Best free SEO tools: the right tool for each need, limits included

You want the best free SEO tools, without opening twenty accounts to find out which ones keep their promises. Here’s the short answer, one tool per job:

1. See how Google sees your site: Google Search Console, plus Bing Webmaster Tools for Bing.
2. Find keywords: Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest’s 3 free searches a day, Semrush’s 10 free reports a day.
3. Audit your site: Ahrefs Free on sites you verify, Seobility Basic, or Rank Math and AIOSEO on WordPress.
4. Check your backlinks: Ahrefs’ free Backlink Checker, no account needed.
5. Track your rankings: Search Console first, then the few keywords Semrush, Seobility or Ubersuggest track for free.
6. Get an action plan from one sentence: SemChat’s Free plan, knowing one full audit uses up the month’s quota.

The SemChat buttons on this page are affiliate links. SemChat is the only tool I tested on a real account; the others are described from their official pages.

Free SEO software: what you really get for nothing

Free SEO software is almost always a capped version of a paid tool, built to make you want the paid plan. That doesn’t make it useless: for a small site, free quotas often cover the essentials. You just need to know what you’re holding.

Free forever, free trial or free checker: know the difference

The word “free” hides three different things:

• a permanent free plan: it never ends, but it’s limited. Of the 20 tools whose pages I read, 8 have one: Semrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Seobility, Rank Math, AIOSEO, Haloscan and BotSEO (October 29, 2026). SemChat has one too;
• a free trial: everything is open, but for a few days, often with your card on file;
• a free checker without an account: one task, a sample of the data, nothing saved.

SE Ranking, Surfer and ChatSEO: trials, but no permanent free plan

SE Ranking says it plainly: “There’s no permanent free plan, but you can evaluate the platform with a free 14-day trial (no card required)”, plus several free tools on its site that need no account (FAQ). Surfer shows no free plan on its pricing page. Its 7-day trial of the Pro plan asks for your card, and its help center warns: “The trial does not cancel automatically.” If you don’t cancel, the plan starts and you’re charged. Surfer does keep one free tool: the Keyword Surfer Chrome extension.

ChatSEO has no free plan either: its entry offer is a 7-day trial with 30 credits, a card saved with Stripe, and a reminder at least 3 days before the first charge (pricing page and terms, October 29, 2026).

Free SEO tools list: what each free plan allows, dated

Sources: each tool’s official pricing, FAQ or help page, read on October 29, 2026 (Semrush pricing reread on October 30, 2026). Each quota comes from the tool’s own page, never from another list.

Free tools from Google and Bing: where every beginner starts

Before any third-party tool, the search engines themselves hand you free tools that report on your own site.

Google Search Console: how Google sees your site

Google calls it a free service that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in its results. It shows the searches that bring up your pages, the clicks, the indexed pages and the problems Google found. It’s the only source of Google’s real data on your site; every other tool estimates.

Google Analytics 4: who visits and what they do

Search Console stops at the click. Google Analytics 4 takes over: the visits to your site, where they come from, what people do. Google’s product page says it “gives you the tools, free of charge, to understand the customer journey” (read October 30, 2026).

Bing Webmaster Tools: the same view, for Bing

Bing has its own tool for site owners. Its page invites you to “Get started for free” and mentions free SEO and GEO tools (read October 30, 2026). If some of your visitors search on Bing, set it up too.

Best free SEO tools for keyword research, for beginners

A keyword is the phrase your customers type into Google. Free plans give you some, a few at a time.

Google Keyword Planner: the keyword tool inside Google Ads

Google calls it “a free resource to help advertisers build keyword lists for search campaigns”. It suggests keyword ideas and shows how often they’re searched. The catch: you need a Google Ads account with your billing information entered and a campaign created (Google Ads pages read October 30, 2026). Pause that campaign and it won’t spend anything. Its “competition” column counts advertisers, not how hard it is to rank.

Ubersuggest and Semrush: a few free searches a day

Semrush Free says “No credit card required” and gives “1 demo project” and “10 reports per day across all vital tools” (pricing page, read October 30, 2026). Ubersuggest’s free plan has no time limit, but stops at 3 searches a day, 1 project, 25 tracked keywords and a 150-page audit a week (help article updated July 26, 2025).

Ahrefs Keyword Generator and the Keyword Surfer extension: free ideas

Without an account, Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator shows the first 100 keyword ideas for a topic (FAQ, October 29, 2026). Surfer’s Keyword Surfer extension adds search volumes and keyword ideas inside Chrome, “100% free. Forever” according to its page.

Haloscan: free searches, for the French market only

Haloscan presents itself as the biggest database of the French-speaking market. Its Free plan gives 50 Keyword Explorer searches and 25 Site Explorer searches a month, with no competitor analysis (pricing page, October 29, 2026). Useful if you sell in France; for a US site, look at the tools above.

Free tools to audit your site and check your backlinks

An audit walks through your site: broken pages, duplicate titles, slow pages, missing tags. A backlink is a link from another site to yours; Google uses links to judge how much it trusts you.

Ahrefs, Seobility and Semrush: what their free plans audit

• Ahrefs Free: “Not a trial”, no card, no end date. Site Audit crawls the sites you verify, with 5,000 crawl credits a month per project (Free page, October 29, 2026).
• Seobility Basic: “Free forever”, no card. 1 project, 100 pages per crawl, a new crawl 7 days after the last one, started by hand (pricing page, October 29, 2026).
• Semrush: its free tools without signup, including an SEO Checker, show “a sample of Semrush’s actual data” (official llms.txt, October 29, 2026).

