--- title: "How to test an AI visibility tool in a 7- or 14-day free trial" url: "https://pmax.online/blog/ai-visibility-tool-free-trial/" canonical_url: "https://pmax.online/blog/ai-visibility-tool-free-trial/" markdown_url: "https://pmax.online/blog/ai-visibility-tool-free-trial.md" language: "en" last_updated: "2026-10-22" type: "article" summary: "A 7- or 14-day trial can't show whether your AI visibility is good. It can show whether the tool is. What to check before the card is charged." --- # How to test an AI visibility tool in a 7- or 14-day free trial Source: https://pmax.online/blog/ai-visibility-tool-free-trial/ AI search · 8 min read · Oct 22, 2026 A 7- or 14-day trial can't show whether your AI visibility is good. It can show whether the tool is. What to check before the card is charged. Written by Claire Enders Fact-checked Oct 22, 2026 Updated quarterly Ask Claude or Gemini which AI visibility tracking tools have a free trial, and neither answers from memory. Both search the web first. We track that question in CrunchJunkie, which records the searches an engine runs before it answers. In the 30 days to 22 October 2026, Claude and Gemini answered it 12 times, and 11 of those answers searched for “AI visibility tracking tools free trial”. The other searches were variations: some added a year, the word “pricing” or a vendor name, and others swapped in “GEO”, “LLM visibility” or “Generative Engine Optimization”. ![Searches Claude and Gemini ran before answering “Which AI visibility tracking tools have a free trial?”: “AI visibility tracking tools free trial” (12×), “GEO tracking tools AI search free trial” (2×), and once each “Semrush AI visibility free trial”, “best AI search visibility tools free trial 2026 Profound Peec AI Otterly” and eight similar searches (CrunchJunkie, 30 days to 22 Oct 2026)](https://pmax.online/blog/ai-fanout-searches-free-trial.webp) The searches Claude and Gemini ran before answering “Which AI visibility tracking tools have a free trial?”, captured word for word by CrunchJunkie in the 30 days to 22 October 2026. The 12× count also includes one answer to our German version of the question. The answers they built from those searches don’t agree. One gave Otterly.AI a 7-day trial and another gave it 14 days. Peec AI got 7 days in one answer and 14 days with a card in another. All six of Claude’s answers told the reader to check the terms on each vendor’s own site. That is good advice, and harder to follow than it looks. On 22 October, Otterly’s help centre said 7 days with no card. Its homepage said both: the button read “Start Your Free 14-Day Trial”, and an FAQ further down said 7 days. Both answers had a source. Peec AI’s pricing page has a “Start free trial” button and says nothing about length or card. The 7 days and “no credit card” appear on one of its comparison pages. One answer searched for “Semrush AI visibility free trial”. Semrush’s own knowledge base says the AI Visibility Toolkit has no free trial. So check the terms on the vendor’s own page, and plan the trial before the clock starts. The rest of this piece is about the planning. A disclosure first: the data above comes from CrunchJunkie. Philipp Enders, who runs pmax, co-founded it, and I work on it too. Its trial is in the table below with its limits, written the same way as everyone else’s. ## Decide what you’re testing A short trial measures very little about your brand. AI answers change from run to run: ask the same question twice and you can get a different list of brands. A week of data on a handful of prompts gives you a few answers each. That can’t tell you whether your visibility is good, and it certainly can’t tell you whether it is improving. What a trial can tell you is whether the tool is any good. You can see what it stores and what it shows you, and work out what it would cost at the number of prompts you would really track. Test the tool, not your ranking. Before day one, write down three or four things the tool has to do. Mine are usually these: - It keeps the full answer text, not just a yes or no for each brand. - It shows cited sources separately from brand mentions. - It shows how many answers each percentage is based on. - I can work out the monthly cost at my real prompt count, on the engines I need. If a tool fails one of these on day two, you have