Free AI Brand Monitoring Across Several Engines

A free check answers three questions per engine: does it name you, does it state your facts correctly, and which pages does it lean on. That is enough to find the problems worth fixing.

It can't tell you your rank inside an AI answer. No such number exists to verify. Google's first-party report exposes impressions only, and OpenAI describes ChatGPT's ranking as "multiple factors" with no detail.

It also can't see every answer. Retrieval is discretionary on every platform as of October 2026. ChatGPT decides when to search, and Claude.ai search is a user toggle. An answer without citations may come from the model's training data, which has a fixed cutoff. If you want the full picture of what to track, see what an AI brand monitoring setup should cover.

Budget about an hour for the first run. A spreadsheet is the only tool you need.

1. Write 5 to 10 buyer questions. Mix brand questions ("What does [your brand] cost?") with category questions ("best payroll software for a 20-person agency"). Category questions show whether you get named at all.
2. Use clean sessions. Log out or use a private window. In ChatGPT, turn memory off, because OpenAI says saved memories can shape how it rewrites a search query. Note the date and plan for every run.
3. Run each question on each engine. Use chatgpt.com, google.com (look for an AI Overview, then open the AI Mode tab), gemini.google.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai and copilot.microsoft.com. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode "may use different models and techniques", so log them as two engines.
4. Record one row per answer. Columns: engine, question, date, named (yes or no), position of the mention in the text, each fact stated, whether each fact is right, cited URLs, and whether the answer showed any citations.
5. Flag wrong facts precisely. Write the claim as the engine stated it next to the true value. "Says the plan costs $79, real price $49" is fixable. "Pricing is off" isn't.
6. Repeat monthly with the same questions. Changing questions breaks the comparison.

For engine-specific detail, see monitoring ChatGPT, the free Perplexity check and tracking Gemini answers.

Engines draw on different indexes, so they fail in different ways. Averaging them erases the failure you need to see.

In OtterlyAI's 2026 experiment, Microsoft Copilot produced 2,718 of the 3,934 citations Otterly tracked for one test site, while ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and AI Mode almost never cited it. Google had deindexed the site, and Bing had kept it. A blended score would have shown a middling number and pointed nowhere.

Citation units also differ. Anthropic's API cites short text spans, while Perplexity cites whole sources. There is no shared denominator to average.

So report per engine. If ChatGPT names you and Copilot doesn't, the next move is to check your Bing index status, not to rewrite your homepage.

Your own check samples answers. Two free reports add data the engines record themselves.

Google Search Console

The generative AI performance report shows impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode, split by page, country, date and device. It shows no clicks, no CTR and no position. Treat it as "did Google show my pages in AI features", nothing more. Google also confirmed a bug that depressed impressions from around 12 August 2026, so read trends across that window with care.

Bing Webmaster Tools

The AI Performance report covers Microsoft Copilot, Bing AI summaries and select partner integrations. It shows total citations, cited pages and grounding queries, meaning the phrases the AI actually searched when it used your content. Microsoft says the grounding query data is a sample. Citation Share is, in Microsoft's words, an observational metric and not a ranking system.

These counts can dwarf a manual sample. Otterly reported that Microsoft's report credited its test site with 42,817 citations, more than ten times the 3,934 its prompt tracker logged. The time windows may differ, but the lesson holds: where an engine publishes its own count, that count sees more.

Read each engine's row on its own, then act on what you control.

• Not named, no citations shown. The answer may come from training data. As of October 2026, OpenAI lists a 31 August 2025 cutoff for ChatGPT's Instant path. Nothing you publish today changes that answer.
• Not named, other sites cited. Those cited pages are the route into the answer. Being named on them is associated with appearing, with no guaranteed effect.
• Not named anywhere on one engine. Check access. Your robots.txt must allow that engine's search crawler (OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot). Your firewall or CDN must not return 403 to it. Blocking GPTBot affects training only.
• Wrong fact. Check your own site for the same fact stated two ways. Then state the correct fact plainly in HTML that loads without JavaScript, since most AI crawlers don't run it. That gives the engine a sentence it can quote.

If one error repeats across engines, read why the same wrong fact spreads and what you can and can't do about made-up facts.

Be plain about what a manual check misses.

• The prompts aren't the real queries. OpenAI says ChatGPT search rewrites a question into one or more targeted queries. Google may fan out across subtopics. Only Bing exposes the queries actually run.
• Results vary run to run. One answer is one sample. Run important questions more than once.
• Logged-in answers differ. Memory and custom instructions change results, so your sales team may see something else.
• It doesn't scale. Six engines by ten questions is sixty answers a month to read and log.

None of this makes the check useless. It makes it a snapshot, not tracking.

If logging answers by hand is the bottleneck, the free checker on this site runs up to three buyer questions for you and scores each engine separately. It's a one-off snapshot.

For repeat checks, the 99Visibility Free plan covers 5 keywords, 1 audit a month and 1 brand on 2 platforms, with no card. Keep the Search Console and Bing reports running alongside either option. For more low-cost setups, see free ChatGPT brand tracking.