI platform, $699/month for all platforms, added to an Ahrefs plan (Lite starts at $129/month)
HubSpot AI Search Grader	How ChatGPT-family, Perplexity, and Gemini models characterize your brand from what they already know (not live buyer prompts). Claude is not included	One-time score out of 100. Full results after a short form	HubSpot AEO: $50/month, or included in Marketing Hub Pro and Enterprise
Search Atlas	ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Grok, and Google AI	Free report, no credit card: visibility, sentiment, competitors, and prompt gaps	Paid plans exist; I could not confirm pricing from the page, so check Search Atlas directly
Pixelmojo Free Checker	Your website’s readiness signals: crawler access, structured data, llms.txt, accessibility	Free with email verification, limited to one audit per email per tool per day (per Pixelmojo’s own guide)	See Citation Tracker below
Pixelmojo Citation Tracker	ChatGPT (GPT-4o-mini), Perplexity (Sonar), Claude (Haiku), and Gemini (Flash), with Grok shown report-only (mentions only, never scored)	A first audit; Pixelmojo lists one-time reports at $5	One-time, low-cost. Note it uses smaller model tiers, which may not match what people see in the full apps
Arobis	Your website’s signals: entity clarity, structured data, answerability, llms.txt, third-party corroboration. It does not query AI answers	Free readiness diagnostic. The full fix plan is unlocked through a contact form	A deeper audit that runs buyer-style prompts (custom)
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit	ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, and Perplexity	A free AI Search Visibility Checker (a one-time snapshot)	$99/month per domain, billed annually: 25 custom prompts with daily AI rankings
Scrunch	Multi-prompt, multi-model professional monitoring, plus site audits	Check Scrunch for its current trial or audit offer	From $250/month; enterprise plans expand models
Amplitude AI Visibility	Top AI platforms including ChatGPT and Google AI Overview; ties visibility to traffic and conversions inside Amplitude	A free one-time report (short form). AI Visibility is also included in every Amplitude plan, including Free, with limited volumes	Higher Amplitude plans raise the limits; Growth and Enterprise are custom-priced

What this table tells you: the free versions are mostly one-time samples, some gate the full detail behind a form, and the paid versions are built for ongoing monitoring at $50 to $700 or more a month. That is exactly what you should expect. It is also why the score alone doesn’t tell you what to do.

 

The free tools are useful

I do not want this to become one of those articles where every alternative is mysteriously flawed until—surprise!—my thing is the only answer.

That is not useful to you.

Some of these tools are genuinely impressive. And I think you should use them.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs’ free AI Visibility Checker is a solid place to start because it gives you a snapshot across multiple AI search environments without requiring a signup at the time of writing.

It checks platforms including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google’s AI search experiences. Ahrefs also tells you something important about its methodology: its prompts are based on real search behavior rather than being completely invented in a vacuum.

That matters because the question is not only whether AI can find your business when someone searches your exact name.

The more meaningful question is whether you appear when people are asking the kinds of questions that lead to business.

To be upfront about the limits: the free version is a snapshot with limited results. Ahrefs’ larger Brand Radar product is designed for businesses that need more ongoing monitoring, historical data, competitive benchmarking, and custom prompt tracking, and it is priced per AI platform on top of an Ahrefs plan.

If that is what you need, use the platform built for that.

 

HubSpot AI Search Grader

HubSpot’s AI Search Grader is also free for a one-time check, and it is helpful for a slightly different reason.

It puts more attention on how AI systems appear to perceive and characterize your brand—not only whether your business gets mentioned.

That distinction can be revealing.

Maybe AI recognizes your business but does not understand what you specialize in.

Maybe it describes your company accurately but vaguely.

Maybe it knows your name but does not connect you with the category, outcome, audience, or expertise you are actively trying to own.

HubSpot is also unusually transparent about how its score is divided across sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice, and market competition.

Two things worth knowing before you run it: you complete a short form to see the full results, and it does not include Claude among the models it asks.

Run it. Then compare it with Ahrefs.

The contrast may teach you more than either number does on its own.

