Answers
What are the best free AI search graders?
A free AI search grader runs a small set of category questions through AI answer engines and reports whether your brand is named. They differ in how many engines they query, whether they compare you to named competitors, and whether you can see the raw answers behind the score.
Updated 2026-09-23
TL;DR
Key takeaways
- Any grader is a single sample, not a trend; treat the number as a starting point.
- The useful ones name your competitors and show the prompts they ran.
- Engine count matters: a one-engine grade tells you about one engine.
- If you cannot see the raw answers, you cannot act on the score.
- All free graders exist to start a sales conversation, including ours.
What to look for in a free grader
Judge a free AI search grader on engine coverage, competitor comparison, prompt transparency, and whether you keep the output.
A score with no method behind it is entertainment. The graders worth your email address show the exact prompts they ran, the engines they hit, and how your competitors placed on the same prompts, because that is the part you can act on.
Keeping the output matters more than people expect. A PDF or a permanent page gives you a baseline to compare against in six weeks; a number on a screen that disappears on refresh does not.
- How many engines, reported separately?
- Does it compare you to competitors you name?
- Can you see the prompts and the raw answers?
- Do you keep a PDF or a permanent link?
- How long does it take, and what does it ask for?
How the main free graders differ
Free graders split between brand-level scores from large marketing platforms and prompt-level reports from AEO specialists.
Platform graders, such as HubSpot's AI search grader, are built for volume. They ask for very little, return a clean brand-level score, and are designed to route you into a much larger product suite. They are a good sanity check and a poor diagnostic.
Specialist graders from AEO vendors go narrower and deeper: real prompts, named competitors, per-engine breakdowns. They ask for more information and give you something you can hand to a content team.
- Platform graders — minimal input, brand-level score, limited method detail.
- Vendor graders — prompt-level detail, competitor comparison, per-engine results.
- Manual checks — free and unlimited, but unrepeatable and slow past 20 prompts.
What the Attribufi grader does
The Attribufi grader runs six category-relevant buyer prompts against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, scores citation rate and competitor share of voice, and returns a PDF plus a permanent shareable report page.
It takes about twenty seconds. You give a brand, a domain, a category and up to six competitors; it fires the prompts in parallel, counts mentions for every brand in the set, and combines citation rate (60%) with share of voice (40%) into an index out of 100.
It is deliberately one sample. The paid product runs multiple samples per prompt with confidence intervals on a weekly schedule, because single-run answers vary and a one-off score should not be treated as a trend.
- Four answer engines, reported separately.
- Your named competitors scored on the same prompts.
- Every prompt shown, no hidden method.
- Branded PDF plus a permanent page you can share.
What to do with a bad score
Treat a low grade as a retrieval problem first: engines could not find an extractable, attributable answer from you for those prompts.
The instinct after a low score is to publish more. The higher-leverage move is to restructure what already ranks: lead each section with a one-sentence direct answer, name your brand consistently instead of using pronouns, and attach concrete specifics an engine can restate without hedging.
Then re-run in four to six weeks. If share of voice has not moved on the prompts you targeted, the gap is usually third-party sources rather than your own pages.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Are free AI search graders accurate?
They are accurate about the run they performed. Because AI answers vary between runs, a single-sample grade carries real variance, which is why any grader result should be read as a baseline rather than a precise measurement.
Is the HubSpot AI search grader free?
Yes, HubSpot offers a free AI search grader that returns a brand-level visibility score. It is a quick sanity check; it does not give you prompt-level or competitor-level detail to act on.
Do free graders require a credit card?
Reputable ones do not. The Attribufi grader asks only for your name, work email, brand, domain, category and competitors, and returns the full report immediately.
How often should I re-run a grader?
Every four to six weeks is enough to see the effect of a content change. If you need a weekly trend line with confidence intervals, that is what a paid tracking platform is for.
Next step
See where your brand actually stands.
The free grader runs a sample prompt battery against your domain across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, then returns a scored report you can download as a PDF. No credit card.