Key takeaways
- Citations.io does not offer a free plan. Its cheapest entry point is a 5-day trial that costs $5, not $0. (https://citations.io/pricing)
- Three tools in this space have a genuinely free, ongoing tier with no time limit: Promptwatch's Explore plan, LLMrefs' single-keyword plan, and Mangools' AI Search Grader.
- Otterly.AI and Wellows offer no-cost, no-credit-card trials or one-off scans that are useful for a quick sanity check, even though their ongoing plans require payment.
- Free tiers are capped on purpose, usually to 1 keyword, 10 prompts, or a single scan, so treat them as a way to validate the category before buying, not as a permanent solution.
- Because AI engines cite far fewer sources than Google (ChatGPT averages around 5 sources per response, AI Overviews around 10), getting your testing methodology right before you invest matters more than it does in traditional rank tracking.
Why Citations.io isn't actually free
If you've been searching for a free way to try Citations.io, I have some mildly annoying news: there isn't one. The pricing page lists a 5-day trial for $5, which is a trial with a price tag, not a free plan. After that you're into Starter at $39/month (25 tracked prompts, 4 engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude), Growth at $69/month, or Pro at $99/month with API access and hallucination alerts.
That's a reasonable product for what it does. But if you just want to know whether your brand shows up in ChatGPT or Perplexity before you commit a card number to anything, $5 is a weird amount of friction for what should be a five-minute gut check. So I went looking for tools that let you test the actual premise, does AI visibility tracking tell you anything useful, without paying a cent.
A quick note on terminology, because review sites conflate this constantly: a free trial and a free plan are not the same thing. A trial ends and asks for a card. A free plan just... keeps working. Only a handful of tools below have the latter. I'll flag which is which.
What actually matters when you're testing for free
Before the list, worth understanding why this category is worth testing carefully rather than just picking whichever tool ranks first on Google. AI answers have far fewer citation slots than a traditional search results page. Promptwatch's data on average sources per response shows ChatGPT typically cites around 5 sources per web-search answer, while Perplexity sits close to 10 and Google AI Overviews averages around 10 as well (Promptwatch Data). Microsoft Copilot is the outlier, swinging from under 2 sources to nearly 17 within a few weeks, which tells you Microsoft is still reworking how Copilot retrieves and cites content.
Fewer slots means the stakes of "am I in the answer or not" are higher than they'd be for, say, page 2 of Google. That's exactly why testing a tracker for free before paying is worth the extra step, rather than just trusting whichever vendor's landing page looked most credible.
The 5 best free Citations.io alternatives
1. Promptwatch (Explore plan) — the only real perpetual free tier with multi-model upside
Promptwatch has a free tier called Explore that lets you track 10 prompts on ChatGPT indefinitely, no time limit, no credit card. That alone puts it ahead of most of this list, since it's an actual free plan rather than a disguised trial.
What makes it worth testing beyond the free tier: Promptwatch scrapes the real user-facing interfaces of ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, and Claude rather than relying only on API sampling, which matters because what a user actually sees in ChatGPT can differ from what the API returns. Once you're ready to pay, Essential starts at $95/month for 1 project, 50 prompts, and 6,000 responses a month, with a 7-day free trial layered on top of the free plan if you want to test the paid features first. It's rated 4.7/5 on G2, and used by 1,840+ brands including Duolingo, Yelp, and Typeform.
The reason I'd start here if you're serious about eventually paying for something: the free tier only covers ChatGPT, but the paid product covers crawler logs (which AI bots are hitting your site and what they read), Reddit and YouTube citation tracking, and Content Agents that draft and publish AEO-optimized articles. So the free tier is a real test of the underlying data quality, not a stripped-down demo of a different product.
2. LLMrefs — free forever, but only 1 keyword
[tool:llmrefs] LLMrefs has a genuine, permanent free plan: $0, one tracked keyword, unlimited seats. No expiry date, no trial clock. If you want to track exactly one query, like your brand name or your flagship product, this is the most honest free tier on the list because it never asks you to upgrade to keep using it.
The catch is obvious: one keyword tells you almost nothing about your overall AI visibility. It's fine for spot-checking a single high-priority query, but if you're trying to understand your footprint across a category of prompts, you'll hit the ceiling in about five minutes. Paid plans start around $79/month and track keywords across 10+ engines.
3. Mangools AI Search Grader — no signup required at all
[tool:mangools] This is the fastest way to get a number. Mangools' AI Search Grader is completely free with no sign-up for basic use, and analyzes your brand plus competitors across models like ChatGPT (GPT-5 Nano), DeepSeek, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, and Meta Llama. Without an account you get 3 models; creating a free account, still no credit card, unlocks all 7 and more searches per day.
