A free alternative to Semrush, and the ten reports a day that decide whether free is enough
The published free tier, the six jobs a suite does, the free tool that covers each one, and the two it cannot.
Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 28 October 2026
There is a free alternative to Semrush, and the first part of it is Semrush. Its own pricing page, read on 28 October 2026, publishes a tier at "$0 /mo" described as "For trying out the platform. No credit card required", with two limits attached: "1 demo project" and "10 reports per day across all vital tools". Ten reports a day is the number that decides this question. If your week involves fewer than about fifty lookups, the free tier plus free first party tools covers the work. If you burn through ten reports before lunch, no free stack replaces the product and the honest answer is to pay for something.
Google Keyword Planner reports 10 searches a month in Singapore for this phrasing, harvested 26 October 2026 against geo 2702. It is a small, specific, high intent query: somebody has already decided Semrush costs too much and wants to know what they lose.
What the free tier is, exactly, and what the page did not say
Two things are worth recording from that reading of semrush.com/pricing on 28 October 2026. The first is the free tier above, with its demo project and its daily report cap. The second is that the paid ladder was not in the served page at all: the only dollar figure present in the document was the "$0". The plan prices arrive once the page's own scripts have run in a browser.
That matters for two different readers. For you, it means a price comparison assembled from served pages will show nothing for Semrush and a full ladder for vendors who print theirs in the HTML, so check the live page in a browser on the day you decide. For Semrush, it means anything reading the page without running scripts, including some of the assistants people now ask "what does Semrush cost", is reading a page whose answer is zero.
The six jobs, and which free tool does each one
A suite feels like one product and is really a bundle of jobs. Replace it job by job and most of the bundle turns out to be free, with two exceptions that are not.
| The job | The free replacement | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| What my own pages rank for, and what people typed | Google Search Console | Nothing. This is your own data, it is more accurate than any third party estimate, and it is free |
| Search volume for a new idea | Google Keyword Planner, free with an Ads account | Low volume terms come back as ranges rather than exact numbers, which is a real limit in a small market |
| Technical site audit | Screaming Frog SEO Spider free version, capped at 500 URLs | No scheduling, no JavaScript rendering, no crawl comparison, no Search Console or Analytics integration |
| My own backlinks | Ahrefs Free, which its own page says was formerly Ahrefs Webmaster Tools | Up to 1,000 backlinks shown at once, verified sites only, and 500 Site Explorer credits in total |
| Rank tracking | Search Console average position, read per query and per page | It is an average across the impressions you received, not a daily position for a chosen keyword list |
| Competitor keyword and backlink research | No free tool does this properly | This is the job the index is for, and nobody gives an index away |
All of the Ahrefs Free and Screaming Frog limits above were read from the vendors' own pages on 28 October 2026. Screaming Frog's paid licence is sold per user per year in four bands by licence count, running from GBP 199 down to GBP 169 per licence, which is a yearly cost rather than a monthly one and is the cheapest serious upgrade in this whole stack.
The two jobs the free stack cannot do, stated plainly
The first is competitive research. Every free tier in this market is scoped to sites you can verify, because verification is what lets a vendor give away data without giving away the index. If your job is to find out what a rival ranks for and who links to them, that is the thing you are paying for and there is no free route to it.
The second is client reporting. A freelancer with three clients can live on Search Console exports. An agency with fifteen cannot, because the product being sold is partly the monthly document, and assembling fifteen of those by hand costs more in time than a subscription costs in money. The crossover point in practice is around five accounts.
If what you actually need is a cheaper paid tool rather than a free one, our page on Semrush alternatives picked by the one job you use it for maps the paid field onto the same six jobs, and what SEO tools really cost a Singapore buyer covers the currency and GST side that the sticker price leaves out.
A fortnight on the free stack, in order
- Day one, verify everything. Search Console and Analytics on the live domain, Ahrefs Free on the same property, and an Ads account for Keyword Planner access. Verification is the gate on every free tier here.
- Day two, crawl your own site with the free crawler. Under 500 URLs you get the whole picture. Over it, crawl the sections that earn money.
- Day three, pull sixteen months of Search Console queries and sort by impressions with a position worse than ten. That list is the cheapest content plan in existence and no paid tool has it, because it is yours.
- Day four, use the Semrush free tier's ten daily reports on one question only. One demo project, one competitor, and the report you most wish you had. Ten a day is plenty for a focused question and nothing for browsing.
- Day five, write down what you could not answer. That list, not the price, is your upgrade decision.
Questions about free alternatives to Semrush
Is Semrush free forever or just a trial?
Its pricing page on 28 October 2026 showed a $0 tier described as being for trying out the platform, requiring no credit card, with one demo project and ten reports a day. That is a standing free tier rather than a countdown trial, and it is a different thing from the time limited trial of a paid plan.
What is the single best free replacement?
Google Search Console, and it is not close. It is first party, it costs nothing, and it answers the questions that change what you do next week: which queries you appear for, at what position, and which pages Google chose to show.
Can I do keyword research without paying anything?
Yes, with Keyword Planner for volume and Search Console for the queries you already appear for. Accept ranges instead of exact numbers on low volume terms, and pay attention to the queries where you are already on page two, because those move fastest.
How many keyword lookups does the Semrush free tier allow?
The page states ten reports per day across all vital tools, read 28 October 2026. A report is a tool run rather than a row of data, so the discipline is to decide the question before you open the tool.
When is free no longer worth it?
When you are doing competitor research weekly, or reporting to more than about five clients. Those are the two jobs the free stack genuinely cannot do, and both of them are time costs rather than data costs.
Verification is the gate on every free tier here, and one question has nothing to verify
Read back through this article and the same mechanism appears in every free offer: you get the data free because you proved you own the site. Search Console, Analytics, Ahrefs Free and the crawler all work that way, and it is why the free stack is generous about your own pages and silent about everybody else's. Now take a question that has no site to verify at all. Somebody asks an assistant who to buy from in your category, and the answer names three companies. There is no property to add, no tag to install and no log file to read, because the thing being measured is what a model said rather than what your server did. That is a different kind of data collection, closer to polling than to analytics, and building it as a product is the work behind AI Knows Us.