 

Search Atlas

Search Atlas currently offers a free report without requiring a credit card. It examines visibility across multiple AI engines and can show visibility, sentiment, competitors, and prompt gaps.

That is another useful piece of evidence.

Not a final answer. Not a diagnosis. Evidence.

Pixelmojo

Pixelmojo is interesting because it does not pretend one scan answers every question.

Its free AI Visibility Checker examines website readiness signals. Its separate AI Citation Tracker tests actual AI responses across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini, with Grok shown report-only, meaning it appears as mentions only and is never scored.

The Citation Tracker is a low-cost one-time test, and Pixelmojo shares a meaningful amount of information about how it scores what it finds. It looks at things including brand recognition, competitive visibility, URL citations, sentiment, and consistency. One thing to keep in mind: it runs smaller, faster model tiers of those tools, so what you see may not match what a person gets in the full app.

That makes it particularly useful as another independent point of comparison.

 

Arobis

Arobis’ free checker is worth running for what it is: a look at your website’s readiness signals. Just know that it is not telling you what ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini actually say about you. It reads your site, not the AI’s answers.

Scrunch and professional monitoring tools

Then there are platforms built for a completely different level of work.

Scrunch, for example, is designed for ongoing professional monitoring, with plans starting at $250 a month. Its plans include prompt tracking, site audits, and visibility monitoring across multiple AI environments. Enterprise-level options expand the number of models and systems being monitored.

The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit is $99 a month per domain, billed annually, and tracks 25 custom prompts. Ahrefs Brand Radar starts at $199 a month per AI platform on top of an Ahrefs plan. And Amplitude includes AI Visibility in every plan, including its free plan with limited volumes, which makes sense if you already use Amplitude to understand what visitors do after they arrive.

That is far more automation than a workbook will ever provide.

And I am completely comfortable saying that.

A workbook is not a monitoring platform.

If you need hundreds of prompts continually tracked across multiple models, competitors, locations, products, or categories, buy software designed to do exactly that.

You do not need to force a $27 workbook to become something it was never meant to be.

 

So what are you actually buying?

You are not buying another magic score.

That was intentional.

The Momentive Media AI Visibility Workbook is a DIY investigation and planning process.

It is for the business owner who wants to understand what is happening—not just receive a report and hope the recommendations make sense.

Here is what is inside:

• Ten modules that take you from a plain-English baseline through your website’s technical foundation, your Google Business Profile, direct-answer content, and the sources AI relies on.
• A Prompt Lab in every module that turns your own information into usable drafts.
• A 6-prompt Quick Check if you want a first look in a short sitting.
• A full Test Log for 15 to 20 prompts, with rules for testing in a fresh conversation, capturing the full answer, and recording whether AI put you in the right category.
• A 90-day plan built from the evidence you gather, with owners and proof of completion for each action.

 

It covers both kinds of checks: what AI says about you, and whether your website is readable.

You choose the AI tools. The workbook works with whichever ones you are most comfortable with. When we test, we use ChatGPT, Claude, and sometimes Perplexity, especially when source visibility and citations matter.

The goal is not to assume every small business, founder-led brand, consultant, service provider, creator, or local business has hundreds or thousands of dollars each month to spend on specialized AI monitoring software.

The goal is to help you do the work of looking.

You run the tests.

You examine what comes back.

You compare answers across tools.

You look for patterns.

You identify what the machines understand about your business, what they do not understand, what they get wrong, what they seem uncertain about, and what evidence exists—or does not exist—to support the claims you want to make about your work.

Then you use that information to build a realistic 90-day plan around your actual business.

Because this is the point where I have become increasingly skeptical of AI visibility work that ends with:

Your score is 43. Here is a list of things to optimize.

Okay.

Which things?

Why those things?

In what order?

What is actually realistic for your budget, capacity, team, time, and stage of business?

What can you fix yourself?

What requires a website change?

What requires clearer messaging?

What requires better content?

What requires stronger third-party evidence?

What requires a review strategy?

What requires more documentation of expertise you have been carrying around in your head for years but have never actually put online?

And which “problem” is not really a business problem at all—but simply a reflection of the methodology used by the tool you ran?

