Last Updated on August 25, 2026
Every tool on this list is free, and the two things most likely to be keeping you out of AI answers cost nothing at all to check. That is not a sales line. It follows from what Google publishes in its own developer documentation: to appear in AI Overviews “a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet”, and “there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary”.
Which means the tools that decide whether AI recommends your business are the ordinary ones. Not a new category of AI visibility software. The same free checks that tell you whether a search engine can find, read and understand your site.
Here are ten of them, what each one is actually for, what the catch is where there is one, and the single thing to do with each in about ten minutes. We opened every vendor page on 25 August 2026 to confirm the pricing rather than assuming it.
10
Tools, all free. Four of them need no account at all
4
Bots OpenAI documents. Only one of them decides whether you appear in ChatGPT search
£0
Cost of checking your robots.txt, the single most common self inflicted block
0
AI companies that have publicly committed to reading an llms.txt file
The mistake most businesses make
AI visibility is being sold as a new discipline requiring new products. It mostly is not. The common pattern we see is a business paying for something described as AI optimisation while its own website is quietly telling the AI crawlers to go away, or while its Google Business Profile is incomplete, or while nothing on the site says where it operates.
The order matters here. Google’s documentation is unusually blunt about it: appearing in its AI features is downstream of ordinary indexing. If a page is not indexed, there is nothing to optimise at the AI layer, because there is no AI layer to optimise. Fix findability first. That is Start stage work, and it is free.
If a search engine cannot read your site, no amount of AI optimisation will make an AI recommend it.
The ten tools
1. Whito AI Visibility Scorecard
Our own free check. It runs 17 structural checks on a website and returns a score out of 100 with the reason for every mark lost, covering HTTPS, contact details, structured data, sitemap, page titles, whether AI crawlers are blocked, and whether the business matches an active Companies House record.
It exists because the other nine tools on this list each show you one piece. This one tells you which piece to look at first.
2. Google Business Profile
Google’s own words: “List your business on Google with a free Business Profile”, and “you can add or claim your business at no charge”. For any business with a location or a service area, this is the single highest leverage free thing on the internet, because it is the structured record Google holds about you.
The catch. Free to create, but verification can require a postcard, a phone call or a video walkthrough, and it can stall. The cost is time and patience, not money. Anyone who tells you it takes five minutes has not done it recently.
3. Bing Places for Business
The one almost nobody does, and it matters more than its reputation suggests. Microsoft’s own documentation states that when web search is enabled, Copilot “may fetch information from the Bing search service when information from the web helps to provide a better, more grounded response”. If Copilot’s web answers are grounded in Bing, your Bing listing is not an afterthought.
Microsoft describes Bing Places as “a free online platform where businesses can create and manage their listings to appear in Bing search results and Bing Maps”, and it can import your existing listing from Google Business Profile rather than making you type it twice.
Note. The service moved from bingplaces.com to bing.com/forbusiness. The old address redirects.
4. Google Search Console
Google calls it “a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results”. Given that AI Overviews require a page to be indexed and snippet eligible, this is where you confirm the precondition is met.
The catch, and it is a real one. You have to prove you own the domain, using a DNS record, an uploaded file or a tag in your site’s code. If your website was built by someone who has since disappeared and you do not have access to your own hosting or domain registrar, you are stuck. This is far more common in small businesses than anyone admits, and it is worth finding out now rather than during an emergency.
5. Bing Webmaster Tools
The Bing equivalent, and the same logic applies: if Copilot’s web answers draw on the Bing search service, being properly indexed by Bing is not optional. Microsoft’s own webmaster blog confirms the submission allowance, “allowing you to submit up to 10,000 URLs per day, with no monthly quotas”, which is more than any small business will ever need.
6. Schema Markup Validator
The cleanest tool on this list. At validator.schema.org you paste a URL, press validate, and see the structured data your page actually publishes. Google’s own documentation describes it as validating “all Schema.org-based structured data that’s embedded in web pages, without Google feature specific warnings”.
Structured data is how a machine reads your business name, address, phone number, opening hours and prices as facts rather than as decoration. It will not put you in an AI answer on its own. Its absence makes you harder to quote accurately.
7. Google Rich Results Test
Where the schema validator tells you what is on the page, this tells you what Google can extract from it. It states its own purpose plainly: “Test your publicly accessible page to see which rich results can be generated by the structured data it contains.”
The two together answer a question worth having a clear answer to: is my markup present, and can Google actually use it?
8. Your own robots.txt file
This is not a product. It is a file at the root of your website, and Google’s documentation is specific that it “must be located at the root of the site host to which it applies”. Visit yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt in any browser and read what is there.
