LLMrefs: Free Plan, $79 Tier and Who It Fits (2026)

LLMrefs gives you a free account and one paid plan: $79 a month for 500 tracked prompts, weekly reports and every engine it supports. It is far cheaper per prompt than Otterly.ai's public plans, and it pays off only if you already think in keyword lists. This guide is based on public documentation as of October 2026; we have not tested the product hands-on.

• Worth paying for: SEO teams and agencies with a keyword list, wanting weekly trends across many engines.
• Not yet: anyone still asking "does AI mention us at all?" or who needs daily data.
• Unconfirmed: the free plan's limits. LLMrefs does not publish them.

What is LLMrefs and how does it measure AI visibility?

LLMrefs is a London-based AI search analytics service that tracks how often brands are mentioned and cited in AI answers. Its defining choice is that you track keywords, not prompts: you enter a keyword, it generates the prompts, runs them across AI engines and rolls the results into one score.

The headline metric is share of voice, a term borrowed from advertising, where it means a brand's share of total category spend. In LLMrefs it is the percentage of answers that name you, shown with an average position and the URLs cited. The product mockup on its homepage shows three views: Rankings, Prompts and Sources.

Aggregation is the right instinct. LLMrefs itself notes that language models are non-deterministic, so a single answer is an anecdote and a percentage over many prompts is a measurement. The cost of that design is distance from the raw answers, which we come back to below.

What does the LLMrefs free plan include?

LLMrefs has a free account, but its public pages do not say what the free plan includes. Signup needs no credit card, and the pricing page lists only the paid plan. Treat any specific free limit you read elsewhere as unconfirmed.

One of LLMrefs' own articles lists the offer as "Free plan; Pro $79/mo for 50 keywords" and gives no free limits. Directories and older reviews say the free account tracks a single keyword. We could not find that on any LLMrefs page, so we do not state it as fact.

To find the real limit in two minutes, create the free account, add a keyword where you know you appear in AI answers, and note where the dashboard asks you to upgrade. Our view: a free plan with unpublished limits is a demo, so use it for one question only. Does the dashboard detect your brand where you know it should?

What does the paid plan cost and include?

There is one paid plan: $79 per month with a 7-day free trial. It covers 500 prompts, weekly refreshes, citation tracking, unlimited seats and projects, and CSV and API export. The pricing card marks the price "Limited time only" with no end date, as of October 2026.

LLMrefs' own pages disagree on one spec. The pricing card says weekly, but its AI Search Visibility page says prompts run daily. Ask support which applies to your plan before you build reporting around it.

On the "limited time" label: billing is monthly and cancellable, so a price rise changes your budget, not your commitment. Re-check the card before each renewal.

Does LLMrefs show the actual AI answer?

Not clearly. LLMrefs' public pages show a Prompts view and a Sources view, but they never say the full answer text is stored for each prompt, and they describe the product as keyword-level. Verify in the trial before you pay.

A hands-on test by an AI SEO agency (November 2025, so possibly dated, and from a company that competes for the same clients) rated data accuracy 2 out of 5. Its reason: keyword-level reporting makes it hard to see which prompt triggered a mention. The same reviewer found that the tool reliably flagged when its domain was cited, compared with manual checks. We treat that as one dated opinion, not a verdict.

Here is the trial test we would run:

1. Pick a prompt buyers really ask, and run it yourself in ChatGPT.
2. Find the same prompt in the Prompts view and open it.
3. Check whether you see the full answer, the order of brands and the cited URLs.

Reading the answer is the step that turns a score into a fix. It is also what AEOeye's free audit does first: it asks ChatGPT three unbranded buyer questions and shows the real answers in full. It is a one-off audit, not a tracker.

Is the $79 plan worth it, and for whom?

It is worth $79 if you already hold a keyword list, want weekly share-of-voice trends across many engines, and either run an SEO team or manage several clients. Unlimited seats and projects make it unusually cheap for agencies. It is poor value if you are still testing whether AI names you.

Per tracked prompt, the gap to daily trackers is large. The prices below are public list prices; the products are not identical, so read the notes.

LLMrefs prompts are generated from your keywords and refreshed less often. Otterly.ai lists four engines on every plan, with Claude, AI Mode and Gemini as add-ons. If you need daily movement on a handful of prompts, the dearer tool is the right one; see our Otterly.ai pricing breakdown.

Our position: do not buy any tracker before you know you have a problem worth tracking. Run the free audit, read the answers, then pay for monitoring only if you will act on weekly data.

What did we see on LLMrefs' own website?

When we fetched llmrefs.com on 3 October 2026 for our AI crawler access study, its robots.txt blocked no AI crawlers, only private paths such as /dashboard and /api. It publishes an llms.txt file. Its served homepage HTML carries Organization, WebSite and SoftwareApplication JSON-LD, but no Offer or FAQPage markup.

This is a neutral fact box, not a verdict on the product. It does mean an AI crawler can read the pricing page we cited above.

What are the alternatives to LLMrefs?

The right alternative depends on what LLMrefs is missing for you. Pick a daily tracker for fast movement, a larger platform for reporting and workflow, or a free audit if you have not yet seen a single real AI answer about your brand.

• Daily prompt tracking, small budget: Otterly.ai, from $29 per month for 15 prompts as of October 2026.
• Other trackers: Peec AI and Profound, compared in our LLMrefs alternatives guide; we have not re-checked their prices for this page.
• Seeing real answers first: AEOeye's free audit, then the $29 full report for five engines and ten questions. We do not track daily; if you need that, a dedicated tracker is the honest choice.
• Head-to-head: AEOeye vs LLMrefs sets the two approaches side by side.

For the wider market, start with the best AI visibility tools and our guide to AI visibility trackers.