“Cheapest” splits two ways in AI visibility tools: cheapest to start, and cheapest over a year. The subscription platforms — Searchable and similar — start around $125/month and rise with every engine you add, which is £1,200+ a year before you count add-ons. The genuinely cheap option is to check free and pay once only when you want the full picture. Here's the honest breakdown.
The cheapest genuine option, tier by tier
- Free — the technical check. A 137-signal AI-readiness scan with a score and your top issues. No signup, no card. If all you want is “can AI read and trust my site?”, this costs nothing and is the honest starting point.
- £5 — the full technical report. Every signal explained with fix instructions, plus your llms.txt and schema templates. One-off, per site.
- £19 — the citation audit. Twelve real buyer questions asked live across all five major engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok) — 60 real answers. The £5 report is included. This is the cheapest way to see actual AI answers about your business, not a subscription dashboard.
- £45 — the three-pack. Three audits with the same locked questions: audit, fix, prove it. Cheaper per run, and still no recurring bill.
The catch on the “free” tools
Some “free AI visibility scores” are free because they never query an AI engine at all — they read your domain and have one model write a plausible essay about your visibility, gated behind your email, ending in a sales call. Free, but worthless as measurement. If a report shows verdicts but no actual quoted answers, that's the tell. (We wrote the field guide: how to spot a fake AI visibility report.)
Cheapest over a year
Run the numbers. A subscription at $125/month is about £1,200 a year, ongoing, and more once you add engines. Checking free and buying a couple of £19 audits when you actually make changes is under £40 a year. Unless you need daily monitoring across many brands, pay-once wins on cost by an order of magnitude — and you get all five engines, not three.
Run the free check now → · See the Searchable vs AI Search Ready comparison.