You are looking for lines that block the AI crawlers. This is rarer than the advice implies: our audit of 120 UK business websites found five blocking an AI crawler, and every one of those blocks came from a platform toggle rather than a considered decision. Our separate audit of 49 sites found not one small or independent business had made a deliberate, owner-led choice either way. So the risk is not that everyone is blocking. It is that the few who are did not decide to, and it undoes everything else on this list.
This is where nearly everyone gets it wrong, so it has its own section below.
9. The AI assistants themselves
The most underused free tool in this category is the product itself. You can ask the engines what they say about your trade in your town and read the answer, which is the only test that measures the thing you actually care about.
| Assistant | Free tier | Account needed | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Yes. “ChatGPT is free to use” with “unlimited everyday text chats” | No, for basic use | Web search is included on the free plan, and OpenAI states “people who are not signed in can also use web search” |
| Microsoft Copilot | Yes, “available at no cost” | No | Microsoft states “sign in isn’t required”. Note that Copilot’s own pricing page shows only paid plans, so it looks paid when it is not |
| Perplexity | Yes, at $0 a month | Not stated on the pricing page | The free tier is capped at 3 Pro searches a day and 1 research query a month. Those numbers are in the help centre, not on the pricing page |
| Google Gemini | An unpaid tier exists | Yes, a Google account is required | Google does not call it free. Its own AI pricing page lists only paid plans, and it describes the unpaid tier as “without an AI plan” with unpublished limits |
Checked against each vendor’s own pricing or help pages on 25 August 2026. Perplexity prices are published in US dollars.
10. Companies House
A UK specific one, and it belongs here for a reason. Our study of which electricians AI engines recommend tested 15 UK towns. In six of them, at least one tool confidently recommended a business whose registered company had already been dissolved or was in liquidation. The public register is what a cautious customer, or anyone checking an AI answer, can look at in twenty seconds.
GOV.UK states it plainly: “you can get some details about a company for free”, including registered address, current and resigned officers, document images and previous company names. You can also set up free email alerts when a company updates its details.
The catch. Searching and viewing is free. A certified copy or certificate is not: £22 for the standard service, £44 for incorporation documents, £65 same day, £130 for same day incorporation documents. If a bank, landlord or tender needs a certified document, you are paying.
The one everybody blocks by mistake
If you take one thing from this page, take this. The advice circulating since 2023 to “block the AI scrapers” is being applied in a way that removes businesses from AI search results, and the vendors’ own documentation says so.
OpenAI documents four separate bots, and they do different jobs.
| Bot | What OpenAI says it does | What blocking it means |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | “used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features” | You disappear from ChatGPT search answers. This is the one that matters for visibility |
| GPTBot | “used to crawl content that may be used in training our generative AI foundation models” | Your content is not used for model training. It does not remove you from ChatGPT search |
| ChatGPT-User | Visits a page when a user asks a question that requires it | OpenAI notes that because these actions are user initiated, “robots.txt rules may not apply” |
| OAI-AdsBot | “used to validate the safety of web pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT” | Relevant only if you advertise on ChatGPT |
Source: OpenAI’s own bots documentation, read 25 August 2026.
OpenAI states the point explicitly: “Each setting is independent of the others, for example, a webmaster can allow OAI-SearchBot in order to appear in search results while disallowing GPTBot.” And the consequence of the other choice: “Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links.”
Google’s split is different again, and just as widely misread. Google-Extended controls whether your content trains Gemini and grounds Gemini answers. It is not a search setting. Google’s documentation says so in one sentence: “Google-Extended does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search.”
The distinction that matters
Being opted out of AI training and being invisible to AI search are two different decisions. Most robots.txt blocks in the wild make the second one by accident while trying to make the first.
If you want to keep your content out of model training but stay visible in AI answers, that is a supported position. OpenAI describes exactly how. Blocking every bot with an AI sounding name is not the way to do it.
One tool that is not on this list, and why
You will have been offered an llms.txt file. A number of UK agencies now sell setting one up as an AI visibility service. Here is what we could establish by reading primary sources.
llms.txt is a proposal by one person, not a standard. The specification at llmstxt.org is published by Jeremy Howard, dated 3 September 2024 and modified 10 August 2026, and describes itself as “a proposal to standardise on using an /llms.txt file to provide information to help agents use a website”, which is “open for community input”. That is a fair description of what it is. It is not an IETF or W3C standard, and no AI company issues it. Robots.txt, by contrast, is documented as honoured by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity and Microsoft.
No major AI company has publicly committed to reading it. We checked the crawler documentation of OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity. All three document robots.txt handling in detail. None documents llms.txt as something its crawlers read.
