Pricing
Free AI SEO tools: what you really get
Short answer. Two tools here are free in a way that does real work indefinitely: Rank Math's WordPress plugin and Screaming Frog's 500-URL crawler. The rest are trials, small daily quotas, or restricted to domains you already own. Free tiers cluster around data lookups and vanish around content generation, because generation costs the vendor money on every request.
Every free tier, and where it stops
| Tool | What the free tier includes | Where you hit the wall | Paid from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outrank | Free trial articles, watermarked. | Immediately: the watermark makes trial output unpublishable. | $99/mo |
| Writesonic | Trial access with no credit card required. | When the trial period ends. | $79/mo |
| Semrush | A small number of daily lookups across the main reports, no card required. | About ten queries in, most days. | $139/mo |
| Ahrefs | Full Site Audit and Site Explorer data, but only for domains you verify ownership of. You cannot research a competitor. | The moment you want a competitor's backlinks or keywords. | Starter $29/mo |
| MarketMuse | One user, 10 queries a month, Topic Navigator, keyword and SERP analysis. | After ten queries, which is roughly one planning session. | Free plan; paid plans on request |
| Koala AI | 5,000 words and 25 chat messages, once. | After roughly three articles. | $9/mo |
| Moz Pro | Limited free access to Link Explorer, Keyword Explorer and Domain Authority lookups. | After a handful of queries per day. | Starter $49/mo, Standard $99/mo |
| Rank Math | Genuinely complete on-page SEO for WordPress: schema, sitemaps, redirects, on-page analysis. The most useful free tier here by a distance. | When you need rank tracking, multi-site management or AI link suggestions. | Free; PRO from €7.99/mo billed annually |
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Crawl up to 500 URLs with no time limit, including broken links, titles, meta and sitemap generation. | At URL 501, which most small sites never reach. | $279/year per licence |
The free tools that are not on anyone's pricing page
Google Search Console is the most valuable free SEO tool in existence and no paid product replaces it, because third-party rank trackers estimate positions while Search Console reports what Google actually recorded. Google Analytics, the Rich Results Test and PageSpeed Insights round out a free stack that covers most of what a small site needs to know.
Then there are ours, all free permanently, no account, nothing uploaded:
AI SEO ROI calculator
Work out whether an AI SEO subscription pays for itself, using your own traffic, conversion…
Free foreverSEO stack cost calculator
Tick the tools you use or are considering, and see the real monthly and annual cost, which…
Free foreverContent cost calculator
Compare what a month of content really costs across four routes: an agency, a freelancer, your…
Free foreverAI SEO tool finder
Six questions about your goal, budget, platform and appetite for automation, matched against…
Free foreverAI Overview traffic impact simulator
Estimate how much of your organic traffic sits in the blast radius of Google's AI Overviews…
Free foreverOrganic traffic forecast calculator
See how many clicks a keyword is worth at each position, with and without an AI Overview on…
Free foreverKeyword value calculator
Turn a keyword's search volume, CPC and your conversion rate into a monthly and annual value…
Free foreverSERP snippet preview
See how your title and meta description will look in Google, measured in pixels rather than…
When paying starts to make sense
- You need competitor data. Free tiers almost universally restrict you to your own verified domains. The moment the question is "what are they ranking for", you are buying something.
- You are publishing more than four articles a month. Below that, free plus your own writing is fine. Above it, the time cost of doing everything manually exceeds the subscription.
- You need to know whether AI engines mention you. There is no free tier for this anywhere in the market, because every tracked prompt costs the vendor a real API call. Entry pricing starts around $20 to $29 a month.
- Someone else needs the reports. Client or stakeholder reporting is where free tools stop entirely.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a completely free AI SEO tool?
Rank Math's free WordPress plugin and Screaming Frog's 500-URL free tier are the two that genuinely do real work at zero cost, permanently. Everything else described as free is either a trial, a small daily quota, or restricted to domains you already own.
Can I do SEO with free tools only?
For a small site, largely yes. Google Search Console is free and is the only source of first-party Google data. Add a free SEO plugin, a free crawl and consistent publishing and you have covered most of what matters. What you cannot do free is competitor research at any depth or AI-visibility tracking at any scale.
Why do free AI SEO tiers exist at all?
Because the marginal cost of a keyword lookup is low and the marginal cost of an AI-generated article is not. That is exactly why free tiers cluster around data lookups and disappear around content generation and prompt tracking, where every query costs the vendor real money.
What free tools do you offer?
14 of them, listed below and on the free tools page: ROI, stack cost and content cost calculators, an AI Overview impact simulator, traffic and keyword value forecasts, a GEO content scorer, a readability checker, a SERP snippet preview, and schema, llms.txt and robots.txt generators. No signup, no limits, nothing uploaded.
Last verified 2 August 2026. Prices, plans and features on this page were read on each vendor's own site on that date. Vendors change pricing often, so confirm before you buy. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix it.
When free stops being enough
Thirty tools compared on what they actually do, at every price point.