Best free SEO analysis tools compared, and where each free analyser stops

Type a domain into a free SEO analyser and you get a score, a list of problems and an invitation to sign up. Two completely different products do that, and knowing which one you opened decides whether the report is about your website or about a vendor's opinion of it.

The criterion on this page: does the tool fetch your pages now, or look your domain up in a stored index? It is answerable in seconds, because a live fetch takes time to run and an index lookup is instant.

The two kinds, and the free ceiling on each

The restriction on the second kind is the interesting one. Free third party analysis of your own verified site is generous; free third party analysis of a competitor is deliberately shallow, because the index is the product.

The free analysis that is free forever, and is first party

Search Console. It reports the queries Google recorded your pages appearing for, the index state of every URL with the reason Google gave, and your Core Web Vitals in field data rather than a single lab run. No analyser can substitute for it and none of them has the data. If a free analyser and Search Console disagree about whether a page is indexed, Search Console is right, because it is Google's own record rather than a third party's inference.

So the honest free stack is: Search Console for what Google knows, a free crawl up to 500 URLs for what is actually on your site, PageSpeed Insights on templates for speed in field data, and the Rich Results Test for markup. That is a complete technical analysis of a small site and it costs nothing.

What a free score is and is not

A score out of a hundred is the vendor's weighting of its own checks. No search engine publishes a target for it, two vendors will give the same site different numbers, and both are internally consistent. Use the findings and ignore the score. The useful part of any free grader is the list of specific problems with URLs attached, which you can verify yourself in the page source.

One pattern worth naming: free graders that report a problem you cannot see when you check the page by hand are often reading a cached copy. Check the date on the report. An index lookup that is three weeks old is reporting a site you have already changed.

The one check none of these tools runs, and who sells it

Every tool on this page measures a search engine. None of them measures the other place your buyer now asks, which is an assistant: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews compose an answer for each asker, naming some businesses and not others, and there is no index a crawler can read to find out whose name came up. No free analyser touches it, and no paid one in this list does either, because there is no page to fetch and no index to look up.

AI Knows Us sells that one measurement and nothing else. We are not an SEO tool and we are not in the ranking above, because a buyer who came here for a crawler or a keyword index should buy one of the tools named above instead. What we do is ask your buyer question in all five apps on a schedule and record which businesses were named. Our own figures, from the rendered text of our llms.txt read on 21 October 2026: one credit is one buyer question on one app once, most checks cost one credit and a Claude check costs three because Claude costs more to run. The published US floor is $149 a month for SEO Start, and that same file says SEO Start watches 0 buyer questions on 0 engines, so it is a demand harvest rather than an engine watch. The first tier that watches the five engines is Growth at $299 with 100 buyer questions and 1,200 scheduled answers a month. A managed option is published in rupees only, Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month at a three month minimum, so we are not going to convert it for you.

Where the tools on this page beat us, plainly. Ahrefs Brand Radar, read on 21 October 2026, tracks prompts on ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude. AI Mode and Copilot are two surfaces we do not read at all, and its page publishes an overage price of $0.020 per check and the cost of a Claude update at 8 checks, which is a level of unit disclosure worth holding every vendor to, us included. Semrush, whose SEO and AI search pricing page we read the same day, sells AI visibility inside the suite you may already be paying for, with 50 prompts tracked daily and 300 AI visibility reports a day on its Starter tier. Moz now publishes AI Explorer, described on moz.com as showing what the top AI agents say about your brand. If you already pay one of those three, their module is the cheaper route and you should take it. We are the single purpose option for somebody who does not want a suite.

How to run a free analysis in twenty minutes

No competitor price table is reproduced on this page. What is quoted instead is the published limit that sets a tier, because a limit is the vendor's own statement of what you get and it does not move with the country you are reading from. That matters more than it sounds: on 21 October 2026 a fetch of one vendor's US pricing page from this machine returned Indian rupee prices, because the request left from an Indian address. A 200 response can still be the wrong page.

Verify Search Console and read index coverage by reason. Crawl free and sort by status code, then by title. Run PageSpeed Insights on your three main templates and read the field data. Validate the markup on one page of each type. Write down the five findings with URLs. That is a real audit, and the paid version of it mostly adds scale and a schedule.

On telling the two kinds of checker apart in practice, and what each one actually reads: SEO site checkers compared, on what each one actually reads. On 21 October 2026 we read every link we could see on this site, 2,169 page bodies in all, against 2,082 live pages, and 935 of them, 44.9 percent, had no inbound link from any of those bodies. That figure is an upper bound rather than a count. No other page on this site links to the one above.

Questions about free SEO analysis tools

What is the best free SEO analyser?

Search Console for your own site, and a free crawl for what is on the site. Both beat any third party grader because one is first party and the other is live.

Are free SEO scores accurate?

The findings usually are. The score is the vendor's own weighting and no engine publishes a target for it, so read the list and ignore the number.

Can I analyse a competitor for free?

Only shallowly. Free tiers restrict depth on sites you do not own, and the public pages are yours to read by hand, which is more useful than most people expect.

Why do two free tools disagree about my site?

Usually because one fetched the page and the other looked up a stored copy. Check which, and check the date on the report.

When is a paid analyser worth it?

Above the free crawl ceiling, when the crawl needs to be scheduled, or when somebody else needs the report. Those three, and nothing else.