25 free SEO tools worth using in 2026

Most free SEO tool lists are ranked by affiliate commission and include at least one product that no longer exists. This one is grouped by the job you are trying to do, says what each tool cannot tell you, and ends with the ones that should have been removed from these lists years ago.

Free tiers change without notice, so treat any limit mentioned here as true at the time of writing and worth confirming.

The four that matter more than the rest combined

If you use nothing else, use these. Three are from Google and one tells you what Google will not.

1. 1Google Search Console (opens in a new tab) — the only source of truth about what Google did with your pages: what is indexed, what is excluded and why, which queries you appear for, and whether you have a manual action. Nothing else on this list replaces it.
2. 2PageSpeed Insights (opens in a new tab) — real-user Core Web Vitals data at the top, lab diagnostics below. Read the field data first; the score is a diagnostic, not the assessment.
3. 3Google Analytics (opens in a new tab) — what people did after arriving. SEO tools measure the click; this measures whether the click was worth anything.
4. 4Bing Webmaster Tools (opens in a new tab) — worth ten minutes even if Bing traffic is small, because its keyword data is more generous than Google's and it surfaces crawl issues Search Console does not.

Diagnosing a specific page

When something is wrong and you need to know what the page actually sends rather than what it is supposed to send.

• Our SEO audit tool (5) — indexability, canonical, headings, metadata, links and security in one fetch, with the evidence quoted for each finding.
• Canonical tag checker (6) — what the page declares as its canonical, which is one of the commonest causes of a page silently vanishing.
• Redirect checker (7) — every hop, every status code, and where the chain lands. Essential after any migration.
• Broken link checker (8) — links that go nowhere, internal and external.
• Robots.txt tester (9) — whether a path is blocked, and which line decided it. Implements Google's real matching rules rather than a naive pattern translation.
• Security headers checker (10) — which security headers you send, quoted verbatim, with the configuration line to add for the ones you do not.

Crawling a whole site

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider (11) — the standard desktop crawler, free up to 500 URLs, which covers most small business sites entirely. Finds duplicate titles, broken links and redirect chains across a site at once.
• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (opens in a new tab) (12) — free site audit and backlink data for sites you can verify ownership of. The most generous free backlink data available, though still a sample.

Performance and rendering

• Lighthouse (opens in a new tab) (13) — built into Chrome DevTools. The same engine as PageSpeed Insights, run locally, which makes it far better for testing a fix before deploying it.
• Chrome DevTools Network and Coverage panels (14) — sort requests by size to find what is actually heavy, and use Coverage to see how much of your CSS and JavaScript is never used.
• Chrome UX Report dashboard (opens in a new tab) (15) — the field data behind Core Web Vitals, for your site and for competitors, which is one of the few genuinely comparative free datasets.

Structured data and metadata

• Rich Results Test (opens in a new tab) (16) — whether Google can read your markup and which rich result it qualifies for. Note that it now reports on fewer features than it used to.
• Schema Markup Validator (opens in a new tab) (17) — validates against the schema.org vocabulary generally, rather than only against Google's supported subset. Use it when the Rich Results Test says nothing.
• Schema generator (18) — produces valid markup for the common types without hand-writing JSON-LD.
• Meta title generator (19) — shows where a title is really truncated, which is by pixel width rather than character count.
• Meta description generator (20) — same idea for the description.
• Open Graph generator (21) — the tags that decide what a shared link looks like.

Keywords and content planning

The weakest category for free tools, because the underlying data is genuinely expensive. Be sceptical of precise numbers here.

• Google Trends (opens in a new tab) (22) — relative interest over time and by region. Not volume, but excellent for seasonality and for settling whether a term is growing or fading.
• Google Keyword Planner (23) — inside Google Ads, free with an account. Volumes come in wide buckets unless you are spending, but it is Google's own data.
• Keyword clustering tool (24) — groups a keyword list by intent and overlap, so you can see how many pages a long list actually justifies.
• Keyword difficulty checker (25) — reports what a keyword's own wording reveals, and states plainly that a difficulty score needs SERP data no free API provides, rather than printing an invented number.

That last one deserves a sentence of explanation, because it is a tool that declines to do the thing its name suggests. A difficulty score is a claim about competition, and competition can only be observed by looking at search results. Producing a plausible number without that data would be fiction that somebody plans a quarter around.

Tools these lists still recommend that you should skip

Four entries that appear on most 2026 tool lists and should not.

Our own keyword density checker exists and is genuinely useful, but for editing rather than for optimisation. Seeing which words dominate a draft tells you whether you have drifted off topic. It does not tell you a percentage to hit.

A sensible starting kit

For a small business with no budget and limited time:

1. 1Set up Search Console and Analytics. Half a day, and it makes everything after it measurable.
2. 2Run PageSpeed Insights on your three most important pages and read the field data.
3. 3Run an audit on those same three pages and fix anything blocking indexing.
4. 4Crawl the whole site with Screaming Frog once, to find duplicate titles and broken links in bulk.
5. 5Come back monthly to Search Console. That is the entire ongoing routine.

The thirty-minute version of steps two to four is written out in checking your SEO for free, and the full inventory is the technical SEO checklist.

Questions people actually ask

Are free tools accurate enough to rely on?

For technical checks, yes — a status code or a canonical tag is a fact, not an estimate. For volume, difficulty and backlinks, no tool at any price is exact, and the free ones are working from smaller samples. Know which of your numbers are measured and which are modelled.

When is a paid tool worth it?

When you are doing this weekly rather than quarterly, when you need to track dozens of keywords over time, or when competitor backlink research is part of the job. For a site with thirty pages and a monthly check, the free set is genuinely sufficient.

Which single tool should I start with?

Search Console, without hesitation. It is the only one reporting what Google actually did rather than what a third party inferred, and most sites find a real problem in it within ten minutes of first opening it.