Looking to get started with SEO for free? You can cover most of the essentials (such as checking AI SEO visibility, doing keyword research, and auditing a site) without spending a cent.
Free SEO tools like the ones below can help you stay ahead of the changes to the AI-driven search landscape and learn where to focus your optimization efforts.
1. Semrush
Semrush is a complete brand visibility platform that covers both traditional SEO and AI search in one place. Its free plan gives you access to a range of tools that handle most of the core SEO tasks you’d otherwise need multiple separate tools for: AI visibility checks, site audits, keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, and more.
That breadth is what makes it a good starting point for anyone new to SEO. You don’t have to bounce between five different platforms to run a full audit, plan content, and monitor performance — it all lives in one dashboard.
Below are some specific tools inside the platform that you can use for free.
2. Google Search Console
Best for: Seeing how Google views your website
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool from Google that gives you insight into how your site is performing in search results.
GSC’s interface isn’t very intuitive at first. But once you get acquainted with the layout and the built-in reports, you can find the data you need fairly quickly. For example, finding pages on your site that have lost a significant amount of traffic in the last 90 days can be done in under two minutes.
One drawback of GSC are the delays, with data lagging by 24-48 hours.
3. Google PageSpeed Insights
Best for: Measuring site speed and performance metrics
Google’s PageSpeed Insights helps you check your site’s technical performance.
Once you enter a webpage into PageSpeed Insights, it will perform a full analysis of the page in a few seconds and provide you with a detailed report.
Apart from showing how your site performs against key metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), PageSpeed Insights also gives you a list of issues slowing your site down.
The main drawback is that PageSpeed Insights doesn’t provide a lot of detail on how to fix the issues it flags—you need to figure this out on your own or hire a developer to do it.
4. Ubersuggest
Best for: Keyword research and first-page potential analysis
Ubersuggest is a free SEO keyword research tool that can generate thousands of keyword ideas from a single seed keyword.
In our test, we were able to get 9,000 keyword ideas from our seed keyword. We were then able to narrow this down in a few clicks by using the volume, intent, and SEO difficulty drop-down filters.
5. Keyword Rank Checker
Best for: Instantly viewing top-ranking keywords by domain
Keyword Rank Checker is a free tool from Semrush that lets you check keyword rankings for any website.
Once you enter a domain, Keyword Rank Checker will show which keywords it ranks highest for and which keywords drive the most traffic.
6. AnswerThePublic
Best for: Uncovering real search questions and long-tail ideas
AnswerThePublic scrapes autocomplete data from Google to show you related searches for a given keyword.
In our test, we were able to get 2,000+ related keywords and 71 highly relevant questions in under 10 seconds. You can then use these as standalone seed keywords to get even more ideas.
7. AlsoAsked
Best for: Mapping related questions and building topic clusters
AlsoAsked lets you see questions people ask related to your search phrase.
In our test, entering a single seed phrase into AlsoAsked generated 50 related questions. Clicking on each question then led to another set of 50 questions, and so on.
One drawback we noticed is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to see or download all of the potentially related questions with the free version of AlsoAsked—you can just view and download 50 at a time.
AlsoAsked is a powerful brainstorming tool for content and SEO planning, although the free limits make it harder to use for large-scale topic research.