Google states in writing that it ignores these files. From Google’s own AI optimisation guidance, last updated 10 July 2026: “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn’t use them.” And more directly: “It’s completely fine if you decide to create and maintain LLMS.txt files (or other similar files) for other services or systems that use these files. Doing so will neither harm nor help your site’s visibility or rankings in Google Search, as Google Search ignores them.”
The confusion worth naming. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity all publish llms.txt files for their own developer documentation. That gets cited as evidence the AI labs “use” llms.txt. Publishing a file about your own docs is not the same as your crawler reading other people’s. Those are two different things, and only one of them is happening.
Our verdict: an llms.txt file takes ten minutes, costs nothing, and might matter later. Write one if you like. Do not pay anyone for it, and do not let it displace the eight checks above that demonstrably do matter.
All ten, at a glance
| Tool | Cost | Account | The catch | Stage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Whito Scorecard | Free | None | Structural checks only. It cannot tell you whether an engine names you | Start |
| Google Business Profile | Free | Verification can require a postcard or video and can stall | Start | |
| Bing Places | Free | Sign in | Google import is rarely complete. Check what came across | Start |
| Google Search Console | Free | Google plus domain proof | Needs DNS, file or tag access to your own site | Build |
| Bing Webmaster Tools | Free | Sign in | 10,000 URL a day submission cap. Irrelevant at small business scale | Build |
| Schema Markup Validator | Free | None | None found. The cleanest tool here | Build |
| Rich Results Test | Free | None asked for | We could not confirm whether an anonymous test completes | Build |
| Your robots.txt | Free | None | Reading it is free. Changing it needs site access | Start |
| The AI assistants | Free tiers | Two need none | Answers vary by run and by location. One test is an anecdote | Start |
| Companies House | Free to view | None | Certified copies cost £22 to £130 | Start |
The order to do them in
Ten tools is nine too many for a first session. If you have an hour, do these four, in this order.
- Read your robots.txt. Two minutes. It is the only item on this list that can silently undo everything else.
- Ask two AI assistants what a customer would ask. Ten minutes. It tells you whether you have a problem worth solving.
- Fill in every field of your Google Business Profile. Thirty minutes, and the highest return of anything here.
- Run the free scorecard and work only on the failed checks. Fifteen minutes.
Everything else is worth doing and none of it is urgent by comparison.
Methodology and sources
Every pricing claim and every quotation on this page was read at its original source on 25 August 2026. Where a vendor page would not render, we say so rather than filling the gap from memory. Nothing here is taken from a summary or a search result.
Vendor documentation
- OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers. The four bots, their descriptions and the independence of the settings. developers.openai.com
- OpenAI, ChatGPT Free Tier FAQ and Searching the web with ChatGPT. Free tier scope and signed out web search. help.openai.com
- Google, Google crawlers and user-triggered fetchers, last updated 14 July 2026. Google-Extended and its relationship to Google Search. developers.google.com
- Google, AI features and your website, last updated 10 December 2025. Eligibility for AI Overviews and AI Mode. developers.google.com
- Google, AI optimization guide, last updated 10 July 2026. The statement that Google Search ignores llms.txt and similar files. developers.google.com
- Google, Create and submit a robots.txt file, last updated 21 November 2025. Root location and rule semantics. developers.google.com
- Google, About Search Console. The description of it as a free service. support.google.com
- Google Business Profile, Get listed on Google, and Add or claim your Business Profile. Free to create and claim. google.com/business
- Microsoft, Manage public web access for Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Learn, last updated 18 August 2026. Copilot fetching from the Bing search service. learn.microsoft.com
- Microsoft, Introducing the New Bing Places for Business, Bing blog, 3 October 2025. Bing Places described as free, and the move to bing.com/forbusiness. blogs.bing.com
- Microsoft, Bing Webmaster blog on URL submission. The 10,000 URLs per day allowance. blogs.bing.com
- Microsoft, What is the difference between Microsoft Copilot (free) and Copilot in Microsoft 365. Free tier and no sign in requirement. support.microsoft.com
- Perplexity pricing and plan comparison. Free tier at $0 a month, 3 Pro searches a day, 1 research query a month. perplexity.ai
- Google, Gemini Apps limits and upgrades, and Google AI plans. The unpaid tier described as “without an AI plan”. one.google.com
- Schema Markup Validator. validator.schema.org
- Google Rich Results Test. search.google.com
- llms.txt specification, Jeremy Howard, published 3 September 2024, modified 10 August 2026. llmstxt.org
Official UK sources
- GOV.UK, Get information about a company. Free company information and the list of what is included. gov.uk
- GOV.UK, Order certified copies and certificates from Companies House. £22, £44, £65 and £130 fees. gov.uk
Whito research used
- Which electricians does AI recommend. 182 businesses across 15 UK towns. In six towns a tool recommended a company that had been dissolved or was in liquidation.