That requires judgment.

What the workbook will not do

Here is the honest list.

• It is manual. You run the prompts and log the results yourself. It takes real time.
• It does not monitor for you. There is no dashboard, no scheduled tracking, and no alerts. You re-run the tests quarterly.
• It uses small samples. With 15 to 20 prompts, one extra mention moves your result by about five percentage points. The workbook tells you to report the count, not just the percentage.
• AI answers change. The same question can give different answers on different days, in different tools, and in different locations, so a result is a snapshot, not a verdict.
• It does not promise rankings, mentions, or revenue. It helps you see what is happening and decide what to do.
• It is not done-for-you. If you want someone to do the work with you, see the options below.

 

If those limits are dealbreakers, choose a monitoring platform.

 

Evidence still needs a human

This has become one of the foundational ideas behind how we are building AI Visibility work at Momentive Media:

Evidence → Judgment → Priority → Intervention

Technology is very good at collecting evidence.

It is becoming very good at organizing evidence, comparing evidence, surfacing patterns, and identifying gaps that a human might overlook.

But a dashboard cannot fully understand why you have made the choices you have made in your business.

It cannot fully understand what you are trying to build next.

It cannot automatically know what resources you have available.

It cannot always distinguish between something you intentionally do not want to be known for and something you have simply failed to communicate clearly.

And it cannot know which parts of your expertise have never made it onto the internet at all.

That last one matters more than people realize.

Because sometimes the machine is not getting your business wrong.

Sometimes we have never given it enough evidence to get us right.

That is a very different problem from technical optimization.

And it is one reason our AI Visibility work at Momentive Media has started crossing into something much larger: positioning, business history, authority, content, systems, proof, and what we are beginning to call Business Archaeology.

Before we add more content, more tools, more schema, more blog posts, more social media, or more “AI optimization,” sometimes we need to understand what is already there.

What exists.

What is missing.

What is inconsistent.

What is outdated.

What is buried.

What has never been documented.

And what story the internet is currently telling about your business when you are not in the room to explain it yourself.

 

You do not have to choose

This may be the most important thing I can say in this article:

You do not have to choose between the free tools and the workbook.

I do not think you should.

Run Ahrefs.

Run HubSpot.

Try Search Atlas.

Test Pixelmojo.

If another reputable AI visibility checker catches your attention, run that one too.

Take screenshots.

Save the reports.

Keep a folder of the evidence.

Look at where the tools agree.

Look at where they disagree.

Ask why.

And if you have access to Google Search Console, look at your own first-party data as well, with one caution. Google’s generative-AI reporting gives website owners another source of information about how their sites appear in Google’s AI search experiences, but it has known limits. Impressions can count even when nobody scrolled far enough to see the AI answer, and every link inside an AI answer is assigned the position of the whole block. Google’s own John Mueller has acknowledged the report is inadequate for position-level reporting (Search Engine Journal, September 13, 2026). Treat one month of data as a data point, not a conclusion, and check it against your own testing.

No single vendor needs to become your oracle.

Triangulate.

That is what I would do.

The workbook is not designed to replace every tool.

It is designed to give you a process for investigating the larger question those tools are helping you ask:

How is my business currently being understood, recommended, cited, categorized, and remembered by AI systems—and what should I do about it?

 

Three ways to get help, and what each costs

There are three ways we are building support around this work. I want you to know exactly what each one is and costs.

 

1. The AI Visibility Workbook: $27. The DIY route described above. 
2.  Momentum Lab: ask questions while you work. Momentum Lab is for the person who is willing to do the work but does not want to work through every confusing moment alone. Bring your screenshots. Bring the reports. Bring the questions. Bring the “why is ChatGPT saying this?” and the “what do I do with this competitor showing up everywhere?” and the “I have three scores and none of them match” moments. It gives you a place to work through the process alongside us and get help interpreting what you are finding.
3. The AI Visibility Intensive: $297, 90 minutes. This is for the point where you want us to go deeper with you. Bring your completed workbook and we turn your findings into a prioritized 90-day roadmap. We look past the visibility score and into the actual business. What do you sell? What do you want to be known for? What are you trying to build next? What does the market currently understand about you? What do the machines understand? Where is the evidence breaking down? What is already working? What is missing? What resources do you have? And what is realistic to address over the next 90 days? Book the AI Visibility Intensive.
   You do not necessarily need a full audit or consulting engagement because one report confused you. Sometimes you need someone knowledgeable sitting beside you while you sort through the evidence.

