Best Free AI Tools for SEO, Matched to the Job

Free tools are good at mechanical questions with yes or no answers. Can a crawler fetch the page? Is the price in the HTML? Is the page indexed? Those questions also happen to be where the evidence is strongest, because the AI companies document the mechanism themselves.

Here are the jobs, ranked by how much evidence sits behind each one, with the free tool category that handles it.

Jobs 1 to 3 are access. They work by removing blocks, and you control them. Job 4 is accuracy, which is what most brands actually complain about. For a fuller tour of tool types, see what each kind of free GEO tool checks.

You need a terminal and 20 minutes. Replace yourdomain.com with your site and pick a page that matters, such as pricing.

1. Read your robots.txt.

curl -s https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt

Look for groups naming OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot, bingbot and User-agent: *.

2. Match each rule to the operator's own docs. OpenAI's crawler page says GPTBot governs training use, OAI-SearchBot governs ChatGPT search, and "each setting is independent of the others". Blocking GPTBot does not remove you from ChatGPT search. Allowing it does not get you in.

3. Request the page with a crawler user agent and check the status code.

curl -sI -A "OAI-SearchBot" https://yourdomain.com/pricing

4. Fetch the raw HTML and search it for a fact that matters.

curl -s https://yourdomain.com/pricing | grep -i "per month"

5. Search the same HTML for suppression controls: noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet and data-nosnippet. Google and Bing document these as the on-page controls that keep content out of AI answers.

6. Open Google Search Console. Run URL Inspection on the page for index status, then open the generative AI performance report. Where your property shows the AI features inclusion setting, confirm it is on, including on child properties that inherit from a parent.

7. Open Bing Webmaster Tools and check the AI Performance report. The walkthrough for free Copilot citation data in Bing covers exporting grounding queries.

Most results map to one clear action.

• robots.txt allows a search bot, curl returns 200. The first gate is probably open. Move on.
• robots.txt allows it, curl returns 403, 429 or a challenge page. Your firewall or CDN is turning the crawler away. OpenAI says eligibility needs both robots.txt permission and a host or CDN that allows its published searchbot IPs.
• The fact is missing from raw HTML but visible in the browser. JavaScript renders it. Vercel's crawler study found ChatGPT and Claude crawlers fetch JavaScript files but don't execute them. Googlebot renders, so this mostly affects non-Google engines. Fix it with server-side rendering of that content.
• You find an unintended noindex or data-nosnippet. Remove it. These often come from a template.
• URL Inspection says not indexed. Google states a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Fix indexing first.

One caveat on step 3: your laptop is not OpenAI's IP range. A firewall may treat a spoofed user agent differently from the real crawler. A 403 is a strong warning. A 200 is encouraging, not proof.

Free tools cannot see the part you most want to see. No public tool shows whether a page was retrieved for a real user's question. Engines rewrite prompts into their own search queries, and retrieval fires at the model's discretion. As of October 2026, Google's generative AI report in Search Console shows impressions with no clicks, no CTR and no position. That is why there's no AI rank to track, free or paid.

Prompt research has the same ceiling. A list of buyer questions is useful for testing answers, but it is a proxy for queries nobody outside the engine sees.

Skip free tools that grade these:

• Schema. Google says structured data isn't required for generative AI search. Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages adding schema against matched controls and found AI Overviews citations fell 4.6%. Existing markup does no harm, so there is no need to remove it. It is simply not a lever.
• llms.txt. Google says Search ignores it, and no other engine documents reading it.
• E-E-A-T scores. Google says E-E-A-T "isn't a specific ranking factor". There is no score to improve.
• AI-friendly writing or chunking. Google says you don't need to write in a specific way for generative AI search.

A free tool that reports any of these as a visibility score is selling a number with nothing behind it.

Once access is clean, the next question is what AI answers say about you. Consoles don't tell you that. AI platforms do get specific facts wrong about specific brands: an old price, a retired product, a competitor's feature.

Do it by hand first. Write three questions a buyer would ask, ask each engine logged out with memory off, and compare every stated fact with your own site. Then fix contradictions on your site, because a page stating one price on pricing and another in the footer gives engines two answers. Stating the fact plainly in fetchable HTML gives the engine a sentence it can quote.

The free checker on this site runs up to three buyer questions and scores the answers in a few minutes. It is a snapshot, not continuous tracking. If you later compare paid options, this rundown of AI visibility tools and the guide on what to fix first explain what to expect.