There are dozens of free SEO tools. I tested 7 of the most popular ones and 3 newer AI readiness checkers to see what they actually give you for free — and what they leave out.
The short version: free tools are split into two separate worlds. Traditional SEO tools check one set of things. AI readiness tools check a completely different set. None of them do both.
The traditional SEO tools
These are the tools most people reach for first.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is the most generous free option. You get 5,000 crawl credits per month, 170+ technical checks, and your top 1,000 organic keywords. The catch: you can only analyze your own verified sites. No competitor research. No keyword discovery. No PDF export. And zero AI readiness checks.
SEMrush free tier gives you 140+ technical checks but limits you to 100 pages per month. That's enough for a small site but not a real audit. You get a decent prioritized issue list, but keyword tracking is capped at 10 terms and PDF export requires a paid plan.
Seobility checks 300+ factors across 1,000 pages — solid coverage for free. But you're limited to one project, 10 tracked keywords, and recrawls every 3 days. No AI analysis. No content quality scoring.
Screaming Frog free version crawls 500 URLs and gives you a spreadsheet of raw data. Broken links, meta tags, redirect chains, heading hierarchy — all useful. But there's no interpretation. No scoring. No priority list. You need to know what you're looking at to make sense of it.
Google Lighthouse is completely free with no limits. It checks performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. But it only works on one page at a time and the SEO checks are shallow — roughly 15 items like title presence, canonical tags, and mobile-friendliness.
They all check traditional technical SEO. None of them check whether AI can find you.
Wondering how your site scores?
Get your SEO audit →The AI readiness tools
This is a newer category. These tools appeared in 2025-2026 as AI search became impossible to ignore.
HubSpot AEO Grader checks how AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity talk about your brand. It tells you whether they mention you, how they position you vs. competitors, and what sentiment they attach to your name. But it's brand-level only. It doesn't crawl your site, check your technical SEO, or tell you what to fix on specific pages.
LLMClicks AI Readiness Analyzer audits up to 9 pages for entity density, schema for AI agents, token efficiency, and contextual completeness. You get a scorecard and a PDF. But it skips everything traditional SEO tools cover — no broken link checks, no performance scores, no keyword data.
WebTrek AI SEO Tool gives you an AI visibility score, GEO score, and schema suggestions for a single URL. It even generates ready-to-use JSON-LD code. But again — single URL, no site-wide crawl, no traditional SEO metrics.
These tools are useful. But they only cover the AI half.
The gap nobody fills for free
Here's the problem: if you want a complete view of your website's visibility — both in traditional search and AI search — you need to run multiple free tools and piece the results together yourself.
That means:
- Ahrefs or Seobility for technical SEO
- Lighthouse for performance
- LLMClicks or WebTrek for AI readiness
- Screaming Frog for deep crawl data
- And then somehow make sense of it all
No free tool scores all of this together, tells you what to fix first, or gives you something you can forward to your developer.
What a full audit actually covers
Our SEO & AI readiness audit scores your site across 10 categories — including technical SEO, content quality, AI crawler access, and E-E-A-T signals. Each category is weighted and benchmarked against industry averages.
You get a health score out of 100, a ranked list of your top 5 critical issues, and a 3-tier action plan that tells your developer what to fix first, what to tackle next, and what can wait.
The keyword research add-on shows your actual Google ranking positions, your competitors, and the keywords they rank for that you don't.
The whole thing arrives as a PDF in your inbox in minutes. No account to create. No subscription to cancel.
When free tools are enough
Free tools work fine if you already know what you're looking for. If you're a developer checking your own site for broken links, Screaming Frog is great. If you want to monitor your brand mentions in AI search, HubSpot's AEO Grader does the job.
But if you're a business owner who needs to understand whether your website is actually working — in both Google and AI search — and you need that answer in a format someone else can act on, free tools leave you doing the work yourself.
That's the difference. Free tools give you data. An audit gives you a diagnosis and a plan.
