You have probably never seen what ChatGPT says about your brand when a customer asks.
That blind spot is fixable in about 20 minutes.
A free AI visibility checker shows how AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini mention, recommend, and describe your brand. You can run one with a free tool, or do it by hand: pick five buyer questions, run them through each engine, and record whether you show up, how you are framed, and which sources get cited. That spreadsheet is your baseline.
What is an AI visibility checker?
An AI visibility checker is a tool or process that queries AI engines with real buyer questions and reports how your brand appears in the answers. It measures whether you are mentioned, whether you are recommended or just listed, which URLs get cited, and how the AI frames you. Some are instant free web tools; others are full monitoring platforms. The goal is the same: turn invisible AI answers into data you can act on.
The reason this matters is simple. Buyers now ask AI before they ask Google, and if the answer skips you, you never get the chance to compete. A checker tells you where you stand on that surface.
How to run a free AI visibility audit, step by step
You can audit your AI visibility by hand in about 20 minutes with nothing but ChatGPT, Perplexity, and a spreadsheet. The trick is to ask the questions your buyers actually ask, run them in more than one engine, and record the results consistently.
Use the real questions a buyer would type, not your brand name. Mix in your category, a use case, and a competitor comparison. For example: "best [category] tool for [persona]," "[your brand] vs [competitor]," and "what is the most affordable [category] software."
Run all five prompts in ChatGPT (with search enabled) and Perplexity. That is ten runs. Add Gemini or Google AI Overviews if you want broader coverage.
For every answer, capture: was your brand mentioned, was it recommended or just listed, which URLs were cited, and did the answer get any fact about you wrong. Put it all in a spreadsheet.
Count how many of the ten answers mentioned you. That percentage is your brand mention rate, and it is your baseline. Flag any engine where you are missing entirely, and any answer that described you incorrectly.
That is a complete starter audit. It will not be perfect, but it tells you the one thing you did not know an hour ago: whether AI engines see you at all.
What should an AI visibility audit measure?
A good audit scores more than "were you mentioned." The free checkers grade your brand across several weighted dimensions. HubSpot's AEO Grader, for example, scores sentiment, presence quality, brand recognition, share of voice, and market position, per its tool. Sentiment usually carries the most weight, because being mentioned badly can be worse than not being mentioned at all.
The five things worth tracking in any audit:
- Presence — are you mentioned at all, and how often across your prompt set
- Recommendation — are you actively recommended or just listed among options
- Citations — do AI answers cite your URLs as a source
- Sentiment — does the AI frame you positively, neutrally, or negatively
- Share of voice — how often you appear versus named competitors
Why you have to check every engine separately
The single biggest audit mistake is checking one engine and assuming the rest match. They do not. You can be dominant in ChatGPT and nearly invisible in Perplexity, because each engine uses different data sources and weights different signals. A brand that shows up in 60% of ChatGPT answers for a category might appear in only 15% of Perplexity answers, since Perplexity crawls the live web.
The best free AI visibility checkers
If you would rather not run the audit by hand, a few free tools do it for you. Each sends prompts to the major engines and returns a quick report. They are great for a one-time baseline.
- HubSpot AEO Grader — scores your brand across five dimensions using ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, based on how each model describes you.
- Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker — queries ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews with search-backed prompts, no signup required.
- Omnia — returns a free report with share of voice, citations, and ten real prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI surfaces.
Free checkers have a ceiling, though. They give you a snapshot, usually on a small prompt set, and they do not track change over time. For that you need ongoing monitoring.
When to move from a free checker to ongoing monitoring
A free checker answers "where do I stand today." Ongoing monitoring answers "am I getting better or worse," which is the question that actually drives work. Move to monitoring once you have a baseline and want to track more prompts, watch competitors, or catch the moment an AI starts describing you wrong.
This is where an API beats a one-time tool. MentionsAPI runs your full prompt set across every engine on a schedule, returns normalized mentions, citations, sentiment, and rank, and uses pay-as-you-go pricing with a free signup credit, so you can start at the cost of a free audit and scale only as you add prompts. If you want a dashboard instead of building your own, we compared the options in our roundup of the best AI visibility tools.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free AI visibility checker?
How do I check if my brand appears in ChatGPT?
How long does an AI visibility audit take?
What should I measure in an AI visibility audit?
Why is my brand visible in ChatGPT but not Perplexity?
Run your audit today
The hardest part of AI visibility is starting, and a free audit removes every excuse. Pick five questions your buyers ask, run them through ChatGPT and Perplexity, and write down what you see. In 20 minutes you will know more about your AI presence than most of your competitors know about theirs.
When you are ready to track it for real, MentionsAPI turns that one-time audit into a continuous one with a single call.