your answer five days early. ## Before day one If the trial needs a card, put a reminder in your calendar for two days before it ends. Most vendors don’t say what happens on the last day. Of those in the table below that do, Scrunch, Searchable and Nightwatch move you to a paid plan unless you cancel, ZipTie and MaxAEO simply stop, and CrunchJunkie charges nothing if you cancel before day 14. The reminder gives you time to decide on purpose instead of finding out from your bank statement. Then choose the prompts. Pick 10 to 20 questions you would actually put in a report, the ones a buyer types when comparing options in your category. Keep branded prompts, such as “is \[your brand\] any good”, in a separate group. They show how engines describe you, which is a different question from whether they recommend you. Mixed in with the rest, they make your numbers look better than they are. Profound is the exception: its trial gives you a prompt set chosen for your industry, and you can’t change it. Add three to five competitors, ideally the ones you already lose deals to. A visibility figure for your brand alone has nothing to compare against. Do all of this in the first hour. On a 7-day trial, a prompt list you finish on day three has cost you almost half the trial. ## What a 7-day trial can and can’t tell you Do the arithmetic before you start. Say you track 10 prompts on 4 engines, and the tool scans weekly. A 7-day trial then gives you one or two scans. Two scans make 80 answers in total, and only 2 per prompt per engine. Two answers per prompt are enough to see which engines bring up your category’s brands at all, and which sources they cite. You can also check that the tool records all of it properly. They are not enough to read a trend. If your brand shows up in one of two Gemini answers, the next two could show it twice or not at all, and neither result would mean anything had changed. Daily scans change the picture. Profound’s trial runs 50 prompts every day for 7 days on three engines, which comes to 7 answers per prompt per engine. CrunchJunkie’s trial also scans daily: 10 prompts with up to 2 runs each, over 14 days, is up to 280 answers on Perplexity alone. That is enough to see how much the answers move from one day to the next, which is worth knowing before you trust any weekly figure. It is still two weeks at most, so it says little about where your visibility is heading over a quarter. Use the trial for the questions it can answer, and leave the trend to the first paid months. ## The checks to run on every tool Run the same six checks on every tool you trial, in the same order, so you compare like with like. 1. Can you open the actual answer text? A tool that only shows “mentioned: yes” gives you no way to check what the engine said, or where in the answer your brand appeared. 2. Are cited sources shown separately from brand mentions? Getting cited and getting named are [different problems](https://pmax.online/blog/ki-sichtbarkeit-ai-visibility/) . An engine can cite your blog post and recommend a competitor in the same answer. 3. Does it show the searches the engine ran? Those are the queries your pages need to rank for if you want to be in the answer, like the list at the top of this page. We explain how that works for one engine in [how to get mentioned by ChatGPT](https://pmax.online/blog/how-to-get-mentioned-by-chatgpt/) . 4. Is the number of answers shown next to every percentage? 40% visibility from 5 answers and 40% from 500 answers are very different findings. 5. Which engines run during the trial, and are they the ones on the plan you would buy? A trial on three engines tells you nothing about the fourth one your buyers use. Most vendors don’t say: of the 19 trials in the table below, only six name the engines they cover, and one of those six is ours. Check on day one, not on day seven. 