Free access after the trial
A RankX AI trial that ends does not lock the account. AI Readiness, Brand Book and Tasks stay free, and this page says exactly what happens to your data.
When a RankX AI trial ends you keep your login and you keep using part of the product. AI Readiness, Brand Book and the Tasks board stay free and stay usable, indefinitely. Every other section shows an upgrade panel instead of its data, and nothing is scheduled or re-measured until you choose a plan.
This state is called free access, and it applies to an account whose trial expired. An account that cancelled a paid plan, or whose plan lapsed for non-payment, is a different state and keeps the full-screen gate.
What stays open
| Surface | What you can do |
|---|---|
| AI Readiness | The live site-side checks of your robots.txt, llms.txt and homepage, the readiness score, generating and downloading your llms.txt, and handing findings to the Tasks board |
| Brand Book | Everything, on every tab, including Competitors |
| Tasks | The full board: create, edit, dismiss, follow up |
| Settings | The whole shell, including billing, your profile and your security settings |
Those three are not a random selection. They are the surfaces that cost RankX AI
nothing to run and still form a loop worth returning to: edit Brand Book,
regenerate your llms.txt, re-run readiness, work the Tasks board. Nothing in
that loop calls a paid provider, so there is nothing to meter.
The whole settings shell stays open, not just Brand Book. Settings are configuration rather than work, so nothing in them can spend, and a customer must always be able to manage, reactivate or close their own account.
What stays live in the background
The daily site-signal watch keeps
running on free access. RankX AI fetches your robots.txt, llms.txt and
homepage once a day and tells you when AI crawler access changes for the worse.
That is what stops free access being an archive of old numbers. Three HTTP requests a day cost nothing, and they mean the one page you can still use is answering about your site as it is today rather than as it was when your trial ended.
Nothing else runs. Scheduled visibility checks, rank checks, AI Shopping checks and audits are all paused, and stored figures go visibly stale. Free access is your data plus a free diagnosis; it was never a monitoring product.
What is paywalled
Everything else: the Dashboard, AI Visibility, AI Prompts, Chat, Sources, Rankings, Rank Tracking, AI Overviews and their citations, Website Audit, Traffic, Content Studio, Keyword Research, Topic Clusters, AI Shopping, and the agency surfaces.
A paywalled section renders a panel in place of its content, naming the section you were reaching for. The navigation and the top bar stay live throughout, so the free surfaces are always one click away rather than being buried behind a wall.
Inside AI Readiness, the free band is bounded too. The answer accuracy check, the page crawl that bootstraps the page-level checks, and brand-prompt authoring are all metered, so they are offered with their price rather than run.
What happens to your data, precisely
The honest sentence is the one RankX AI shows you in the app: your projects, keywords, rank history and brand profile are saved. It says what survives rather than claiming everything does, because the unqualified version is not true.
| Data | What happens |
|---|---|
| Websites, tracked keywords, rank-check history, AI visibility history, brand profile, services, knowledge, competitors, topic clusters, prompts and tasks | Kept. No status-driven deletion touches any of it |
| Crawled page content, its embeddings, and stored audit pages and resources | Deleted 7 days after the trial ends |
| Search Console and Analytics history, and the Google connection itself | Deleted 30 days after the trial ends |
The split is deliberate and it follows one rule: history and configuration are irreplaceable, bulk is reproducible. An indexed page costs RankX AI about 420 KB once its embeddings are counted, so a large site carries gigabytes of crawl data that is doing nothing and can be rebuilt from the live site in minutes. Rank history cannot be rebuilt at any price, because nobody sells June's positions, and you cannot ask an assistant what it said about you last month.
The Google connection goes on its own, longer clock for a different reason. It is not a record, it is a live standing capability against a real person's Google account, held by a relationship that has ended. Thirty days is the window to come back before RankX AI gives it up.
The practical consequence on AI Readiness: seven days after your trial ends, the checks that read stored page content have nothing to read and report themselves as not assessed. The site-side checks keep answering, because they are fetched live. The page tells you which is which, and stamps the page-level checks with the date the pages behind them were read.
How you can tell what a check is reading
Because free access mixes live and stored evidence, AI Readiness labels the difference rather than rendering both identically.
The site-side checks of your robots.txt, llms.txt and homepage are fetched
on every page load and are always current. The page-level checks are derived
from stored crawl data, and carry a line saying how many pages they read and on
what date. Past 30 days old that line changes tone and offers a re-scan.
A verdict from four months ago rendered exactly like one computed a second ago is the slow form of the defect this product refuses everywhere else: not a check that never ran, but a check that ran on stale evidence and was presented as current.
Coming back
Subscribing restores everything at once, and every section picks up where it left off. You can subscribe at any point, including long after the trial ended.
Two details worth knowing before you do:
Anything deleted on the clocks above is rebuilt rather than restored. A new crawl repopulates page content and audit pages. Reconnecting Google starts a backfill of up to 16 months, so the traffic charts refill rather than starting from the day you reconnected. That is Search Console's own ceiling rather than a RankX AI one; for Analytics the same 16 months is RankX AI's choice, matched to how long it keeps the rows.
Trial credits do not roll over, and neither do monthly grants on a paid plan. See plans and limits.
Only an account owner can buy. Admins and members can see billing and cannot complete a purchase, so if the upgrade button is not doing what you expect, check who is signed in. See roles and permissions.
If you are an agency client
An Agency Client viewing a workspace whose agency has lapsed sees a neutral statement and no upgrade button. The plan is not theirs to buy, and on a white-labelled domain a "choose a plan" button would be their supplier soliciting them directly. The agency restores access.
Where to go next
- The free trial, for what leads here.
- AI Readiness, the headline free feature.
- The daily site-signal watch, which keeps running throughout.
- Plans and limits, for what subscribing gets you.
Last updated
The free trial
RankX AI's trial does not start at signup. It starts when the onboarding package completes, and this page explains why and what the grant funds.
Credits and billing
Your credit balance, where credits went, the monthly grant that does not roll over, top-up packs, and the four refusals with four different remedies.