Four free tools for the things you should not be paying for in 2026
No login, no email, no domain upsell. Each tool eats the API cost so you do not have to. The economics work because most users hit cache; the budget for the rest funds itself out of the consultancy.
The tools
Business Name Generator + Trademark Check
NEWThe only free generator that runs a real trademark check
Generates 20 brand-name candidates with Claude, then runs a real Signa.so trademark search across USPTO, EUIPO, and WIPO Madrid on the top 12. Surfaces conflicting marks with owner, filing date, NICE classes, and status. Skip the cease-and-desist letter that arrives 6 months after launch.
AI Search Keyword Research
See what AI engines are actually answering for your topic
Harvests questions from Google PAA, Reddit, and Stack Exchange. Clusters them semantically with Claude. Returns search volume, KD, AI Overview presence flag, and the actual Perplexity answer with cited sources for the top clusters. Built for AEO and GEO research in 2026.
AI Citation Checker
Test if ChatGPT cites your brand for buyer-intent queries
Type your domain. Tool derives 5 buyer queries someone in your category would ask ChatGPT or Perplexity, runs each through Google with AI Overview detection, and reports whether your brand appears in the top 10 organic results that AI assistants pull citations from.
WordPress Stack Advisor
Get a stack pick for your specific WordPress brief
Answer 6 questions about your project — traffic, content team, performance budget, technical depth. Returns a stack recommendation across managed WordPress hosting, headless WordPress, Next.js, Astro, or static-site path. With pricing ranges and the trade-offs explained.
Why these are free, and where the line is
The free tier on each tool is sized so an honest researcher never hits the cap. Cached searches are unlimited (most popular queries hit cache); fresh searches are rate-limited per IP at a level that costs the consultancy under $50/day in API fees at typical traffic. The economics work because the same searches recur — the first user pays for the API call, every subsequent user for 4 weeks gets the cached result for free.
Where the free tier stops: deep enterprise audits (citation tracking over 90 days, multi-brand comparison, programmatic content brief generation across 100+ topics, attorney-grade trademark clearance opinions). Those are paid engagements, not free tools — described on /solutions/ai-seo-geo/ and /ai-search-optimization/.
If a tool ever starts running at a loss, the rate limit tightens before the tool disappears. None of them have ever been gated behind email collection and none ever will be — the lead-gen path is the consultancy CTA on each results page, not a captured email list.
Want the next tool to be your idea?
The roadmap is informal. Tools that genuinely save consultancy clients time get built. The next likely additions: schema markup generator for AI Overview readiness, AI prompt visibility tracker (recurring monitor across ChatGPT/Perplexity/Gemini), domain availability + TM combined search.