6. Can you export the data or put it in a report? If it stays in the dashboard, someone will end up copying numbers into slides by hand every month. ## Trial terms at a glance These are the tools the AI answers named for this question, plus other trackers that advertise a trial, with what each vendor’s own pages said on 22 October 2026. CrunchJunkie comes first because it is ours. Where a page doesn’t say something, the table says so rather than borrowing a number from a review site. | Tool | Trial | Card | Engines during trial | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | [CrunchJunkie](https://crunchjunkie.io/pricing) | 14 days | Yes, no charge before day 14 | Perplexity at no cost; others with your own API keys | | [Nightwatch](https://nightwatch.io/pricing/) | 14 days | No | Not stated on page | | [SE Ranking (platform)](https://seranking.com/subscription.html) | 14 days | No | Not stated on page | | [Searchable](https://searchable.com/terms) | 14 days | Yes, charged the day after the trial | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity | | [LLM Pulse](https://llmpulse.ai/pricing) | 14 days (weekly plans) | Yes, payment method | Not stated on page | | [SE Visible](https://visible.seranking.com) | 10 days | Not stated on page | Not stated on page | | [Otterly.AI](https://help.otterly.ai/free-trial) | 7 days | No | Not stated on page | | [MaxAEO (maxaeo.ai)](https://maxaeo.ai/pricing) | 7 days | No | All eight it tracks | | [ZipTie](https://ziptie.ai/pricing/) | 7 days | No | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot | | [Scrunch](https://scrunch.com/faqs/what-features-are-included-in-scrunchs-free-trial) | 7 days (Core plan) | Yes, per its FAQ; its pricing page says otherwise | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot | | [Profound](https://www.tryprofound.com/pricing) | 7 days (Trial plan) | Not stated on page | ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews | | [Rankscale](https://rankscale.ai/pricing) | 7 days (Pro) | Not stated on page | Not stated on page | | [KIME](https://kime.ai/pricing) | 7 days | Yes, not charged during the trial | Not named; the full plan you pick | | [Writesonic](https://writesonic.com/pricing) | 7 days | No | Not stated on page | | [Knowatoa](https://knowatoa.com/onboarding/trial/signup) | 7 days | Not stated on page | Not stated on page | | [Promptwatch](https://www.promptwatch.com/pricing) | 7 days (Essential, Professional) | Not stated on page | Not stated on page | | [LLMrefs](https://llmrefs.com/#pricing) | 7 days | Not stated for the trial | Not stated on page | | [DeepSmith](https://deepsmith.ai/) | 7 days (homepage) | Not stated on page | Not stated on page | | [Peec AI](https://peec.ai/comparison/peec-ai-vs-ahrefs-brand-radar) | 7 days, on a comparison page only | No, same page only | Not stated on page | | [Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit](https://www.semrush.com/kb/1493-ai-visibility-toolkit) | None | — | — | Each tool name links to the vendor page the row comes from, read on 22 October 2026. Otterly’s homepage button says 14 days, while its help centre and an FAQ on the same homepage say 7; the table uses the help centre. Scrunch’s FAQ says a card is required and the trial turns into a paid plan unless you cancel; its pricing page says no credit card is required. Peec AI’s pricing page states no trial terms. Searchable’s terms say the card is charged automatically the day after the trial ends, and Nightwatch’s FAQ says it bills you if you don’t cancel within 14 days. DeepSmith’s pricing page says trial length and limits are given at sign-up. Semrush offers 7-day trials on most of its toolkits, but its knowledge base says the AI Visibility Toolkit has none. Trial terms change often, so check the vendor’s page on the day you sign up. For caps and prices after the trial, [we checked every vendor’s trial terms in a separate comparison](https://tikitaka.digital/en/ai-visibility-tools-free-trial/) . ### What the vendor pages showed Screenshots taken on 22 October 2026 from Spain, cropped to the trial terms. Prices appear in euros because that is what these sites show European visitors. [Nightwatch](https://nightwatch.io/pricing/) : pricing page, with “14-day free trial · No credit card required” under every plan. [SE Ranking](https://seranking.com/subscription.html) : pricing page, with “Start free 14-day trial” and “No credit card required”. [Searchable](https://searchable.com/pricing) : pricing page, with “Try it free, 14 days” on Pro and Scale, and ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity included. [LLM Pulse](https://llmpulse.ai/) : homepage, with “14-day free trial” and “Cancel anytime”. [SE Visible](https://visible.seranking.com/) : pricing page: “explore SE Visible with a 10-day free