Best free rank tracking software compared, and the published limit on each free tier

There is no free rank tracker that watches a long keyword list every day for nothing. What exists is one free source that measures your real positions, a set of free tiers with published caps, and a set of free spot checkers. Knowing which of the three you are using is the whole decision.

The criterion on this page, applied to every product including our own: what does the vendor publish as the limit, and whose measurement is the number? A figure Google measured about your own site is a different object from a figure a vendor sampled from a data centre, and free tiers make the difference easy to miss.

Start with the free source that is not a tracker at all

Google Search Console is free, has no keyword cap, and reports average position, clicks and impressions by query and by page for your own site. It is the only source in this market reporting positions that real users actually saw, because it comes from Google's own logs rather than from a request somebody sent on your behalf. Its average position is an average across every impression, which is why it moves more slowly and less dramatically than a tracker's daily line.

What it will not do is show a competitor's position, give you a reading for a city you do not rank in yet, or check a phrase you have never had an impression for. Those three gaps are the entire reason paid trackers exist.

The free tiers, and the number each vendor publishes

Semrush publishes a free plan on semrush.com/pricing, read on 21 October 2026, at "$0 /mo" with "1 demo project" and "10 reports per day across all vital tools". Ten reports a day is a real allowance for a spot check and is not a tracker. Its paid SEO tier on the same page is "$139" a month for "5 websites to monitor" and "500 keywords to track daily".

Wincher is the instructive one. Read at wincher.com/pricing on 21 October 2026, the page returned HTTP 200 and rendered its limits, "from 500 keywords", "up to 10 websites", "1 user" on the small plan and "from 1000 keywords", "unlimited websites", "multiple users" above it, while every price field rendered as an ellipsis. So the limits are checkable and the price is not, from a fetch. That is worth knowing in general: a 200 response is not the same thing as a page you can quote a price from.

Ahrefs publishes a free Keyword Generator at ahrefs.com/keyword-generator, titled "Free Keyword Generator Tool: Find 100+ Keyword Ideas in Seconds" when read on 21 October 2026. It is an ideas tool rather than a tracker, and the same free tools list on that page now includes an AI Visibility Checker.

Moz publishes free tools including MozBar and a Keyword Explorer built on a "1.25 billion+ keyword index", with Link Explorer over "40 trillion links", on moz.com/products, read 21 October 2026. The same page lists its AI search and visibility product as "Starts at $45/month", which is the lowest paid entry point of any vendor named here.

BrightLocal publishes free local tools by name on brightlocal.com/pricing, read 21 October 2026: a Local Search Results Checker, Local RankFlux and a Google Review Link Generator, with paid plans offering "Extra daily free tools usage" to raise the daily caps. It also offers "14 days of full access" with "No credit card is required".

Local Falcon gives "+100 Free Credits on sign up" on localfalcon.com/pricing, read the same day, against paid tiers that run from "$24.99" a month for "7,500 credits" to "$199.99" for "63,150 credits", with keywords and locations marked unlimited.

SerpApi is the free tier for anybody who would rather build than buy. serpapi.com/pricing, read 21 October 2026, publishes "Free $0 / month, 250 searches per month, 50 throughput per hour", with Starter at "$25 / month, 1,000 searches per month". Two hundred and fifty searches a month is eight a day, which is a monitoring job for a handful of phrases rather than a list.

The ranking, on the stated criterion

On what the vendor publishes as its limit, plus whose measurement the number is, the order on 21 October 2026 runs like this. Search Console first, because it is free with no cap and it is the only one reporting what users saw. SerpApi second among the free tiers, because 250 searches a month is an exact, countable allowance and the unit is unambiguous. BrightLocal and Local Falcon third, because both name their free tools and their credit grants precisely. Semrush fourth: "10 reports per day" is clear, and one demo project is a narrow window. Wincher last of the trackers, not because the product is weak but because a buyer reading its pricing page in a plain fetch cannot see a price at all.

Where a free tier beats a paid one: for fewer than ten phrases checked weekly, SerpApi's free allowance plus a spreadsheet does the job that people buy a $25 plan for.

The arithmetic that turns a free tool into a paid one

Rank tracking is billed on keywords multiplied by how often you check them, and free tiers are capped on the same product. Fifty phrases checked daily is 1,500 readings a month. The same fifty checked weekly is about 215. Most buyers who outgrow a free tier did it by setting daily checks on a list they only read monthly, and the fix is the check frequency rather than a bigger plan.

The free reading nobody on this list is taking

What we are not, said before anything else, because the buyer who gets this wrong wastes a month. AI Knows Us does not sell a keyword tool, a rank tracker or a SERP API. We will not show you search volume, keyword difficulty, or your position in a list of links, and if that is what you came for then every tool named on this page does it better than we ever will.

