Free SEO tools lists are the easiest content in this industry to write and the least useful to read. They tell you a tool exists and is free. They never tell you the number that actually decides whether you can use it: the crawl cap, the rows you can see, the lookups per day, the credits per month, the features the free tier quietly withholds.
So this list is organised around those numbers. Everything stated as a limit below was read from the vendor’s own page on 2 November 2026, and where we could not verify a limit we say so rather than repeating a figure from another list. Prices and limits in this category change frequently, which is the reason for the date at the bottom.
The genuinely free, genuinely sufficient tier
Three tools, no cost, no trial, and between them enough to run a small site properly. If you install nothing else, install these.
Google Search Console
The most valuable free tool in this subject and the one most teams use at a fraction of its capability. It reports the queries that actually brought impressions and clicks to your site, measured rather than estimated, plus indexing status, structured data reports, Core Web Vitals field data and the Manual Actions report.
Two limits to know about, and we will be straight that we could not verify the exact figures from Google’s own help pages while preparing this. The interface shows a limited window of history, and it withholds very low-volume queries for privacy reasons, so the long tail you see is not the whole tail. Google documents both behaviours and the specifics change, so read the current help pages rather than any blog’s number, including ours. One detail we could verify: in exports, “Values shown as either ~ or – in the report (not available/not a number) will be zeros in the downloaded data”, which matters if you are doing arithmetic on an export.
The practical move is to get the data out rather than reading the interface, which is in how to export all your Search Console data with Python, and the index-checking use is in bulk index checks with the URL Inspection API.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Free, underused by Indian sites, and more generous than Google in one specific way: Bing announced Adaptive URL submission in January 2019 allowing “up to 10,000 URLs per day, with no monthly quotas”, with the quota set per site and, in Bing’s words, “determined based on the site verified age in Bing Webmaster tool, site impressions and other signals”. It also imports your Search Console setup, so the cost of adding it is minutes.
Worth having for a second opinion on indexing and for the fact that Bing’s index feeds surfaces beyond Bing. What its submission routes do and do not reach is in every place you can actually submit a URL.
PageSpeed Insights
Free, no account, and it gives you both field data from the Chrome UX Report and an on-demand Lighthouse run. The limits here are not commercial, they are methodological: the field section only exists if your site meets the Chrome UX Report’s eligibility criteria, and the lab score varies between runs for reasons Google documents. Both are explained in website speed testing tools and why they disagree, which is the piece to read before you quote a score to anyone.
Free tiers of paid tools, with the number that matters
Ahrefs Free, formerly Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
The most substantial free tier in the category, and the limits are published clearly, which we appreciate. Free access to three tools, for an unlimited number of verified websites.
The numbers: Web Analytics at “Up to 1M events per project”. Site Audit at “5K crawl credits/month per project”, with the FAQ clarifying that a credit is used only for “an HTML page with status code 200”. Site Explorer at “1K backlinks & keywords visible at once”. AI Content Helper at “1 free docs/month”.
Read the Site Audit number carefully, because it is the one that decides usefulness. Five thousand crawl credits a month per project means a site of a few hundred pages can be crawled several times a month, and a site of five thousand pages can be crawled once. If you need before-and-after crawls around a deployment, that is two crawls, and a large site exhausts the allowance immediately.
The real constraint is the one the page implies rather than states: the free tier covers sites you have verified. Competitor analysis, which is what most people want a backlink tool for, requires a paid plan. Ahrefs’ own paid pricing, verified the same day, runs Starter $29 a month, Lite $129, Standard $249, Advanced $449, Enterprise $1,499 with an annual commitment.
Its Web Analytics deserves a separate mention, described on the page as a “Privacy-focused alternative to GA: no cookies by default, no personal data collected”. For a site that needs basic traffic numbers without a consent banner, that is a genuinely useful free product, and it connects to the question in the DPDP analytics piece on this site.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
The free version is capped at, in the vendor’s words, “Crawl Limit – 500 URLs”. Paid is “£ 199 Per Year” for a single licence, dropping to £189 each for 5 to 9 licences, £179 for 10 to 19 and £169 for 20 or more, with the crawl limit becoming “Unlimited*” subject to allocated memory and storage.
Something worth knowing that the pricing page itself reveals: the free and paid feature lists are otherwise identical. The licence buys crawl volume rather than capability. So for a 300-page brochure site, the free version is the full product, and it will do structured data validation, broken link detection, redirect chain analysis and the rest. For anything larger, 500 URLs is reached before the crawl is useful.
This is the free tool we reach for most often, and the crawl-wide structured data validation in schema validators and structured data testing tools is one of its better uses.
Google Keyword Planner
Free with a Google Ads account, and the closest thing to authoritative volume data. The limits here are again methodological rather than commercial, and they are serious: the headline figure is a 12-month average, and the competition column describes advertiser competition rather than organic difficulty. Both traps are set out in keyword research tools, where the numbers come from.
Google Trends
Free, unlimited, and routinely misread. Google’s own documentation states the data is “scaled on a range of 0 to 100 based on a topic’s proportion to all searches on all topics”, so it is relative interest and not volume. Good for seasonality and comparison, useless as a number to put in a plan.