trial”. [Otterly.AI](https://otterly.ai/pricing) : pricing page, with plans but no trial terms. The 7-day, no-card trial is stated in its help centre. [MaxAEO](https://maxaeo.ai/) : homepage: “7-day free trial · no credit card”. [ZipTie](https://ziptie.ai/pricing/) : pricing page: 7 days free with 25 daily prompts on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot, no card required. [Scrunch](https://scrunch.com/pricing/) : pricing page: “Start 7-day free trial” on the Core plan, which covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AIO and Copilot. [Profound](https://www.tryprofound.com/pricing) : pricing page: a free Trial plan with 50 prompts run daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. [Rankscale](https://rankscale.ai/pricing) : pricing page: “Try Pro free for 7 days”. [KIME](https://kime.ai/pricing) : pricing page, with “Try for free” on Explorer and Core. The 7-day length and the card are explained in its FAQ. [Writesonic](https://writesonic.com/) : homepage: “Start 7-Day Free Trial”. [Knowatoa](https://knowatoa.com/pricing) : pricing page, with “Start free trial” but no length. The 7 days appear on its trial sign-up page. [Promptwatch](https://www.promptwatch.com/pricing) : pricing page: “Start 7-day free trial” on Essential and Professional; Business is demo-only. [LLMrefs](https://llmrefs.com/#pricing) : pricing section: “Start 7-day Free Trial” and “Cancel anytime”. [DeepSmith](https://deepsmith.ai/) : homepage: “Start 7-day free trial”. [Peec AI](https://peec.ai/) : homepage, with a “Start Free Trial” button and no length or card terms. ## CrunchJunkie’s trial, plainly CrunchJunkie’s trial lasts 14 days. You need a card to start it, but nothing is charged before day 14, and if you cancel before then you pay nothing. Every report and feature is included. The visibility scans run on Perplexity on CrunchJunkie’s own API keys, so they cost you nothing. To test other engines during the trial, you connect your own API keys for them. The trial is capped at 1 brand and 10 prompts, with up to 2 runs per prompt, and the scans run daily without you having to start them. ![CrunchJunkie pricing: €37/mo for 1 brand, 20 prompts checked weekly across four engines, made up of €12 for the software and €25 for the scans; the 14-day trial runs on Perplexity at no cost](https://pmax.online/blog/crunchjunkie-pricing-trial-card.webp) CrunchJunkie’s pricing card: €37 a month excluding VAT for one brand and 20 prompts checked weekly on four engines, of which €12 is the software and €25 the scans. After the trial, every plan includes all ten engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Meta AI. There is no per-engine fee and no prompt limit. The scans run either on Managed AI, where CrunchJunkie runs and bills them, or on your own keys at the providers’ prices. Plans and the current prices are on the [CrunchJunkie pricing page](https://crunchjunkie.io/pricing) . ![CrunchJunkie plans: Solo €12, Starter €49, Pro €124 and Agency €186 a month billed annually, and the features every plan includes: all ten AI engines with no per-engine fee, no prompt limits, unlimited reports and data connections, and your own API keys or Managed AI](https://pmax.online/blog/crunchjunkie-plans-features-overview.webp) CrunchJunkie’s plans as shown on 22 October 2026, billed annually and excluding VAT. Plans differ in brands and team seats; all four include the ten engines and have no prompt limit. The limitation is worth stating plainly. You need a card to start, and the free scans cover one engine. Testing ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini during those 14 days means setting up your own API keys. With 10 prompts, it is a good test of the tool and a partial view of your market. ## When the trial ends Go back to the criteria you wrote down before day one and mark each one pass or fail before you look at price. Then compare prices properly. The headline price is rarely what you pay. Work out the monthly cost at your real number of prompts, on the engines you need, at the scan frequency you need. Some tools charge by prompt, some charge extra per engine and some charge per domain, so the same workload can land in very different places. Our [buyer’s guide to AI visibility tracking tools](https://pmax.online/blog/ai-visibility-tracking-tools-2026/) shows how each pricing model