NO SIGNUP use it immediately
FREE ACCOUNT registration, no card
DAILY CAP limited uses per day
TRIAL paid after a limited period
Free tiers change constantly. Everything below was accurate when written; verify on the vendor’s own pricing page before relying on it. If something here is wrong or out of date, tell me and I’ll fix it.
The genuinely free foundation
If you set up nothing else, set up these. Free permanently, no upsell, first-party data.
Google Search ConsoleThe truest data about your own site: impressions, clicks, position, indexing status, Core Web Vitals.Free forever. No paid tier exists. FREE ACCOUNT
Bing Webmaster ToolsThe same for Bing — which also means DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Copilot. Includes Site Scan, a free audit Search Console has no equivalent for.Free forever. Import from Search Console in one click. FREE ACCOUNT
Google Analytics 4What visitors do after they arrive. Conversions are the only metric that connects SEO to revenue.Free at the scale any small site operates. FREE ACCOUNT
PageSpeed InsightsCore Web Vitals with prioritised fixes, using real-user field data where available.No account, no limit. NO SIGNUP
Rich Results TestValidates structured data and shows which rich results a page qualifies for.No account, no limit. NO SIGNUP
Crawlers and auditing
For finding what is broken across a whole site rather than one page.
Screaming Frog SEO SpiderDesktop crawler. Finds broken links, duplicate content, missing titles, redirect chains — the standard tool for technical audits.Free tier caps at 500 URLs per crawl. Enough for most small sites. 500 URLS
On-Page SEO AnalyzerAround 40 checks on a single URL: meta, headings, content, images, links, technical setup and structured data, scored and grouped.Mine. No account, no email, no cap. NO SIGNUP
LighthouseGoogle's open-source auditing engine, built into Chrome DevTools. Performance, SEO and accessibility scoring.Open source. Already in your browser. NO SIGNUP
Keyword research
Honest warning: real search volume data is genuinely expensive to produce. Anything free is either estimating or limiting you.
Google Keyword PlannerVolume ranges straight from Google. The only free source of first-party volume data.Requires a Google Ads account. Ranges are broad unless you're spending. ADS ACCOUNT
Keyword ExplorerReal long-tail suggestions from Google autocomplete across ~65 modifier patterns, classified by search intent.Mine. No volume data — I won't invent numbers I can't source. NO SIGNUP
Google TrendsRelative interest over time, seasonality and geography. Directional rather than absolute.No account, unlimited. NO SIGNUP
AnswerThePublicQuestion-shaped queries grouped by how, what, why and when. Good for content ideation.Free searches are limited per day; the rest sits behind a subscription. DAILY CAP
Snippets, social and structured data
Small checks that catch surprisingly expensive mistakes.
SERP Snippet PreviewHow your title and description render in Google, measured in pixels rather than characters — which is what actually determines truncation.Mine. Runs entirely in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere. NO SIGNUP
Social Share PreviewHow your link renders on LinkedIn and X, and which Open Graph tags are missing.Mine. No account, no cap. NO SIGNUP
Schema Markup ValidatorValidates any structured data against the schema.org vocabulary, including types Google doesn't use.Run by schema.org. No limits. NO SIGNUP
Indexing and AI crawlers
The newest category, and the one most sites have never checked.
AI Crawler Access CheckerWhether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and the traditional crawlers are allowed by your robots.txt.Mine. Reads a public text file; nothing stored. NO SIGNUP
Canonical Health CheckerWhether your canonical tag resolves to a live 200 page or quietly points at a redirect.Mine. Built after I broke 29 of my own. NO SIGNUP
IndexNowOpen protocol for instant submission to Bing and several other engines. Not supported by Google.Free protocol, not a product. Implement it yourself or via a plugin. NO SIGNUP
The paid platforms, described honestly
Their free tiers exist to demonstrate the product. That is fair enough — but worth naming, because these pages dominate the search results for “free SEO tools”.
Ahrefs free toolsNarrow single-purpose checkers — backlink checker, keyword generator and similar. Genuinely useful for one-off lookups.Full data requires a paid plan. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives more, free, for sites you own. LIMITED
Moz free toolsLink and domain checks plus a keyword tool with limited daily queries.Domain Authority is a Moz metric, not a Google one. Useful for comparison only. DAILY CAP
SemrushBroad platform covering keywords, backlinks, audits and PPC. The free tier is a sampler.Limited free queries per day, then paid. TRIAL
Why I list competitors
Because a directory that only lists my own tools is not a directory, it is a menu. Screaming Frog is better than anything I have built for whole-site crawling, and Keyword Planner has volume data I cannot produce. Saying so costs me nothing and makes the rest of the page believable.
My tools are marked. They have no signup, no email capture, and no cap — not as a growth tactic, but because gating a tool that costs nothing to run would be difficult to justify.
Related: what SEO tools actually do,
my six free tools, and
where to start if you are new.