   Maybe you do not need the workbook

   I am completely serious.

   If what you want is a quick snapshot of whether AI systems recognize your business, start with the free tools below.

   If you want ongoing automated monitoring across hundreds of prompts, competitors, and AI platforms, a professional monitoring platform may make more sense.

   If you want to understand the process for yourself, investigate your visibility manually, learn what the results mean, and walk away with a realistic plan for improving it, that is why I built the Momentive Media AI Visibility Workbook.

   And if, somewhere in that process, you decide you do not want to figure it all out alone, that is where we come in.

   There does not need to be a trick.

   There does not need to be a secret score hiding behind a sales call.

   And I do not need to pretend the free tools do not exist in order to explain why this work has value.

   Here they are.

   Use them.

   Compare them.

   Question the scores.

   Look underneath the score at the evidence that created it.

   Because in this new era of search, knowing whether the machine can see your business matters.

   Understanding why it sees what it sees matters even more.

   Once you have a score, here is what to do with it: Read “An AI Visibility Score Is a Starting Point. Here’s What to Do Next.”

 

Resources and AI visibility tools

Information and pricing referenced in this article were checked on September 18–19, 2026. AI-search products, model coverage, features, methodology, and pricing change quickly, so verify current details directly with each provider before making decisions.

Free and freemium tools

• Ahrefs Free AI Visibility Checker — Free snapshot across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google AI search experiences; no signup was required at the time of research; limited preview.
• HubSpot AI Search Grader — Free one-time brand assessment measuring sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice, and market competition; full results after a short form.
• Search Atlas AI Visibility Checker — Free report covering multiple AI engines with visibility, sentiment, competitive information, and prompt gaps.
• Pixelmojo Free AI Visibility Checker — Website-readiness diagnostic covering crawler access, structured data, llms.txt, accessibility, and related signals.
• Pixelmojo AI Citation Tracker — Low-cost, one-time citation test covering ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini, with Grok shown report-only.
• Arobis AI Visibility Checker — Free diagnostic focused on website, entity, content, and third-party signals; it does not query AI answers.
• Amplitude free AI Visibility report — One-time report on how your brand appears across top AI platforms.

Ongoing monitoring platforms

• Ahrefs Brand Radar — Paid monitoring add-on with competitive analysis, historical data, and custom prompt tracking.
• Scrunch Pricing and AI Visibility Platform — Professional AI visibility monitoring platform with multi-prompt and multi-model tracking.
• Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit — AI-search visibility monitoring within the broader Semrush SEO ecosystem.
• Amplitude AI Visibility — AI visibility monitoring inside Amplitude’s analytics platform, included in every plan with limited volumes on Free.

Primary research and guidance

• Google’s Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features — Google’s first-party guidance on generative AI search optimization, including its position on llms.txt.
• Google Search Documentation Updates — Google’s official documentation change log.
• Google Search Generative AI Performance Reporting Announcement — Documentation related to generative-AI performance reporting in Search Console.
• Search Engine Journal: Google Admits Search Console Reporting For AI Search Is Inadequate — Coverage of John Mueller’s comments on the report’s limits (September 13, 2026).
• Pixelmojo AI Visibility Tools — Pixelmojo’s collection of technical, citation, and AI-readiness diagnostics.
• Arobis AI Readiness Report — Vendor-published research and analysis based on websites assessed through Arobis’s methodology. As with any vendor-produced dataset, read the findings with the scoring framework and incentives in mind.

 

Momentive Media has no financial relationship with the tools listed above unless explicitly disclosed. They are included for education, comparison, and research—not as a blanket endorsement. Features, model coverage, pricing, and methodologies can change quickly.