adds up. If two tools pass, take the one whose cost you can predict at next year’s prompt count, not this month’s. ## Need help with this? If any of the above feels like a problem you have, [tell us a bit about your situation](https://pmax.online/contact/?topic=geo-audit) and we will come back within a working day. First conversation is 30 minutes, on us. ## Common questions Which AI visibility tools have a free trial without a credit card? Of the tools we checked on 22 October 2026, Nightwatch and the SE Ranking platform (14 days) and Otterly.AI, MaxAEO, ZipTie and Writesonic (7 days) say on their own pages that no credit card is needed. Peec AI says the same, but only on a comparison page. CrunchJunkie, LLM Pulse, Searchable and KIME ask for a card or payment method, and Scrunch's FAQ says it does too, though its pricing page says otherwise. The others don't say. These terms change, so check the vendor's own page on the day you sign up. Is 7 days enough to test an AI visibility tool? It is enough to test the tool and not enough to judge your visibility. In a week you can check whether the tool keeps the full answers, separates citations from mentions and shows how many answers sit behind each percentage. One or two scans cannot show a trend, because AI answers change from one run to the next. Do free trials include every AI engine? Rarely, and most vendors do not say. ZipTie's trial covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot, Profound's ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and Scrunch's ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. MaxAEO runs all eight of its engines during the trial. CrunchJunkie's trial runs on Perplexity at no cost, and other engines need your own API keys. Most other vendors list engines only for their paid plans. Compare the engines in the trial with the engines on the plan you would actually buy. What's the difference between a free trial and a free tier? A free trial gives you a paid plan, or a cut-down version of one, for a fixed number of days. After that you pay or lose access, and some trials convert to a paid plan automatically. A free tier is a permanent plan with smaller limits that costs nothing. A trial is for deciding whether to buy; a free tier is for keeping an eye on a few prompts. More on AI search - [What Is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?](https://pmax.online/blog/what-is-generative-engine-optimisation/) - [How to Get Your Brand Cited by AI Engines](https://pmax.online/blog/ki-sichtbarkeit-ai-visibility/) - [AI Visibility Tracking in 2026: What to Check Before You Sign Up](https://pmax.online/blog/ai-visibility-tracking-tools-2026/) Related from pmax [AI search visibility →](https://pmax.online/services/ai-visibility/) [Client results →](https://pmax.online/cases/) On this page [Decide what you’re testing](https://pmax.online/blog/ai-visibility-tool-free-trial/#what-youre-testing) [Before day one](https://pmax.online/blog/ai-visibility-tool-free-trial/#before-day-one) [What a 7-day trial can and can’t tell you](https://pmax.online/blog/ai-visibility-tool-free-trial/#what-a-week-shows) [The checks to run on every tool](https://pmax.online/blog/ai-visibility-tool-free-trial/#checks) [Trial terms at a glance](https://pmax.online/blog/ai-visibility-tool-free-trial/#trial-terms) [CrunchJunkie’s trial, plainly](https://pmax.online/blog/ai-visibility-tool-free-trial/#crunchjunkie-trial) [When the trial ends](https://pmax.online/blog/ai-visibility-tool-free-trial/#when-the-trial-ends) [Common questions](https://pmax.online/blog/ai-visibility-tool-free-trial/#faq) More from pmax [All services →](https://pmax.online/services/) [Client results →](https://pmax.online/cases/) [Work with us →](https://pmax.online/contact/) CE About the author Claire Enders Claire is a digital marketing strategist at pmax, a performance marketing and AI visibility agency in Calvià, Mallorca. She leads content strategy and AI search optimisation for pmax clients, and contributes research on GEO and AI brand visibility. She also works on [CrunchJunkie](https://crunchjunkie.io/) , an AI visibility tracking platform for monitoring brand citation across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and six other engines. [LinkedIn →](https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairelouenders/)