CiteFuel vs Sona: Letter-Grade Audit vs Benchmarked Fix-File Output

Sona's AI Visibility Checker is one of the more thorough free tools in the space. Its 17-check, 127-point grading system covers crawlability, schema markup, content structure, and freshness signals, and the letter grade output (A through F) makes it immediately communicable to clients or stakeholders who don't want to read a raw score. It requires no signup and allows 5 audits/day per IP — generous for a free product.

We could not confirm whether Sona has a paid tier, and we're not going to guess — if you need that answer, check their site directly. What we can say from the free product alone: scoring calibration differs. CiteFuel separately publishes historical five-signal configuration context from 7,543 reachable homepages; that cohort is not a percentile for a current 26-check Readiness score or blended headline. And Sona's free checker identifies gaps and grades them; it does not generate fix files — no rewritten llms.txt, robots.txt patch, passage rewrite, or JSON-LD fix in the output we could verify.

CiteFuel's free audit covers 26 internal checks, no signup required, and a severity framework (P0/P1/P2), plus suggested configuration and content artifacts. Generated output must be checked against the live implementation and visible facts before use. If Sona ships more via a paid tier we're not aware of, we'll update this page — email us if you find one.

If what you need is a fast, no-signup gut check you can run five times a day and hand to someone as a single letter grade, Sona's free tool does that job well and costs nothing — there's a real case for using it as a quick screening pass across a list of domains before deciding which ones deserve a deeper look. Where it stops is exactly where the fix work begins: a grade of "C" tells you there's a problem; it doesn't generate the llms.txt, the robots.txt patch, or the passage rewrite that turns a C into a B. CiteFuel's free audit runs more checks (26 versus 17) and adds percentile context against a 7,543-site benchmark, so a score means something relative, not just absolute — and it produces the fix files in the same free pass, no separate purchase required. We're being deliberately cautious here about one thing: we could not confirm whether Sona has a paid tier at all, so we're not going to speculate about what a hypothetical Sona Pro might or might not include. Based on what's publicly verifiable today, the honest comparison is free-grading-tool versus free-audit-plus-fix-files — and if that changes, this page gets corrected, not quietly left stale.