AI Visibility Tools With a Free Trial or Free Tier (2026): Two Real Free Plans, Four Verified Trials, and What Each Lets You Test

01The short answer

If you want to try an AI visibility tracker without a card or a call, AthenaHQ’s free plan is the most useful thing on the market: 300 credits across five engines including Claude, permanent, with the product’s gap view included. BrandPeek’s free plan is the other real one, smaller and newer, with no independent review behind the product yet. If you want a timed trial of a paid tier, SE Ranking’s 14 days and Scrunch’s 7 days are the two with a length printed on the page; Peec and Otterly have the button and the promise, and we could not read a length.

Whichever you pick, the free allowance buys a snapshot. The thing these tools are for is the comparison between runs, and no free plan is large enough to show one convincingly. Section six is about using a trial to test that anyway.

02Free plans and trials, as printed on the day

03The two real free plans

AthenaHQ. The plans page on the day lists the free tier and a $25 line item alongside the $295 Starter; our AthenaHQ review records the free plan at 300 credits, one credit per response, five engines including Claude, and 3,600 credits on Starter with ten models. The arithmetic: 300 responses is 60 prompts on five engines once, or 12 prompts on five engines five times, which is the smallest run that shows week-over-week movement. The review base is small and strong, 4.9 on 48 G2 reviews, and the jump from free to $295 is the complaint. For a founder who wants to see Claude’s answers without paying anyone, this is the plan.

BrandPeek. The pricing page: “Start free, then choose the plan that fits your AI monitoring needs,” $0, 25 credits, “Free plan includes ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, with up to 2 providers per topic,” and “Free plan: 30 days” of data retention against unlimited on paid. BrandPeek’s own help article gives the credit formula, queries times the sum of model credit costs, so 25 credits is roughly eight queries on two models, once. Our BrandPeek review found no independent review of the product anywhere on the day, so the free plan is also the only way to find out whether it works.

04The trials, and what each lets you test

SE Ranking, 14 days, no credit card. The AI Search Toolkit page and the MCP page both print it, and the MCP page adds that the trial includes 100,000 API credits “to run real queries, connect your assistant, and start using live data from day one”. What you can test: AI visibility on AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini inside an SEO platform, and whether the MCP server answers a competitor AI search report from Claude or Cursor. What you cannot: Claude coverage, which the FAQ says is coming. The SE Ranking review explains the two-product split you will meet on day one.

Scrunch, 7 days, no credit card. The pricing page prints “Start 7-day free trial” and “No credit card required”. What you can test: the Core tier, 125 prompts on four engines, the interface reviewers prefer to Profound’s, the API. What you cannot: Claude, Meta AI, AI Mode or Grok, which are Enterprise, or the agency tier. Seven days is one run and one comparison; plan the prompts before you start the clock. The Scrunch review has the tier detail and the Sitecore ownership.

Peec, trial button, length not stated. The pricing page carries “Start free trial” and no duration in the text we could read; the plan tiers are $80, $205 and $420 annual with three models of your choice from six. What a trial would test: the cleanest tracker interface in the category on ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini, and a documented read-and-write MCP. What it would not: Claude, which is Enterprise only. Ask the length before you start.

Otterly, trial for new users, length not stated. The pricing FAQ: “Yes, we provide a free trial for new users. This allows you to explore our platform and its features without any commitment.” No duration printed. What a trial would test: the $29 entry tier’s fifteen prompts on ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. What it would not, unless the trial includes add-ons: AI Mode, Gemini and Claude, which are priced separately at $9 to $439 by tier.

05Not verified, and why

Rankscale. Its pricing page has an FAQ entry headed “Is there a free trial?” and the answer did not render in the text we fetched, so we do not know. The hub records an Essentials tier listed at $20 and Pro at $99 for 1,200 credits, which is the cheapest paid route to seventeen engines with Claude on every plan; whether you can try it first is a question for Rankscale.

Semrush AI Toolkit. The pricing URL returned a 404 on the day, with generic Semrush “Start free trial” links on the error page. Semrush famously trials its SEO platform; whether that trial includes the AI Toolkit at $99 per domain we could not confirm from the page.

Profound, HubSpot AEO, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Searchable, Brand24. We reviewed all five this month, priced on the day, and did not re-fetch their pages for trial wording for this article. Our Profound pricing page records no trial and a Starter at $99 billed yearly; HubSpot AEO’s $50 tier and Ahrefs’ $50 check packs are cheap enough that the question matters less. We would rather list them here than print a trial that may not exist.

06The arithmetic of a free allowance

Free plans in this category are metered in credits, and a credit means something different on each. Here is the same programme, ten unbranded buying questions on every engine the free part covers, priced in each vendor’s own unit using the numbers on its pages.

The pattern: AthenaHQ’s free plan is the only one that buys enough runs to see a comparison, and it does so on five engines including Claude. BrandPeek’s free plan is a taste. The timed trials are large enough for two runs if you plan them. Our free tools are single runs by design, with the daily caps printed on the page, because the paid product is the history.

One more number worth knowing before a trial. On our own measured run on 4 September 2026, the same 21 prompts produced admissible answers on 10 of 15 Claude samples, 15 of 16 Gemini, 7 of 16 ChatGPT and 3 of 13 Perplexity, because answers that did not search, cited nothing or named no product were graded out. A trial that counts every response as a measurement will show you a bigger, tidier number than a tool that grades them. Ask which yours does.

07How to use a trial without fooling yourself

Decide the prompts before the clock starts. Ten unbranded buying questions, the ones your buyers would type: best tool for the job, alternatives to the rival you lose to, the pricing question. Branded prompts test whether the engine knows you, which is a different and easier question.

Run them on day one and again before the trial ends. The product you are evaluating is the comparison. Watch how the tool reports the difference: does it show you a delta with the sample size behind it, or a score that moved? Our methodology page explains why a rate over ten samples cannot move by less than a tenth, and any tool that shows you otherwise is showing you noise.

Check the engine list against your buyers. A trial that excludes Claude tells you nothing about Claude. A tool that measures ChatGPT without web search on some runs is measuring training data. Read the disclosure, if there is one.

Ask what happens at the end. Whether the trial converts to a paid plan automatically, whether your data is kept, and whether the free tier, where one exists, keeps history. BrandPeek’s free plan keeps 30 days.

08Where we stand

Answer Radar has no free tier and no free trial, and we are not going to dress a demo up as one. Every measured sample costs a credit against a real engine, and a trial that measures too little to compare would teach you nothing about the product. What is free is the tools shelf, and none of it needs an account: the AI visibility checker runs one buyer question on a real engine and shows the unedited answer; the query fan-out generator shows the searches an engine actually ran before answering; the gap analyzer compares you with one competitor on five prompts; the crawlability checker reads your robots.txt for the AI bots. Each is the free version of one Answer Radar view, and each says what one run cannot tell you.

09Frequently asked questions