Last updated: 11 July 2026
Changelog: 11 July 2026: first published. Every free tier, daily limit and trial term on this page checked against vendor sites the same day.
Disclosure: some links on this page are affiliate links. If you buy through one we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we would genuinely use.
The best free SEO tools in 2026 are Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, Bing Webmaster Tools, Screaming Frog’s free crawler, Ahrefs Free and the free Semrush account: all genuinely free, not trials in disguise. We are Luckywebs, a UK SEO and web agency based in London, and we run parts of the free stack on every client site alongside our paid platforms. This page covers more than 25 free tools grouped by job (keyword research, rank checking, audits, backlinks, local and AI search), with the real limits of each as of July 2026, and an honest note on when free stops being enough.
An actually free SEO tool works forever at no cost, with no card and no expiry date. That matters because “free” on a pricing page hides three different deals, and stale roundups blur them constantly. A free trial ends after 7 or 14 days and usually converts to a paid subscription. A free tier lasts forever but caps your usage (searches per day, pages per crawl, rows per report). Only the first category, permanently free tools like Google Search Console, costs you nothing whatever you do. Every tool on this page is labelled with its type, so you know what you are signing up for before you hand over an email address:
| Type | What it means | Examples (July 2026) |
|---|
| Actually free | No cost, no cap that bites, no expiry | Google Search Console, GA4, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Business Profile, Looker Studio, Lighthouse |
| Free tier | Free forever, but capped daily or monthly | Semrush Free (10 queries/day), Ahrefs Free, Ubersuggest (3 searches/day), Moz (10 queries/month) |
| Free trial | Full product, time-limited | Semrush (7 days, card needed), SE Ranking (14 days, no card) |
| Open source | Free code you host and run yourself | SerpBear, Serposcope, Greenflare, Matomo |
The best free SEO tools cover a specific job well rather than everything badly, so we recommend building a small stack instead of hunting for one free platform. The ten below are the tools we would install first on any UK small business site, in rough order of impact. All are free tiers or permanently free products, verified July 2026. We score free tools on the same criteria as paid software, set out in how we test SEO tools. If you only act on one row, make it the first: no paid tool replaces Google Search Console, because it is the only source of your actual Google query data.
| Tool | Job | One-line verdict |
|---|
| Google Search Console | Rankings, indexing, clicks | Non-negotiable. Your real Google data, free forever |
| Google Analytics 4 | Traffic and conversions | Free forever; clunky but unavoidable |
| Bing Webmaster Tools | Bing/Copilot visibility + keyword data | The most underrated free tool in SEO |
| Screaming Frog (free) | Technical crawling | Best free crawler; 500 URL cap per crawl |
| Ahrefs Free | Audit + backlinks for your own site | Astonishingly generous for verified sites |
| Semrush Free | Keyword and competitor snapshots | 10 queries a day, enough to learn the craft |
| Google Keyword Planner | Search volumes | Free but shows broad ranges without ad spend |
| Google Business Profile | Local SEO | The whole local game, free |
| PageSpeed Insights | Speed and Core Web Vitals | Free, unlimited, straight from Google |
| HubSpot AEO Grader | AI search visibility | Free brand check across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini |
The best free keyword tools in 2026 are Google Keyword Planner for raw volume ranges, Bing Webmaster Tools for real impression numbers, and Keyword Surfer for volumes inside Google results as you browse. None gives you everything: Keyword Planner shows broad buckets (a term searched 1,300 times and one searched 9,400 times both land in the “1K to 10K” band) unless your Google Ads account has active spend. Bing’s keyword research tool is the workaround most people miss: it is completely free, shows real weekly and monthly impression figures rather than ranges, and exports to CSV. Layer the question-mining tools on top for content ideas. We walk through the full workflow in our guide to free keyword research tools, and if you later outgrow them, our Semrush keyword research guide shows what the paid ceiling looks like.
| Tool | Free limit (July 2026) | Verdict |
|---|
| Google Keyword Planner | Unlimited, but volume ranges without ad spend | The baseline, not the answer |
| Bing Webmaster Tools | Unlimited, real impression data, CSV export | Best free volume data available |
| Google Trends | Unlimited | Direction and seasonality, not volume |
| Semrush Free | 10 keyword/domain queries a day | Best data quality of any free tier |
| Keyword Surfer (Chrome) | Free, no Surfer account needed, volumes for 70 countries | Volumes in the SERP as you search |
| AnswerThePublic | 3 searches a day | Question mining for content ideas |
| AlsoAsked | 3 searches a day, no CSV on free | People Also Ask trees, great for FAQs |
| Ubersuggest | 3 searches a day (40/day via its Chrome extension) | Fine as a taster, thin beyond that |
| Moz Keyword Explorer | 10 queries a month | Decent difficulty scores, tiny allowance |
How can you check your Google rankings for free?
