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Best free SEO competitor analysis tools compared, and what each free tier allows on a domain you do not own

A free tier is generous about your own site and mean about everybody else's, because competitor data is the product. Here is where each free tier draws that line, in each vendor's own published words.

Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 22 October 2026

The criterion on this page, applied to everybody including us. Every one of these vendors will show you plenty about your own domain for nothing, because verifying a property costs them nothing and wins them a user. The interesting number is what the free tier allows on a domain you cannot verify, because that is the whole job you came for. Rank on the published allowance for an unowned domain, not on the feature list.

What each free tier publishes, read 21 October 2026

ToolFree allowance, in the vendor's own wordsOn a domain you do not own
Ahrefsahrefs.com/pricing publishes a plan called "Ahrefs Free", described as "Get Ahrefs data on your site and fix what matters". The page publishes no free trial and no refund wording anywhere.The description is explicit about the boundary: "on your site". That is the clearest statement of this limit in the whole set, and it is a point in its favour rather than against it.
Semrushsemrush.com/pricing/ publishes a free plan, "For trying out the platform. No credit card required", with "1 demo project" and "10 reports per day across all vital tools". It also offers "Try Semrush free for seven days. Cancel anytime".Ten reports a day across all tools is a real competitor allowance, because a report can be run against any domain. It is the most useful free competitor allowance published in this set, and it is a daily cap rather than a monthly one, so it refreshes.
SE Rankingseranking.com/pricing.html publishes a "free 14-day trial" that is "fully functional and includes starter usage", with caps of 10 projects, 750 tracked keywords per day, 20 AI prompts per day and "AI competitive research for 3 domains".Three domains, named as a competitive research allowance. It is a trial rather than a permanent free tier, so it answers one afternoon's questions and then stops.
Ubersuggestubersuggest.com/en/pricing publishes reports per day at 150, 300 and 900, tracked competitors at 5, 10 and 15, monthly credits at 250, 500 and 1,000, and an add-on for "Additional 500 Daily Searches". Its FAQ says you can "downgrade to a free account at any time" and mentions "a one-time 7-day free trial for monthly subscriptions". It does not publish what the free account allows.The paid tiers publish an explicit tracked-competitor count, which is unusual and useful. The free account's allowance is not published, so it cannot be ranked.
Google Search ConsoleFree for any property you can verify.Nothing, by design. It will not tell you a single thing about a competitor, and it is still the first thing to open, because it tells you which queries you already appear for and those are the ones where a competitor comparison is actually actionable.

So the ranking, on the stated criterion

Semrush first, on the narrow published ground that "10 reports per day across all vital tools" with "No credit card required" is the only permanent free allowance in this set that can be pointed at a domain you do not own, and it resets daily.

SE Ranking second, for "AI competitive research for 3 domains" with no card required, with the honest caveat that fourteen days is a window rather than a tier.

Ahrefs third on this criterion and first on honesty. "Get Ahrefs data on your site" tells you exactly where the free line is, in six words, which several vendors here do not manage in a feature table. If your question is about a competitor, the free plan is not the tool, and its own page says so.

Ubersuggest is unranked, because what the free account allows is not published. Its paid competitor counts are published and clear.

A limit in the pages themselves, worth knowing before you go checking

Ubersuggest's pricing page, read 21 October 2026, does not name its three plan columns at all. The middle one is marked "Popular" and that is the only label. So a buyer comparing limits has to count columns from the left and hope the order matches whatever the sales page said, which is a genuine problem with quoting a figure from it. Every number above is reported by column position for that reason.

And a 403 or a 404 is never evidence of absence. On 21 October 2026 moz.com would not serve this machine at all, seoptimer.com returned 403, neilpatel.com/pricing returned 403 while app.neilpatel.com/en/pricing returned a 301 to ubersuggest.com/en/pricing which served normally, and seranking.com answered 404 on one pricing path and 200 on another within the same minute. Four hosts, four different failures, one afternoon.

The three competitor questions no free tier answers

Which competitors actually compete with you. No tool knows your category; they infer it from keyword overlap, which puts a directory and a magazine in your competitor set. Building the set is a judgement call and it is yours.

Why a competitor outranks you. A tool can show the gap. The reason is usually in their page, their links or their brand, and reading three of their pages beats any report.

Whether an assistant names them instead of you. This is the one that is structurally invisible to every tool on this page.

The competitor comparison nobody on this page runs

Every tool above reads search engines. When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Google's AI Overviews who they should use, the assistant composes an answer and names some businesses. If it names your competitor and not you, no keyword gap report will ever show it, because nothing was indexed. The answer was generated and then discarded.

AI Knows Us sells that one measurement and nothing else, and we are not in the ranking above, because somebody who came here for a free keyword gap report should use Semrush's ten daily reports. We are not an SEO competitor analysis tool. What we do is ask your buyer's question in all five apps on a schedule and record which businesses were named, yours and your rivals'. From the rendered text of our pricing page, read 21 October 2026: "One credit is one buyer question, asked on one AI app, once", "Most checks use one credit", "A Claude check uses 3, because Claude costs us more to run". From our llms.txt the same day: SEO Start at $149 a month watches 0 buyer questions on 0 engines, so it is a demand-harvest tier and not an engine watch, and Growth at $299 with 100 buyer questions and 1,200 scheduled answers a month is the cheapest plan that reads all five surfaces.

Where the vendors here beat us, on this page's own terms. This is a page about free tiers and we publish none. Semrush, Ahrefs and SE Ranking all let you start without paying us anything and we do not. Three of them also sell AI prompt tracking inside a bill you may already have: Semrush publishes "50 prompts to track daily" on Starter rising to "Unlimited prompts to track daily" on Advanced, SE Ranking publishes 100 AI prompts daily on Core and 250 on Growth, and Ubersuggest publishes AI Search Visibility at 10, 15 and 20 prompts per brand with monthly, biweekly and weekly updates covering "ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overview". If you already pay one of them, take their module.

For the harder half of this job, which is deciding who your competitors are before any tool is opened: SEO competitors compared, and how to build the set yourself because no tool hands it to you. On 21 October 2026 we read 2,411 page bodies on this site against 2,325 live pages and 971 of them, 41.8 percent, carried no inbound link from any body we could read, which is an upper bound rather than a count. We measured that target specifically: no other page on this site links to that one.

Questions about free SEO competitor analysis tools

Can I do competitor analysis entirely free?

You can get most of the way. Ten Semrush reports a day, a free crawl of a competitor's site and reading their pages covers the questions that change a decision. What free will not give you is history or a large link index.

Why is competitor data the expensive part?

Because it is the part the vendor had to build an index to produce. Your own data mostly comes from Search Console, which the vendor got free as well.

Are free traffic estimates for a competitor reliable?

Treat them as an order of magnitude. They are modelled from clickstream panels and keyword data, and two vendors will disagree by a factor of two on the same domain.

How many competitors should I track?

Three or four that you actually lose deals to. A set of twenty is a report nobody reads.

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