This one is best treated as a diagnostic snapshot rather than a tracker. It doesn't run on a schedule, so you won't see trend lines. But if your only question right now is "does any AI model mention my brand at all," this answers it in under a minute. Mangools also sells a paid ongoing tracker, AI Search Watcher, if the grader convinces you it's worth monitoring continuously.
4. Otterly.AI — the cheapest honest trial, if not a free plan
[tool:otterly-ai] Otterly.AI doesn't have a free plan, but it has the most useful free trial in this list: 7 days, no credit card required, and it's the tool most third-party roundups point to as the rational first step before spending real money. Otterly's own help center states 7 days explicitly, worth noting because several review sites incorrectly claim 14.
During the trial you get full access to Lite-tier features: daily tracking across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, plus a Brand Visibility Index and a GEO audit. Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Mode are paid add-ons even on paid plans, so if those specific engines matter to you, check they're covered before you commit. After the trial, Lite starts at $29/month, which is genuinely one of the cheapest entry points in the whole category.
5. Wellows free checkers — narrow, but zero friction
[tool:wellows] Wellows doesn't have a free ongoing plan either, but it publishes standalone free tools that need no signup: a Perplexity Visibility Tracker and an AI Overviews Tracker, each a single-domain check. Wellows built the Perplexity tool on an analysis of over 800,000 Perplexity answers, and the underlying data is genuinely interesting on its own: the average Perplexity answer cites 4.82 sources, 76% of brand references are implicit (mentioned via a third-party site rather than the brand's own domain), and Reddit is the single most-cited domain.
One stat from that same research is worth remembering regardless of which tool you pick: Perplexity never cites 89.1% of the websites ChatGPT cites for the same question. Visibility on one AI engine simply doesn't transfer to another, which is itself a good argument for testing more than one tracker rather than assuming a single free scan tells the whole story.
Comparison table: free access at a glance
| Tool | Type of free access | Engines covered on free tier | Best for | Paid plan starts at |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Promptwatch | Perpetual free plan (10 prompts) | ChatGPT | Testing real UI-based tracking before scaling up | $95/mo |
| LLMrefs | Perpetual free plan (1 keyword) | 5+ engines for that keyword | Watching one specific query long-term | $79/mo |
| Mangools AI Search Grader | Free, no signup | 3 free / 7 with account | A one-time gut check across multiple models | $0 for the grader itself |
| Otterly.AI | 7-day free trial, no card | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot | Cheapest honest ongoing tracker after testing | $29/mo |
| Wellows | Free single-engine scans | Perplexity, AI Overviews | A fast, narrow check with no commitment | $29/mo |
| Citations.io (for reference) | $5, 5-day trial | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude | Not actually free | $39/mo |
How to actually use these before you pay for anything
Run the Mangools grader first. It costs nothing, takes about a minute, and tells you whether your brand shows up in any AI model at all. If the answer is a flat no across every model, that's useful information on its own, it means you're starting from zero and any tracker you buy afterward should be judged on how well it helps you close that gap, not just on how prettily it reports the zero.
If you get some mentions, move to something with a real ongoing free tier, LLMrefs for a single keyword or Promptwatch's Explore plan for 10 ChatGPT prompts, and let it run for a week or two. You want to see whether your visibility is stable day to day or noisy, because a single snapshot can mislead you either way.
Then, if you're leaning toward paying, use Otterly's 7-day trial or Promptwatch's 7-day trial on paid features to test the things free tiers can't show you: multi-engine coverage, competitor comparisons, and whatever content or action recommendations the tool generates. This is also the point where crawler logs and citation source data become relevant, since those explain why you're visible or not, not just whether you are, and no free tier in this category currently includes them.
One thing to watch for regardless of which tool you settle on: content type matters a lot in what gets cited. In July 2026, product pages overtook listicles as the most-cited content format in Google AI Overviews, and ChatGPT's citations that same month were led by product pages at roughly a third of all citations, with listicles the fastest-growing format (AI Overviews citation types, July 2026, ChatGPT citation types, July 2026). If a tool's free scan tells you you're invisible, check whether your content even exists in the format AI engines are currently favoring before blaming the tracker.
If you want to browse beyond these five, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com lists a wider set of platforms by category, and ai-rank-tools.com is worth checking if you specifically want rank-tracking-style tools rather than full visibility platforms.
The bottom line
Citations.io is a fine paid product, but its $5 trial isn't a real free option, and you shouldn't have to pay anything to answer the basic question of whether AI mentions your brand. Start with Mangools' free grader for a one-minute answer, use LLMrefs or Promptwatch's Explore plan if you want to watch a query over time without a credit card, and only step up to a paid trial once you already know the category is worth your budget. That order gets you the same information Citations.io would eventually show you, minus the $5 and minus the risk of committing to a tool before you know what good data even looks like for your brand.