Best free SEO keyword tools compared, and the published limit on each free tier

The useful question about free keyword tools is not which one is best. It is what each one is counting, because a volume figure from an advertising planner and a volume figure from a clickstream model are different kinds of statement about the world, and a free tier does not make either of them worse.

The criterion on this page: the tool is free in a way the vendor publishes, with a named ceiling rather than an unspecified trial. A thirty day trial is not a free tool. A free tier whose limit is not published is one you discover at an inconvenient moment.

The free tools, what each number means, and where it stops

The question no free tier answers

Which keywords a specific competitor ranks for, in depth, with their pages attached. Free tiers restrict third party index tools to your own verified property, which is the honest commercial decision: the index cost real money to build. This is the single reason to pay anybody in this category, and one concentrated month usually answers it.

The mistake that a free tool makes easy

Adding up pooled phrasings. Keyword Planner reports one figure for a normalised group, so a list of twelve phrasings that all belong to one group looks like twelve opportunities and is one. We measured this on our own planning data and found it overstated a plan by several percent overall and by a hundred percent on individual rows. If two phrasings return exactly the same volume and the same grouped figure, treat them as one group until proven otherwise.

The second mistake is reading a national figure for a local business, or a summed multi country figure as if it were one market. A figure is only about the geography you selected.

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. There is no free keyword tool for it and there is no paid one either in the keyword market, because a buyer question asked of an assistant has no search volume and no result page.

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.

A free keyword method that holds up

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.

Start with Search Console, because the queries you already appear for are real, about you, and free. Expand the promising ones in Keyword Planner to size them. Read the search box suggestions for the phrasing people actually use. Then open the three pages already ranking and write down what they cover. That is four free steps and it beats most paid workflows, because the expensive part of keyword research was always the reading.

If you want the full picture of what each data source counts, including the paid ones: SEO keyword analysis tools compared, and what each data source really counts. 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 keyword tools

Is Keyword Planner free without running ads?

You need an Ads account, which you can create without an active campaign. The figures are grouped ranges rather than exact counts.

Which free keyword tool is most accurate?

Search Console, for your own site, because it is a log rather than a model. For demand you do not have yet, Keyword Planner is closest to the source.

Why do free tools show different numbers?

Different sources. One reports an advertising planner's grouped estimate, another a clickstream model. Neither is lying and they are not comparable.

Can I do keyword research with no tools at all?

Largely yes. The search box, the people also ask box and the three pages outranking you contain most of the answer.

When is it worth paying?

When the question is about somebody else's site. That is the one thing free tiers deliberately withhold.