- The Whito AI Visibility Index. 160 answers, 734 businesses, eight sectors.
Known limits
- We could not confirm whether the Rich Results Test completes without signing in. The page asks only for a URL and Google’s help documentation is silent on the point. It shows a standard Google sign in link, which is not the same as a requirement. We are not asserting either way.
- Bing Places and Bing Webmaster Tools product pages would not render for us. Both are JavaScript only and returned no readable text. Everything stated about them comes from Microsoft’s own blog and support pages instead, which is a weaker source than the product page and we would rather say so.
- Google never calls the consumer Gemini tier free. An unpaid tier plainly exists. We could not find a Google page using the word, and Google’s own AI pricing page lists paid plans only, so we describe it as Google does.
- Microsoft’s guidance on Copilot and the Bing search service is scoped to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat. We did not find an equivalent Microsoft statement about the free consumer Copilot app, so do not read our Bing Places reasoning as stronger than it is.
- OpenAI does not publish where ChatGPT search gets all of its results. It says it “sometimes partners with other search providers” and operates its own OAI-SearchBot crawler. We have not claimed it runs on any named third party index, because OpenAI does not say so.
- Perplexity’s free tier limits come from its help centre, not its pricing page, and its prices are in US dollars.
- Our own free scorecard names GPTBot in its guidance on AI crawler blocks and does not yet mention OAI-SearchBot. On the evidence set out above, that wording understates the distinction between training and search opt outs. We are correcting it. Recorded here on 25 August 2026 rather than changed quietly.
- Vendor pricing and crawler documentation change without notice. Everything here is dated 25 August 2026. Check the source links before relying on a figure.
Questions people ask
Do I need special software to appear in AI search results?
No. Google’s own documentation states that to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode “a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet”, and that “there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary”. The free tools that confirm you are findable are the ones that matter.
Should I block GPTBot?
That depends on whether you object to your content training AI models, which is a legitimate position. But understand what it does. Blocking GPTBot stops training use. It does not remove you from ChatGPT search. The bot that governs that is OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI states that sites opted out of it “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”. You can allow one and block the other.
Does blocking Google-Extended hurt my Google rankings?
No. Google’s documentation says “Google-Extended does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search”. It controls whether your content trains and grounds Gemini.
Is llms.txt worth setting up?
It costs ten minutes and nothing else, so write one if you want to. But no major AI company has publicly committed to reading it, the specification is one person’s proposal rather than a standard, and Google states that Google Search “ignores them” and that creating one “will neither harm nor help your site’s visibility or rankings”. Do not pay anyone for it.
Is Bing really worth bothering with for a UK small business?
Microsoft’s own documentation says Copilot “may fetch information from the Bing search service” when answering with web information. If you want to appear in Copilot answers, being indexed and listed on Bing is the mechanism. Bing Places is free and can import from your Google profile.
What should I do first?
Read your own robots.txt file, which takes two minutes and can be silently undoing everything else. Then ask two AI assistants the question a customer would ask, to find out whether you have a problem worth spending time on.
The sharp takeaway
AI visibility is being sold as a new problem needing new products. The evidence from the AI companies’ own documentation says otherwise. Google’s AI features are downstream of ordinary indexing. Copilot’s web answers are grounded in Bing. Every engine reads robots.txt and publishes exactly what its bots do.
Which means the work is unglamorous and free. Be indexed. Be listed. Be readable. Do not block the crawlers by accident. Make sure the facts a machine can check about you are true and consistent.
Before you buy anything with AI in the product name, spend two minutes reading your own robots.txt. It is the cheapest thing on this list and the most likely to be the actual problem.
Start with the free check
The Whito scorecard runs 17 of these checks at once and tells you which one to fix first. Free, about two minutes, no sign up.
Most of what it finds costs nothing to fix, which is the point of this page.
- Common mistakes that make UK businesses invisible to AI. What these tools tend to find, ranked by how often it turns up, with the fix and the time it takes.
- How to check if AI recommends your business. The step by step test, using the free tiers above.
- The Whito AI Visibility Index. Which sources AI engines actually cite when recommending UK businesses.
- The best AI marketing tools in the UK. The other half of the question: using AI to do the work, rather than being found by it.
- UK marketing budgets by revenue. What to spend once the free work is done.
