7 min read
Four AI visibility tools signed up for and tested. Only one hands over a complete report without a card, and the free checkers answer a narrower question than they appear to.
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Run IvaBot →Four AI visibility tools were signed up for in August 2026 to answer one question: how much do you actually see before paying.
Otterly AI gives the most away. It asks for a name and an email, generates the prompts itself, and shows a complete working report with no card.
Peec AI and Semrush both stop at a payment screen. Peec runs six onboarding steps, shows a demo dashboard labelled Sample data, then asks for a card. Semrush leads from its free checker into a $199 a month bundle on the same seven-days-then-billed terms.
Free brand checkers are a separate thing and they are genuinely free: they answer whether AI platforms mention a brand. Prompt-level tracking, meaning your own questions run on a schedule with the answers kept, is the part that always costs money.
| Tool | Price published | Report without a card | What you actually see for free |
|---|---|---|---|
| Otterly AI | yes | yes | brand coverage, share of voice, sentiment, cited domains and pages, prompt-level detail |
| Rankscale | yes | trial | pricing and plan limits |
| Peec AI | yes | no | six onboarding steps and a demo dashboard labelled Sample data |
| Semrush | yes | no | a free brand checker, then a paid bundle |
| Profound AI | no | no | a demo request form |
Short answer: Peec AI's seven-day trial asks for a card before it shows any real data, and the charge starts automatically on day eight.
Several published comparisons state that the Peec AI trial needs no card. That is wrong as of August 2026. Signing up as an agency runs through six onboarding steps, shows a demo dashboard labelled Sample data, and stops at a payment screen that asks for a card before any real tracking begins. The screen states seven days free, then $296.45 per month from the following week.
That figure is worth reading twice. The advertised Essentials price is $245 a month, and $296.45 is what a customer in the EU actually pays once 21 percent VAT is added. Every comparison in this category quotes the pre-tax figure.
The demo dashboard carries one more line worth knowing: its numbers come from the API, and access to the interface-scraped data that the company markets as its method begins only after onboarding is complete.
Tested by signing up and stopping at the card screen. The screenshots in this section are from that session.
Short answer: prompt generation works well across the tools tested, and automatic competitor detection is the part that fails.
Two tools were signed up for during this review, and both auto-generate the prompt list rather than asking for one. Peec AI proposed five topics and forty prompts, all specific to the market being tracked. Otterly AI proposed fifteen prompts and they matched the category closely, including questions about pay-as-you-go tools, auditing a site without a subscription, and paying only for what you use.
That settles a complaint repeated across community threads all year, which is that these tools make you type every prompt by hand. It is out of date.
Competitor detection is a different story. Otterly AI, asked to analyse an SEO tool, returned seven medical device manufacturers as the closest competitors and ranked the brand first among them. The list had to be replaced by hand with the actual competitors. A brand ranking built on a misread category is worse than no ranking, because it looks precise.
The practical rule that follows: accept the generated prompts, check the generated competitors before trusting any share-of-voice number built on them.
Short answer: of the three signed up for during this review, only Otterly AI produced a real report without a card.
Peec AI runs six onboarding steps and stops at a payment screen. Semrush leads from its free checker into a $199 a month bundle with the same seven-day-then-billed structure. Otterly AI asks for a name and an email, generates the prompts, and shows the working report: brand coverage against named competitors, share of voice, sentiment, the domains being cited for those prompts, and which prompts drive them.
That last screen is the reason to run it even if the subscription is never bought. It names the pages the models quote in your category, which is the list worth acting on.
Every review of this category quotes the brand tiers. The agency tiers are priced differently and are cheaper per prompt.
| Plan | Monthly | Yearly | Credits | Tracked prompts | Projects | Cost per prompt, yearly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Essentials | $245 | $205 | 10,000 | about 111 | 3 | $1.85 |
| Growth | $495 | $420 | 25,000 | about 278 | 10 | $1.51 |
| Scale | $795 | $675 | 65,000 | about 722 | 25 | $0.93 |
Client seats are unlimited on all three tiers. Three things follow. Paying yearly saves about 16 percent. The agency route costs less per prompt than the $95 brand tier, which works out at $1.90. And the self-serve trial exists only on Essentials: both higher tiers lead with a setup call, with the trial offered as a small link underneath.
Model access splits the same way. All three tiers cover six engines through interface scraping, and the seven API-based models are locked to the top tier.
Short answer: run the free report first, act on the citation list, and only then decide whether a subscription is worth it.
The most useful screen found across these signups was not a score. It was the list of domains and pages the models cite when answering the tracked prompts. That list names where to get mentioned, which is the work that changes the answer. A subscription measures whether the work landed; it does not do the work.
For anyone comparing prices rather than trials, the full pricing comparison across nine tools is in Best AI visibility tracking tools for startups on a tight budget.
Four: the Ahrefs checker, the Semrush checker, the HubSpot grader and Google Search Console for your own site. Only the first needs no account. A fifth route is a full trial: Otterly AI gives a complete report for seven days without a card.
Paid buys history and scheduling, not better answers. If the free check shows the brand absent everywhere, paying changes nothing until the content and mentions change.
Yes. The Ahrefs one needs no signup, the Semrush one needs an account, and the HubSpot grader gives a one-off snapshot. A free AI visibility checker answers whether a brand appears at all, which is the right first question.
Peec AI pricing runs $95, $245 and $495 a month on the brand tiers, and $245, $495 and $795 on the agency tiers, dropping to $205, $420 and $675 when paid yearly. VAT is added on top for EU customers.
Otterly AI pricing starts at $29 a month for 15 prompts, with Gemini and Google AI Mode charged separately.
Profound pricing is not published. The figures in circulation are about $99 for a ChatGPT-only starter tier and about $399 for Growth, which includes three seats.
Start with a free AI visibility checker to see whether the brand appears, then run the one trial that needs no card. Only pay once there is something to track.
There are free brand checkers, and one tool in this test gave a full report on a trial without a card. Continuous tracking is paid everywhere.
Yes, as of August 2026, despite several published comparisons saying otherwise.
No. A name and an email were enough for a complete report.
VAT. The list price is quoted before tax, and an EU customer sees 21 percent added at checkout.
Yes. Both tools tested generated a sensible prompt list automatically, so the old complaint about typing every prompt by hand is out of date.
Check it. In this test one tool returned seven medical device manufacturers as the closest competitors to an SEO product and ranked the brand first among them.
Every finding on this page comes from signing up in August 2026 and screenshotting what appeared, not from vendor documentation or other reviews. Where a figure could not be verified without paying, that is stated rather than filled in.
Cite as: IvaBot, How Can I Check AI Visibility for Free? Four Tools Tested Without a Card, August 2026.
Last verified: August 2026.
Run one free report, take the list of cited pages, and work on getting mentioned there. That is the part that changes the answer.
IvaBot gives three free credits with no card, checks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI on your own prompts, and keeps the answer text so you can read what the model said. Check your page for free.
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