Free tools for AI search

Answer engine optimization is the practice of structuring content so AI assistants can extract and cite it directly in their answers. It differs from traditional SEO in what it optimises for: SEO competes for a position in a list of links, while AEO competes to be the passage an engine quotes. In practice that means dense, self-contained answers near the top of a page, explicit question-and-answer structure, named sources for claims, and structured data that tells an engine what the page is.

They are free, with no account and no trial countdown. Three of them (AEO Score, Schema Validator, FAQ Generator) show the first results right away and send the full report to an email you give them; the other four need nothing at all. The reason is straightforward: the people who need a crawler checker are the same people who need the paid product, so the tools work as an introduction. Some tools are capped per day because they call paid APIs behind the scenes, and when a cap is reached the tool says so rather than degrading quietly.

Run the AI Crawler Checker first. It answers whether the assistants you want citations from are permitted to fetch your site at all, and a block there makes every other improvement irrelevant. If crawlers are getting through, score a page you care about with the AEO Readiness Score, then close the structured-data gaps it finds with the Schema Validator.

Not by itself. AI crawlers fall into distinct classes and they are not interchangeable. Training crawlers such as GPTBot and Google-Extended collect data for model training; blocking them does not remove a site from answers. Retrieval crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot fetch pages at answer time, and blocking those does remove a site from the answers they build. Google's AI Overviews are served through Googlebot, so blocking Google-Extended has no effect on them.

No, and none of them claim to. They measure whether a page could be cited — whether it is reachable, structured and marked up for extraction. Knowing whether it is cited requires running your actual queries against the engines and reading the answers they return, which is what the paid product does. The distinction between what a page could do and what it is doing is deliberate throughout.

No. Every tool works from a URL or pasted text, and nothing is added to your site. The generators produce markup you copy and paste yourself, so you decide what goes live.