You can check your Google rankings for free with Google Search Console’s Performance report, which shows the average position, clicks and impressions for every query your site actually appears for. It is the most truthful rank data available because it comes from real searches, not simulated ones, although positions are averages across users and locations rather than a single neutral number. For a classic tracked-keyword view, the free Semrush account follows 10 keywords with daily updates, and Ubersuggest’s free plan tracks 25 keywords with weekly desktop-only checks (both verified July 2026). Self-hosters can run SerpBear or Serposcope, covered in the open source section below, for unlimited keywords at the cost of setup and maintenance. Our guide to checking your Google rankings covers why the position you see in your own browser lies to you, and how to track keyword rankings compares the tracking options properly.
Free technical SEO auditing in 2026 rests on two tools: Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider and Ahrefs Free. Screaming Frog’s free version crawls up to 500 URLs per crawl with no time limit and no sign-up, which covers most small business sites entirely; the £199 a year licence removes the cap and adds JavaScript rendering and saved crawls (verified on screamingfrog.co.uk, July 2026). Ahrefs Free (the renamed Ahrefs Webmaster Tools) gives verified site owners Site Audit with 5,000 crawl credits per project per month, checks for 170+ issues, and works on unlimited verified websites. Bing Webmaster Tools’ Site Scan is the sleeper: a free on-demand audit of up to 10,000 pages per site. Google’s own free checkers handle the specifics: PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse for speed and Core Web Vitals, the Rich Results Test and Schema Markup Validator for structured data. Follow our technical SEO audit in an hour to run it end to end.
What is the best free backlink checker?
The best free backlink checker for any site you do not own is Ahrefs’ free Backlink Checker, which shows a sample of a domain’s top backlinks with domain rating and anchor text (the full index sits behind a paid plan). For your own site the picture is far better: verify it in Ahrefs Free and Ahrefs quotes up to 1,000 backlinks at once with full sorting and filtering, drawn from one of the largest link indexes in the industry. Google Search Console’s Links report lists your linking sites for free with no row limit worth worrying about, though without any quality metrics. Moz’s free account allows 10 Link Explorer queries a month, and the free Semrush account can spend its 10 daily requests on Backlink Analytics. If the question you are really asking is “who links to my website?”, we answer it step by step in who links to my website.
Pros of free backlink data: your own profile is well covered; spotting toxic patterns and lost links costs nothing.
Cons: competitor analysis is capped everywhere; 100 rows will not reveal a rival’s full link strategy. That research is what paid tiers are for, as our Semrush alternatives comparison shows.
Free local SEO tools start and nearly end with Google Business Profile, which remains completely free and drives the map results where most local buying decisions happen. Claiming, completing and actively managing your profile (categories, services, photos, posts, review replies) outweighs everything else on this page for a tradesperson or local firm. Bing Places is its free equivalent on Microsoft’s side and takes minutes to set up by importing your Google profile. Google Search Console then shows which town and “near me” queries you actually appear for, and the free Semrush account includes 50 Map Rank Tracker credits a month to sample your map pack positions street by street (verified July 2026). Paid local suites like Semrush Local start at $30 (about £22) per location per month, but exhaust the free stack first: our local SEO checklist and guide to local keywords for tradespeople show how, and Semrush’s local toolkit shows what the upgrade buys.
Can you track AI search visibility for free?
You can check AI search visibility for free, but you cannot yet monitor it for free. HubSpot’s AEO Grader (formerly the AI Search Grader) runs a free one-off brand check across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, scoring sentiment, share of voice and brand recognition with no account, no card and no usage cap (verified July 2026). Bing Webmaster Tools counts twice here: its AI Performance report (added in 2026) separates AI citations from ordinary search clicks, and Bing’s index feeds ChatGPT search and Microsoft Copilot, so invisible on Bing means invisible to a large slice of AI answers. Beyond that, the honest free method is manual: ask the assistants your money questions monthly and log who gets cited. Continuous tracking is paid territory; Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit monitors ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, which we cover in our Semrush AI Toolkit guide. Start with optimising for AI Overviews and GEO rank tracking.