Google Analytics
Free at the tier almost every Indian business will ever need. The limits that bite are not row caps but consent and data residency, which is a different conversation and the subject of the DPDP analytics piece on this site.
Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator
Both free, both unlimited in practice, and both answering different questions, which is the entire point of the schema validators piece linked above. No commercial limits to report.
Tools we could not verify
Semrush, Ubersuggest and Moz all operate free tiers with daily lookup limits. We could not read Semrush’s pricing page on 2 November 2026 because it returned a bot challenge rather than content, and rather than quote limits from a third party post that may be stale, we have left all three unverified here. Check their own pages. The pattern across the category is a small number of free lookups per day, enough to answer a question and not enough to do a project.
The free tools that matter for AI visibility
This is where the free tier is genuinely competitive with the paid one, because the paid products in this space ration the thing you need most.
The assistants themselves. Asking ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini your own commercial questions, in a clean session, and recording what they say and what they cite, costs nothing and is the same mechanism the paid tools automate. The method is in how to track brand mentions in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for free. The reason this competes with paid tools is the run-count problem explained in rank trackers and AI answer trackers: a paid plan that gives you 150 checks a month rations exactly what you need to repeat, and your own hands do not.
Your own server logs. Free, already being written, and the only record of which AI crawlers actually reached you. Reading them is in log file analysis at scale with Python, and verifying crawler identity in verifying Googlebot and GPTBot in server logs. Which tokens to look for is in the AI crawler user agent reference.
A crawler access check. Free and five minutes, using the AI crawler access checker, which answers the question most sites get wrong before they spend anything on visibility work.
View source. Not a tool, and the most reliable test in this subject: if your content and your JSON-LD are not in the raw HTML, they do not exist for crawlers that do not render. The scripted version is in rendered vs raw HTML.
The table
All limits as published on each vendor’s own page, read 2 November 2026.
| Tool | Cost | The limit that decides usefulness | Enough for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search Console | Free | History window and withheld low-volume queries, exact figures not verified here | Every site, as the primary source |
| Bing Webmaster Tools | Free | Adaptive submission up to 10,000 a day, per-site quota | Every site, minutes to set up |
| PageSpeed Insights | Free | Field data only if the site meets CrUX eligibility | Any single-page check |
| Ahrefs Free | Free, verified sites only | 5K crawl credits a month per project; 1K backlinks and keywords visible at once; 1M analytics events | Sites up to a few thousand pages, own site only |
| Screaming Frog | Free, or £199 a year | 500 URL crawl limit; features otherwise identical | Sites under 500 URLs, fully |
| Keyword Planner | Free with Ads account | 12-month average headline; competition is advertiser competition | Volume, if you pull the monthly series |
| Google Trends | Free | Normalised 0 to 100, not a volume | Seasonality and comparison only |
| Rich Results Test and Schema Markup Validator | Free | Each answers a different question | All structured data work |
| Asking the assistants by hand | Free | Your own time | AI visibility measurement, better than rationed plans |
| Server logs | Free | Whether your host gives you access | The only proof a crawler arrived |
| Semrush, Ubersuggest, Moz free tiers | Free | Not verified on this date | Check their own pages |
What a small site can actually run on nothing
For a business with a few hundred pages, this is a complete stack at zero cost, and it is better than most paid setups we are shown.
- Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, both verified, with the data exported monthly rather than read in the interface.
- Screaming Frog free for a full crawl, since you are under 500 URLs, run before and after any deployment.
- PageSpeed Insights for the page types that matter, read as field first and lab second.
- Ahrefs Free for Site Audit on your own domain and for basic traffic analytics without a consent banner.
- Keyword Planner for volume with the monthly series, and Trends for shape.
- The two schema validators at publish time, with the rules automated per automating structured data from your CMS.
- Your own hands in the four assistants, monthly, recorded in a sheet.
- Server logs, read quarterly.
The first paid tool worth buying, when you outgrow this, is usually a crawler licence or a backlink tool for competitor data, in that order, and the trigger is site size rather than ambition.
What is a waste of effort
Paying for a crawler licence for a 300-page site.
Buying a suite before exporting Search Console, which is free and is about your own site rather than a model’s estimate.
Quoting a Trends score as a search volume.
A free tier that gives three lookups a day, used as a research tool.
Treating any free tools list, including this one, as current without checking the date on it.
If you are paying for tools whose free tiers would have covered your site, get in touch.
Last verified: 2 November 2026. We review this page quarterly. Free-tier limits change without announcement, so treat every number here as the date it was read.
Sources, all read 2 November 2026. ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools and ahrefs.com/pricing for the Ahrefs Free limits and paid prices. screamingfrog.co.uk pricing page for the 500 URL limit and licence prices. Bing Webmaster Blog, January 2019, for the Adaptive URL submission quota. Google Trends Help for the normalisation statement. Google Search Console help pages for the export behaviour. Google Ads API documentation for the keyword volume fields. Semrush, Ubersuggest and Moz free-tier limits are recorded as unverified.