Rank Math and AIOSEO: free checks inside WordPress

If your site runs on WordPress, the checks can happen in your dashboard. Rank Math’s free plugin lists “30+ Detailed SEO Tests”, Search Console integration, sitemaps and redirects. AIOSEO Lite “covers the fundamentals: title tags, meta descriptions, and basic sitemaps”. Both read on October 29, 2026.

Ahrefs Backlink Checker: your first links, no account needed

Type a domain and Ahrefs’ free Backlink Checker shows its first 20 backlinks, without an account (FAQ, October 29, 2026). For your own verified site, Ahrefs Free goes further: up to 1,000 backlinks and keywords visible at a time in Site Explorer. Semrush and Seobility also offer a free Backlink Checker without signup, and Search Console lists a sample of the links to your site.

BotSEO’s free plan and ChatSEO’s checkers, mostly without signup

BotSEO, a French tool with an English site billed in euros, has a free Discovery plan with no card: 5 AI actions a month, 1 project, and a first full diagnosis included (pricing page, October 29, 2026). ChatSEO, with no free plan, publishes 10 free online tools, most of them usable without signing up: a SERP simulator, checkers for meta descriptions, indexing, H1 tags and readability, robots.txt and schema markup generators (tools page, October 29, 2026).

Free AI SEO tools: where SemChat’s €0 plan fits

SemChat works differently: you don’t read dashboards, you ask your question in plain English and it answers with its tools.

SemChat Free: every feature in light use, no credit card

Its pricing page says: “Every feature, in every plan. Just pick your monthly usage.” The Free plan costs €0, with no credit card; only the quota changes from one plan to the next. Starter costs €20 a month, Pro 5x €100 and Pro 20x €200 (read October 30, 2026). For France, SemChat uses Haloscan’s data; for other countries, its data providers aren’t named (email from SemChat’s team, October 29, 2026).

Our test: one full audit used 100% of the Free quota

I tested it on October 29, 2026 on plugkit-avis.com, one of my sites, on the Free plan, with one sentence asking for a full SEO audit and a prioritized action plan. In about 3 minutes, SemChat returned 8 key figures, a diagnosis and 3 actions for the week. But that single audit used 100% of the Free plan’s monthly quota.

So the Free plan is there to see whether this way of working suits you. Keep that first audit for your real site.

SemChat review and SemChat pricing: the details

The full test, what works and what doesn’t, is in our SemChat review. The plans, top-ups and real cost are on the SemChat pricing page.

Semrush alternatives: which tool fits your budget and skill level

Semrush is a worldwide suite: its SEO plan costs €134 a month from France, and its Free plan stops at 10 reports a day (pricing page, October 29, 2026). The right replacement depends on who you are: SemChat if you’d rather ask questions in plain words, Ahrefs for backlinks, SE Ranking for an agency, Ubersuggest’s free plan on a tight budget, Surfer for writing. Each profile is covered in our guide to the Semrush alternative that fits you.

Ahrefs alternatives: which tool to pick when your budget is tight

Ahrefs offers no free trial (“We don’t provide any free trials”, help article of September 3, 2026), and its Ask Ahrefs assistant starts with the Lite plan, at €119 excl. VAT a month. On a tight budget, Semrush Free or SemChat’s Free plan cover the basics; SE Ranking suits agencies; Surfer suits writers. For backlinks, Ahrefs keeps its own link index. The comparison is in our guide to the Ahrefs alternative for your budget.

Ubersuggest alternatives: when the free plan stops being enough

Three searches a day run out fast. Out of searches? Add Semrush Free and Google Search Console. Want your own site checked in depth? Ahrefs Free. Want a plan in plain words from the free tier? SemChat Free. Need a full suite? Semrush, Ahrefs or SE Ranking. All the options are in our guide to Ubersuggest alternatives.

SE Ranking alternatives: simpler tools for a single site

SE Ranking is built for teams and agencies: its Core plan costs €109 a month for 10 projects (pricing page, October 29, 2026). If you manage clients, stay. If you run one site, SemChat answers in a chat from a Free plan at €0, Ubersuggest and Seobility keep a lasting free plan, and Semrush or Ahrefs play at the same level. The breakdown by profile is in our guide to the SE Ranking alternative.

Surfer SEO alternatives: for writing, and for seeing your whole site

Surfer is first a content editor: its first plan, Discovery, costs €59 excl. VAT a month, with no free plan (pricing page, October 29, 2026). To write with a no-card trial, look at Frase; for a larger content team, Semji; for a full suite with a content editor inside, SE Ranking or Semrush; for a free site diagnosis you get by asking, SemChat. It’s all in our guide to the Surfer SEO alternative.

ChatSEO alternatives: which AI SEO assistant fits your budget

ChatSEO starts at €29 excl. VAT a month, after a 7-day trial with a card (pricing page, October 29, 2026). To start without a card, SemChat makes the same promise with a Free plan at €0, and BotSEO has its Discovery plan. For an agent that writes and publishes, Frase; for a full data suite, Semrush, Ahrefs or SE Ranking. The profiles are laid out in our guide to the ChatSEO alternative that fits.

SemChat comparison: which SEO tool fits your site?

Already torn between SemChat and one specific tool? Our SemChat comparison puts SemChat next to 7 SEO tools (Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking, Ubersuggest, Surfer, ChatSEO, Haloscan) on three things: the entry price, the free plan and how you work with it. It leads to each detailed head-to-head.

Where to start with free SEO tools

Start with Search Console: it’s free and it’s about your site. Add one free keyword tool to pick your topics, then a free audit once a month. If you go with Google’s own, our answer to is Google Keyword Planner free shows you how to open it and what it hides for SEO. Pay only on the day a quota really blocks you, not before. The best free SEO tools do most of the work for a small site; a paid tool, or an assistant like SemChat, mostly buys you time.