Open source SEO tools trade money for maintenance: the software is free, but you host, update and troubleshoot it yourself. The strongest options in 2026 are SerpBear, a self-hosted rank tracker that follows unlimited keywords via third-party scraping APIs, SEOnaut, a self-hosted technical audit tool that deploys with Docker and focuses on crawlability and indexing, and Matomo, the open source analytics platform UK firms often choose over GA4 for data-ownership reasons. Serposcope also tracks unlimited keywords for free, but it is ageing and needs proxy configuration, so treat it as a tinkerer’s tool. Greenflare, a free crawler once pitched as a Screaming Frog alternative, has not seen a release since 2021, so we no longer recommend it. Lighthouse, Google’s audit engine inside Chrome DevTools, is open source with no limits, and on WordPress the free version of Yoast SEO covers titles, metas, sitemaps and schema. Genuinely useful, provided someone on your team enjoys a terminal.
A complete small-site SEO campaign runs on free tools alone if you accept manual work where paid platforms automate. Here is the workflow we would follow, using only tools from this page; it mirrors our fuller DIY SEO guide:
- Verify your site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and submit your sitemap to both.
- Install GA4 (or Matomo) and mark your enquiry form or checkout as a conversion.
- Research keywords with Bing Webmaster Tools and Keyword Planner, then mine questions in AnswerThePublic and AlsoAsked (3 free searches a day each).
- Crawl the site with Screaming Frog free and fix broken links, missing titles and duplicate pages.
- Verify the site in Ahrefs Free for the monthly audit and backlink watch.
- Track your 10 most valuable keywords in the free Semrush account.
- Complete Google Business Profile and Bing Places if you serve a local area.
- Wire Search Console and GA4 into Looker Studio (also free) for a monthly dashboard.
- Re-check Search Console monthly: pages, queries, and anything Google flags.
Budget three to four hours a month once set up. The constraint is never the tools; it is the discipline.
Upgrade from free SEO tools when a daily cap, not your knowledge, becomes the thing limiting progress: ten Semrush queries vanish in one competitor session, three Ubersuggest searches barely start a keyword map, and no free tool will track 200 keywords across locations. In client work we see the switch pay for itself once a site earns real revenue from search, because paid data turns guesswork into prioritisation. There are two sensible routes. To test the full-platform ceiling, the Semrush free trial gives seven days of complete access (card required, from $139, about £102, a month after; see Semrush pricing for the current plans). For better long-term value on a UK small business budget, SE Ranking’s Core plan is £95 a month (£76 on annual billing) with a 14-day trial that needs no card at all: read our SE Ranking review or the head-to-head in SE Ranking vs Semrush.
Start Your Free Semrush Trial
Try SE Ranking Free for 14 Days
Yes. Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse and Google’s structured data testing tools are all permanently free with no usage caps that matter in practice (as of July 2026). Everything Google and Microsoft give site owners directly is genuinely free, because you and your data are the product. The caps begin where commercial SEO platforms offer cut-down free tiers.
Is Semrush actually free?
Semrush has a genuinely free plan, but it is deliberately small: 10 keyword, domain or backlink requests a day, 10 tracked keywords and a site audit capped at 100 pages (verified July 2026). It never expires and needs no card. The separate 7-day free trial gives full access to a paid plan but requires a card and converts automatically. Our Semrush review covers what the paid tiers add.
Is Ahrefs free?
Partly, and generously so for your own site. Ahrefs Free (formerly Ahrefs Webmaster Tools) gives verified owners Site Audit with 5,000 crawl credits per project per month, plus Site Explorer showing up to 1,000 backlinks and 1,000 ranking keywords for the verified site, on unlimited sites (verified July 2026). What it will not do is show a competitor’s data: that starts on the paid Starter plan at £23 a month in the UK.
Often, yes, in the first year. The free stack on this page covers keyword research, rank checking, technical audits and local SEO well enough for a small UK site with modest competition. Free SEO tools UK businesses rely on most (Search Console, Business Profile, Bing Webmaster Tools) all support UK-specific data. The limits bite when you need competitor research at depth, hundreds of tracked keywords or client-ready reporting.
Is there a free alternative to Semrush?
No single free tool replaces Semrush, but a stack gets surprisingly close: Bing Webmaster Tools and Keyword Planner for keywords, Ahrefs Free for audits and your backlinks, Search Console for rankings, and the free Semrush account itself for 10 daily competitor queries. For paid options at lower prices, see our full Semrush alternatives comparison, where SE Ranking’s no-card 14-day trial is the standout.
Only at snapshot level. HubSpot’s AEO Grader checks your brand’s visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for free, and Bing Webmaster Tools’ free AI Performance report shows AI citations from the index that feeds ChatGPT search and Copilot. Continuous prompt-level tracking (which assistants cite you, for which questions, over time) currently requires paid tools such as Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit. Our GEO rank tracking guide explains the manual free method.
Every tool review and comparison we publish lives in our SEO tools hub. Luckywebs is a London SEO and web agency rated 4.7 stars from 60 Google reviews; if you would rather someone ran all of this for you, we do that too.
