Best free YouTube keyword tools compared, and what each free tier actually allows

YouTube does not publish search volume for a term the way Google Ads does. So every number in every YouTube keyword tool is an estimate, and the free tiers differ less on data quality than on how much of their own tool they will let you use.

The criterion on this page: what does each free tier publish as its allowance, and where does its number come from? Applied to the extensions, to the free web tools and to YouTube's own reports.

The free source that is better than all of them

YouTube Studio's own Research tab reports search terms viewers used, both across YouTube and inside your own audience, with a signal for whether a term is well served by existing videos. That is YouTube's own data about real searches, it is free for every channel, and it is the only observed source in this category. Any paid or free third party figure is an estimate of what Studio partly shows you directly.

Alongside it: the search suggestions in YouTube's own search bar, which are ordered by YouTube and cost nothing, and the tags and titles of the videos already ranking for your term, which tell you what the algorithm is currently rewarding.

The extensions, and what the free tier allows

vidIQ publishes the clearest free allowance of the group. vidiq.com/pricing, read 21 October 2026, lists "Free $0, Test drive powerful creator tools" with "150 AI Credits every month", against a Boost tier with "2,000 AI Credits monthly" and a MAX tier offering "6,000 Credits", "8,000 Credits" and "10,000 Credits". Its FAQ states "vidIQ offers a free tier that includes limited access to our most popular tools". Two further details from that page are worth having: the paid prices rendered blank in a plain fetch, so the allowance is checkable from the page and the price is not, and the FAQ says "vidIQ MCP connects your account to Claude, ChatGPT or any other AI that supports MCP", which tells you where the vendor thinks the next question is coming from.

TubeBuddy publishes a free plan by reference rather than as a tier. tubebuddy.com/pricing, read the same day, publishes paid plans at "Pro $3.00 per month" and "Legend $15.00 per month", with an annual Pro at "$32.00 per year". Its FAQ confirms a free plan exists, saying that after cancellation "the channel is downgraded to the free plan", and its own licence note says "A standard TubeBuddy license is tied to one YouTube channel". The feature matrix names Keyword Explorer, Search Explorer, Search Insights, Tag Rankings and Insta-Suggest, and marks "Search Rank Tracking" as Limited on the Pro tier. So the free tier's contents are not published as a list on that page, which is the one thing a buyer most wants to read.

The free web tools, and what they really do

Several free web tools scrape YouTube autocomplete and present the result as a keyword list with an estimated volume beside it. The scraping half is genuinely useful and effectively the same across all of them, because they are all reading the same suggestion endpoint. The estimated volume half is a model, and the models disagree with each other by large margins for the same term.

Use them for the suggestion harvest and ignore the number, or cross check the number against Studio's Research tab, where you have YouTube's own view for the terms your audience actually used.

The ranking, on the stated criterion

On what the free tier publishes and where the number comes from, the order on 21 October 2026 ran: YouTube Studio Research first by a wide margin, free, uncapped and the only observed data. vidIQ second among third parties, because "150 AI Credits every month" is an exact, countable free allowance. TubeBuddy third, because the free plan is confirmed in its FAQ but its contents are not published as a list, and the paid entry point at $3 a month is the lowest in this category by some distance. The free autocomplete scrapers fourth: useful for harvesting, and the volume column is a model nobody documents.

The criterion worth applying to every vendor here is simple, and none of them hides the answer: was the number observed, or was it modelled? Ahrefs says it outright on ahrefs.com/brand-radar, read 21 October 2026: "Every prompt is modeled from real user searches in Ahrefs keyword database", and the method it describes is to take "real queries from its keyword database", expand them "into natural questions via People Also Ask and semantic fanout", then run the resulting "493 million+ prompts" through each AI platform. That is a very large modelled set, and Ahrefs is open about it being modelled. Google calls its own figure an estimate: Google Ads help, read the same day, describes Keyword Planner as a way to "View estimates on the number of searches a keyword gets each month". Neither of those is a flaw. Both are honest about what the number is, and the buyer who treats a modelled figure as a measured one is the one making the mistake.

The video search that happens somewhere else entirely

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.

vidIQ's own FAQ points at the shift without meaning to: it now connects "to Claude, ChatGPT or any other AI that supports MCP". A growing share of the question that used to be typed into YouTube search is now asked of an assistant in a sentence, and the assistant answers with names and links rather than a results page. There is no keyword in that interaction and no position to track.

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 we publish no free tier at all, so we are last: $149 is our floor and it watches zero buyer questions. Where we are first is narrow: of the vendors read on 21 October 2026, ours was the only one publishing the whole metering, the price, the questions watched, the credits, the engines and the cadence for every tier, in a server rendered plain text file.

For the wider YouTube tool category rather than the free keyword cut, we keep a separate page on the YouTube SEO tools compared, and which numbers each one can really see. 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 creators ask about free YouTube keyword tools

Which free tool has real volume data? None of them, in the sense of a figure YouTube published. Studio's Research tab is the closest thing to a real source and it is already yours.

Do tags still matter? Less than titles, thumbnails and the first line of the description, which is where the free tools are most useful.

Is a paid tier worth it? At $3 a month for TubeBuddy Pro, the question is barely worth asking for an active channel. Above that, buy on the workflow rather than on the volume column.