Free AI SEO tools: the stack that covers the work without an invoice

You can do the whole of the measurement half of AI SEO for nothing. Google, Microsoft and the assistants themselves publish free tools that cover indexing, page speed, structured data, demand research, crawler access and whether an assistant names your business. Here is the free stack in the order you should set it up, what each tool answers, and the one job it is worth adding money to later.

The free stack, in setup order

Tool	The question it answers	Set up time
Google Search Console	Which of my pages is Google indexing, what queries am I shown for, and what is my robots.txt doing	Under an hour, including verification
Bing Webmaster Tools	The same for Bing, which matters because Microsoft powers search in several assistant products	Minutes if you import from Search Console
PageSpeed Insights	How this page loads for real users, and the specific fix list behind each score	No setup, paste a URL
Rich Results Test	Whether Google can parse my structured data and which rich result types it found	No setup, paste a URL
Google Trends	Whether interest in a term is rising or falling, and how two terms compare	No setup
Your server access log	Which AI crawlers are actually visiting, as opposed to what robots.txt says they may do	One request to whoever runs your hosting
The assistants themselves	Whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Claude names my business when a buyer asks	Twenty minutes per round

Search Console first, every time

Everything else is optional until this is connected. Three reports carry most of the value.

• Pages. Indexed against not indexed, with a reason for each exclusion. A page that is not indexed is out of Google and out of Google's AI surfaces, because Google's documentation on AI features states that a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet to appear as a supporting link.
• Performance. Queries, impressions, clicks and average position, filterable by page and country. This is the only free source of your real query data.
• The robots.txt report. The file Google found for each of your hosts, when it last fetched it, and any parse errors. This catches the single most expensive mistake in SEO before it costs you a quarter.

Google's own guide to getting started with Search Console is the fastest way through verification.

The free AI visibility check, done by hand

There is no console for an AI answer, so the measurement is made by asking. Done carefully this is a genuinely useful free instrument, and it takes about twenty minutes.

• Write five buyer questions in your buyers' words. Category plus location, category plus constraint, a direct comparison, a price question, and a shortlist question such as who are the best providers of this for a company of my size.
• Keep your own name out of every question. Asking an assistant about your own company primes the answer and the reading becomes worthless. The protocol is in why you must never name your own brand in a tracking question.
• Use a temporary chat, with memory off. Your own account history shapes what comes back, so a logged in account with memory on is the least representative place to run a test.
• Ask each question twice, in two different assistants. The same question returns different companies on different runs, so record a range rather than one reading.
• Save two things per answer. Whether you were named, and every source that was cited. The citation list is the more valuable half, because it names the sites to go and get listed on next.

Free scans also exist. Semrush publishes a free AI search visibility checker that returns a visibility score across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews. AI Knows Us runs a free scan with no account needed, asking five real buyer questions on two AI apps. Use one of those for a baseline, then keep the manual round as your sanity check.

Free ways to use an AI assistant as an SEO tool

The free tier of any mainstream assistant will do real work if you give it real inputs.

• Turn your Search Console query export into a topic list. Paste the queries and ask it to group them by the job the searcher is doing. You get clusters in minutes instead of an afternoon.
• Generate the question list for a page. Ask it what somebody choosing in your category needs settled before they commit, then check the list against your own sales inbox.
• Draft and validate structured data. Ask for an Organization or LocalBusiness block from facts you supply, then confirm it with the Rich Results Test rather than trusting the draft.
• Read your own page back. Paste one page and ask what question it answers in the first two sentences. If the answer is vague, the page is not quotable yet. The structure that fixes it is in how to write a page an assistant will quote.

Supply the facts yourself and keep an editor in the loop. A count, a date and a named source are what an assistant will repeat later, and those have to come from you.

Where paying starts to earn its keep

The free stack covers measurement and diagnosis well. Money buys scale and repetition: running fifty prompts across five assistants several times a month, keeping the history so you can see movement, crawling tens of thousands of URLs on a schedule, and doing the writing and third party listing work. If you have fewer than a hundred pages and five buyer questions, the free stack is the right size for you today.

This page covers free tools and how to get a real answer out of them. For paid categories and a trial plan, see best AI SEO tools. For the full technical list, see the technical SEO checklist.

Where people get stuck on Free AI SEO tools

Are free AI SEO tools good enough for a small business?

For a site under a hundred pages, yes. Search Console plus PageSpeed Insights plus a monthly manual prompt round covers indexing, speed and AI answers. The gap that appears as you grow is history and repetition, not accuracy.

Is there a free tool that tells me if ChatGPT mentions my business?

Asking ChatGPT your buyers' questions in a temporary chat, without naming your company, is the free version and it works. Free scans from AI visibility products give you a scored baseline in one click. Our walkthrough is in how to check whether ChatGPT knows your business.

Can I do keyword research for free?

Yes. Search Console shows the queries you are already shown for, Google Trends shows direction and comparison, and Google Keyword Planner gives volume bands inside a free Google Ads account. The method that ties them together is in keyword research in five steps.

Do free AI writing tools hurt my rankings?

Google's published position is that it focuses on the quality of content rather than how it was produced, and that using automation to generate content mainly to manipulate rankings breaks its spam policies. Write for a reader, add facts only you have, and put a named author on it.

What should I check first if I have one hour?

Open Search Console and read the Pages report, then open your robots.txt and look for OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot by name. Those two checks find more real problems in an hour than any other pair.

What to do first

• Verify Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools today, then read the Pages and robots.txt reports.
• Run PageSpeed Insights on your three most important pages and fix only the items it names.
• Paste your highest value page into the Rich Results Test and correct whatever it flags.
• Write five buyer questions, ask each twice in two assistants without naming your company, and save the cited sources.
• Ask whoever runs your hosting for a week of access log lines filtered to the AI crawler names. If none have visited, access is your problem rather than content.