"Free" means two different things in AEO/GEO tooling: a permanent free tier you can use forever, and a time-boxed free trial that ends. For a Shopify brand that just wants to answer "does AI recommend my store, and if not, why?", the distinction matters. This compares what's genuinely free in 2026. Competitor prices reflect each vendor's published materials as of September 2026.
Free tiers and trials at a glance
| Tool | Free option | What free gets you | Paid entry (USD/mo) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arenza | Permanent free tier ($0, no card) | AI visibility and conversion scores for your own store on ChatGPT, brand accuracy, verbatim answers, and the brands AI cites — weekly | Starter $49 (unlimited tracked competitors, 2 articles/mo) · Pro $299 |
| Otterly.AI | 7-day free trial | Full features during the trial window | $29 |
| Scrunch AI | 7-day free trial | Full features during the trial window | No public list price |
| Profound | Free AEO Report (one-off brand snapshot) | A one-time report, not ongoing monitoring | $99+ |
| GEOly | Not published | — | No public list price |
| Peec AI | Not published | — | $95 |
The only permanent $0 tier: Arenza Free
Arenza's Free tier is permanent, not a trial: self-serve signup, no card, and it measures the things paid trackers charge for — AI visibility and conversion scores for your own store, brand accuracy, the verbatim answers, and the brands AI cites instead of you, on a weekly ChatGPT scan. If the question is "what does AI say about my Shopify store right now?", the cheapest serious answer in 2026 is $0. When you're ready to compare, Starter ($49/mo) adds unlimited tracked competitors head-to-head, Google AI Mode, and 5 articles a month; when you're ready to act, Pro ($299/mo) adds daily monitoring across ChatGPT and Google AI Mode plus Arenza Agents that ship on-site fixes and publish answer-targeted pages hosted on your own domain; Performance is outcome-based. See https://arenza.ai/pricing.
Trials vs a real free tier
A 7-day trial (Otterly, Scrunch) is a paid product you preview; when it ends you pay or lose access. Profound's free AEO Report is a useful one-off snapshot but not ongoing monitoring. A permanent free tier is different: it keeps measuring at $0, so you can watch your AI visibility over time and only pay when you want the tool to start fixing things. For a Shopify brand testing the channel, that distinction is the whole point.
Where paid entry starts (for context)
If you skip the free route, budget trackers start around $29 (Otterly), with Peec at $95 and Profound from $99; GEOly and Scrunch don't publish list pricing. But every one of those is a paid meter — Arenza's free tier is the meter at $0, and its paid tiers are the part that actually compares, fixes and publishes.
What a free check should look at on your own store
A free storefront check is only worth running if it looks at something your store might fail. In a July 2026 scan of 857 Shopify stores for Arenza's State of Agentic Commerce report, the crawl-level checks passed almost everywhere, while the product-identifier check, run on the 806 stores where a product page could be sampled, split the sample. Like any storefront check, these read what a machine can see on the site; they do not show whether an assistant recommends it.
| Check | Stores that passed | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Sitemap discoverable | 841 of 857 | 98.1% |
| AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt | 834 of 857 | 97.3% |
| llms.txt present | 783 of 857 | 91.4% |
| Brand plus product identifier (SKU, GTIN or MPN) | 376 of 806 | 46.7% |
So a free check that stops at robots.txt and llms.txt will report a pass for most stores; the one worth running reads your product pages. When you move to paid, the cheapest GEO tool comparison lines up entry prices, the playbook for getting recommended by ChatGPT lists the exact Product and Offer schema fields to add, and the State of Agentic Commerce 2026 write-up explains the scan in full.
FAQ
Is there a truly free tool to check AI visibility for Shopify?
Yes. Arenza offers a permanent free tier at $0 (no card) that measures your own store's AI visibility, conversion and brand accuracy on ChatGPT every week, and shows the brands AI cites instead of you as evidence. Tracked competitors and head-to-head comparison start on Starter ($49/mo). Several other tools offer 7-day trials or one-off reports rather than an ongoing free tier.
What is the difference between a free tier and a free trial?
A free tier is permanent and keeps working at $0; a free trial is a time-boxed preview of a paid product that ends after a set period (often 7 days). For ongoing monitoring, a free tier is what you want.
Does free include fixing my store, or only measuring it?
Free tiers measure. Fixing — on-site technical changes and published pages — is typically a paid capability. With Arenza, the $0 tier measures, Starter ($49/mo) adds competitors and 5 articles a month to your own blog, and Pro ($299/mo) ships the fixes and pages, then re-measures.