A free AI visibility checker can tell you roughly how often AI assistants mention your brand, and Ahrefs and Semrush both offer one. When you need to know who wins one specific buyer question, though, a paid run on seogeoaeo.ai's AI Answer Visibility is the better use of a small budget, because it names the brands that beat you and the sources behind them.
Below is what each free route actually gives you, and the point where one paid check pays for itself.
Free route 1: ask the assistants yourself
The cheapest check is a browser tab. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, switch on web search where the assistant offers it, and type the question a customer would type. Note whether you appear, where in the list, and whether your site is linked.
It works for a quick look. It gets messy once you want to compare runs, because you are copying answers by hand and your own chat history may shape the reply.
Free route 2: Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker
Ahrefs asks only for a brand name and no signup. It runs prompts based on real searches across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI results, then shows a limited preview: total mentions, a split by platform, your top topics, and the domains and pages cited next to you. Ahrefs calls it a one-time snapshot and points to its paid Brand Radar for history and competitor benchmarks.
Free route 3: Semrush AI visibility tool
Semrush asks for a domain and returns an AI Visibility Score from 0 to 100, plus mentions, citations, top cited pages, topics and a comparison with competitors, across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews. The paid AI Visibility Toolkit takes over for tracking.
What the free tools do not tell you
Both free tools work from their own prompt sets. You get a picture of your brand in general, not the answer to the question your best customers actually ask. If your sale depends on "which booking app is best for a small dental clinic", a general score will not show you who wins that exact query.
| Need | Free tools | seogeoaeo.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Rough sense of brand mentions | Yes | Not the aim |
| Your exact buyer question | No, their prompts | Yes, your wording |
| Who is named in your place | Partly, as competitor views | Yes, per answer |
| Google AI Overviews | Yes | No |
| Cost | Free | 120 credits per run |
When one paid run is worth it
seogeoaeo.ai's AI visibility check takes your site, your question and, if you like, your brand name. It asks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini with web search on, then lists for each answer whether you were named and in what position, whether any page of your site was cited, and which brands and sites were recommended instead.
That is worth paying for when:
- you are about to write a comparison or use-case page and want to know who it has to beat;
- a competitor keeps coming up in sales calls and you suspect assistants recommend them;
- you changed your pages and want to test the same question again.
The credit price is shown before the run, and a run that fails returns its credits. It does not track answers over time, so rerun the same question when you want a fresh sample. Answers vary between requests, which is why one run is a sample and not a fixed ranking.
A sensible order
Start free. Ask the assistants yourself and try the Ahrefs or Semrush checker to see where your brand stands in general. Then pick the two or three questions that bring in revenue and run those through seogeoaeo.ai to see exactly who is named instead of you.