Every AI visibility tool on the market charges you a monthly fee. Except one. Here’s how to find out if ChatGPT talks about your business for exactly zero dollars.
Let me save you an afternoon of research. You’ve probably already Googled something like “how to track brand mentions on ChatGPT” and landed on a wall of SaaS tools charging between $29 and $700 a month. Every single one promises to reveal “how AI sees your brand.” Every single landing page looks identical. And the technology underneath is exactly the same across all of them.
They all send prompts to ChatGPT’s API. They all count how often your brand shows up. They all chart it on a dashboard. Nobody has proprietary technology here. You are paying for frequency, coverage, and a nice UI.
Most business owners I talk to do one of two things at this point. They either sign up for a tool they don’t need yet and burn money on a dashboard they check once, or they decide the whole category is a scam and ignore it completely. Both are wrong.
You do need to know whether ChatGPT mentions your brand. You just don’t need to pay to find out.
Why this actually matters for your bottom line
This isn’t abstract marketing theory. This is money walking out your door.
When someone asks ChatGPT “best project management tools for small teams” or “affordable CRM for service businesses,” the model gives them three to five names. If your business isn’t one of those names, that person never visits your website. They never see your pricing page. They never enter your pipeline.
You can’t even tell it happened. There’s no impression to count, no click to track, no bounce to measure. The lead simply never existed in your analytics. It went straight to whoever ChatGPT decided to recommend instead.
With traditional Google search, you can open Search Console and see your impressions, clicks, and average position. You know where you stand. AI search is a black box. Unless you actively monitor it, you have zero visibility into whether you’re being recommended or completely ignored.
And the volume is real. ChatGPT drives roughly 87% of all AI referral traffic to websites right now. Perplexity, Gemini, and the rest split what’s left. If you’re only going to track one AI platform, ChatGPT is the one that matters.
So the question isn’t whether you should check. The question is how much you should spend to check. The answer, at least to start, is nothing.
The free method: step by step
Beamtrace is built by the team behind Elfsight — they’ve been shipping SaaS products for 13 years and have over three million active users across 90-plus tools. I mention this because when a startup offers a free tier, you wonder if the product will exist in six months. Elfsight isn’t going anywhere.
Beamtrace is the only AI visibility tool on the market with a genuinely usable free plan. No credit card. No time limit. No 7-day trial that auto-converts into a $85/month subscription. Free forever.
Here’s what to do.
Sign up and add your brand. Takes about two minutes. You’ll land on a dashboard showing your AI Visibility Score — a number from 0 to 100 — a Share of Voice breakdown, and a competitor grid. Competitors are detected automatically. You don’t manually enter them, which is a nice touch most paid tools also offer but some cheap ones skip.
Immediately delete the pre-filled prompts. This is the single most important thing I can tell you about this tool. Your free plan gives you five prompt slots. When you sign up, all five arrive pre-filled with auto-generated questions. Your allocation looks fully used from the start. It is not obvious from the interface that you can delete these and replace them with your own. Delete them. Free up the slots. Pick your own.
Choose your five prompts carefully. You only get five, so make them count. I’d split them like this:
Two branded queries — questions where someone is specifically looking for your type of business. “Best [your category] for small business” and “top [your category] tools in 2026.” These tell you whether ChatGPT knows you exist in your core market.
Two discovery queries — broader questions your ideal customer would ask before they even know what category to search. “How do I [solve the problem your product solves]” or “what should I look for in a [your product category].” These tell you whether you show up at the top of the funnel.
One competitor query — something like “is [your main competitor] worth it” or “[competitor] alternatives.” This tells you whether ChatGPT mentions you when people are actively evaluating your competition.
Wait a week. The free tier checks your prompts weekly. Don’t touch anything for seven days. Let the first batch of data come in. Then read it.
Reading the results: what the numbers actually tell you
Your dashboard will show you three things that matter.
Visibility Score. A number from 0 to 100 based on how often your brand appears across your tracked prompts. If you’re at zero, ChatGPT genuinely does not mention you. If you’re at 40-60, you show up in some contexts but not others. Above 60, you’re doing well relative to your competitors.
Share of Voice. This shows you who ChatGPT mentions alongside you and how the pie splits. Maybe you hold 30% and your main competitor holds 45%. Or maybe three competitors you’ve never heard of are eating 80% of the visibility and you’re stuck in the remaining scraps. This is the number that tells you how much ground you actually need to make up.
Topic breakdown. This is where the five-prompt strategy pays off. If you’re visible across both branded queries but invisible on both discovery queries, that’s a specific, actionable gap. It means ChatGPT knows your brand but doesn’t associate you with the broader problem you solve. That tells you exactly where to focus your content: educational material, thought leadership, the kind of content that trains AI models to connect your name with the category, not just the product.
If you’re invisible across all five prompts, you don’t need more data. You need to go fix your content, build your brand’s presence in the training data, and come back to tracking in a month after you’ve actually changed something. Don’t pay for a bigger tracking plan to confirm what five prompts already told you.
When free isn’t enough
The free tier has real limitations and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Five prompts gives you a rough shape. It doesn’t give you coverage. Weekly checks mean you can’t measure the impact of changes in real time — you make a content push on Monday and you’re waiting until the following week to see if it moved the needle.
If the free data shows you that AI visibility matters for your business — and a month of weekly checks will tell you that clearly — the paid tiers start at $20/month for 10 prompts with every-three-day tracking. Growth runs $40/month for 30 prompts every two days. Premium is $100/month for 60 prompts checked daily.
For context, the next cheapest competitor starts at $29/month (Otterly), and most tools that cover multiple AI platforms sit in the $49–$85 range at the entry level.
But don’t upgrade because the dashboard told you your score was low. Upgrade because you made changes, need faster feedback, and have outgrown five prompts’ worth of insight. The tool should earn your money, not just ask for it.
The bottom line
You don’t need a $500/month dashboard to answer a $0 question. Does ChatGPT mention your brand? You can find out this afternoon without entering a credit card number.
If the answer is yes, great — now you have a baseline to protect. If the answer is no, you have a problem to fix before you start paying anyone to track it more granularly.
Start free. Measure what matters. Pay when the data tells you to, not when a vendor tells you to.
Pricing verified March 2026. Tools and pricing may change.