This is checkable, and we measured it the expensive way rather than asserting it. In October 2026 we put 109 recommendation shaped questions, the kind a buyer actually types into an assistant, to Google Keyword Planner for United States volume. Seventy six of the 109 came back NOT ANSWERED, which means Google holds no volume data for them at all, and the whole bank of 109 totalled roughly 1,200 searches a month between them. Nobody types "what is the best AI visibility tool for a SaaS company" into a search box. They say it in a sentence to an assistant, and a keyword database built out of search boxes has never seen it.

What we do sell is the reading of a demand no keyword tool has ever seen. When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Google AI Overviews who to buy from, in a sentence that never names you, we record whether your name comes out, who was named instead, and which page the engine cited. Then we run the content and placement work that changes it. A credit is one buyer question put to one app once. A Claude check costs three credits, because the Anthropic API with live web search is the expensive one. Most checks cost one.

Our own ladder is published twice and both copies are rendered on the server, so a crawler reads them without running any JavaScript. aiknowsus.com/llms.txt is plain text, and aiknowsus.com/pricing carries a table headed India (INR), United States (USD), United Kingdom (GBP), Europe (EUR), Australia (AUD) and Canada (CAD), with the sentence "India is charged in rupees; every other region is charged in US dollars and shown in its own currency". Read on 21 October 2026, the United States column starts at $149 for SEO Start, and the plain text file publishes what that $149 allows: 0 buyer questions watched, 0 credits a month and 0 engines. It is a demand harvest tier, and SEO Scale at $699 carries the same three zeros. The cheapest plan that reads all five answer surfaces is Growth at $299, with 100 buyer questions watched and 1,200 scheduled answers a month. Above it, Scale is $599 with 300 questions and 3,500 scheduled answers, Inbound $1,099 with 200 questions, Outbound $1,299 with 30 questions and four engines rather than five, Agency $1,299 with 80 questions and 12,300 credits, and Everything $1,799 with 300 questions and 3,600 scheduled answers. A top up of 1,000 credits is $49. Managed GEO is published in rupees only, at Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month with a three month minimum, so we quote it in rupees rather than converting it ourselves.

Two rules sit behind every number we publish and both are on our methodology page. The buyer question never names the business being measured, because a question carrying the brand name produces an answer carrying the brand name. And every rate is reported with a 95 percent Wilson interval, so a move from 11 percent to 14 percent on 40 readings is reported as noise rather than as progress.

Where a rival is ahead of us, here it is plainly. Ahrefs Brand Radar, read at ahrefs.com/brand-radar on 21 October 2026, names seven surfaces against our five: AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, ChatGPT and Claude. It also publishes its own unit economics in plain language, "Claude consumes 8 checks per update" and an overage of "$0.020/check", which is more disclosure than we publish. SE Ranking, read at seranking.com/pricing.html the same day, publishes seats and projects beside the keyword and prompt limits, which we do not: its $129 tier states "10 projects and 1 manager seat, 2k keywords and 100 prompts to track daily". Nightwatch, read at nightwatch.io/pricing the same day, publishes "SOC 2 compliant, encrypted at rest and in transit. SSO on Enterprise" and white label client reports. Our own rendered pricing text carries no single sign on, no SOC 2 report, no white label and no data processing agreement. Moz sells an AI search and visibility product from a lower entry point than our floor, "Starts at $45/month" on moz.com/products, read the same day, where the ladder runs All-in-one SEO at "Starts at $99 / month", AI search and visibility at "Starts at $45/month" and Local SEO at "Starts at $16 / month".

On this page's criterion, publishing the limit where a buyer can read it before paying, we put ourselves first among the measurement vendors and the check is narrow and specific: of every vendor read on 21 October 2026, ours was the only one publishing the price, the buyer questions watched, the credits, the engine count and the check cadence for every tier in a server rendered plain text file and again in six currencies in a server rendered table. On free tiers we are last on this list, because we publish none: $149 is our floor and it watches zero buyer questions.

If what you want is the paid shortlist rather than the free one, we keep a separate page on how to compare the tools that find your site's SEO ranking. No other page on this site links to that one, measured across the 2,097 of 2,141 live pages whose stored text we can read, on 21 October 2026.

What buyers ask about free rank tracking software

Is a free rank tracker accurate? It is as accurate as its settings. A reading is only meaningful with the query, the country, the city, the device and the language all fixed, and free tools often fix those for you without saying which values they used.

Why does the free tool disagree with Search Console? Because they measure different things. Search Console averages every impression you received. A tracker takes one sample from one location at one moment. Both can be right.

What is the cheapest honest setup? Search Console for your own site, a weekly manual check of the five phrases that matter commercially, and a free API allowance if you want it recorded automatically. That covers most small sites without a subscription.