Google AdWords keyword tool alternatives compared: the product is now Keyword Planner, and what each option adds

If you are looking for the Google AdWords keyword tool, you are looking for Keyword Planner inside Google Ads. AdWords was renamed Google Ads, the standalone keyword tool and the old Traffic Estimator were folded into one product, and the tool is still free to use without running a campaign.

The criterion on this page: what does each option give you that Keyword Planner does not, and what does the vendor publish about the number? Starting with what Google itself says, because it is more careful than most of the tools built on top of it.

What Keyword Planner is, in Google's own words

Google's own help page, read 21 October 2026, lists what the tool does: "Discover new keywords: Get suggestions for keywords related to your products, services, or website", "View monthly searches: View estimates on the number of searches a keyword gets each month with a comprehensive Google keyword research tool", "Determine cost: View the average cost for your ad to show on searches for a keyword", and "Organize keywords: View how your keywords fit in[to] different categories". It also documents filtering, with the example "you may want to view keyword ideas where bids under $1 may be enough to reach the top of the page".

Three things follow from that paragraph and they are the whole basis for choosing an alternative. The figure is an estimate, in Google's word. The cost column is an advertising number, which answers what a keyword costs to buy rather than how hard it is to rank for. And the suggestions come from Google's own query data, which no third party has.

The three things Keyword Planner will not do

It groups close phrasings into one figure. Four spellings of one question come back as a single number, which is correct for buying ads and lossy for planning pages.

It reports nothing about difficulty. There is no organic competitiveness score, because the tool was built for an ad auction. The competition column is auction competition.

It shows you nothing about a competitor's organic inventory. It will tell you what a page is about if you paste a URL. It will not tell you which terms a rival already ranks for.

Those three gaps are exactly what the alternatives sell.

The alternatives, and what each publishes

Semrush adds an organic difficulty score, a competitor gap and tracking on one plan: "$139" a month for "5 websites to monitor", "500 keywords to track daily" and "Basic keyword research and competitor analysis", on semrush.com/pricing, read 21 October 2026. Its free plan on the same page is "$0 /mo" with "1 demo project" and "10 reports per day across all vital tools", which is enough to see the difficulty column before paying.

Ahrefs adds its own index. Its Keywords Explorer is described as "Learn what your customers are searching for" in the navigation on ahrefs.com/keyword-generator, and the free Keyword Generator on that page is titled "Find 100+ Keyword Ideas in Seconds". The company describes itself there as "The only AI marketing platform built on Ahrefs' proprietary web index".

Moz adds scale you can check: "1.25 billion+ keyword index" and "over 40 trillion links" on moz.com/products, read the same day, with an All-in-one SEO tier at "Starts at $99 / month" and an AI search and visibility product at "Starts at $45/month".

SE Ranking adds a Keyword Grouper, which addresses Keyword Planner's grouping problem directly, listed in its product navigation on seranking.com/pricing.html, where the entry tier at "$129.00 /mo" carries "2k keywords and 100 prompts to track daily".

DataForSEO adds the raw data at the wholesale rate. Its Keywords Data API covers "Google Ads, Google Trends, Bing Ads" and is published "From $0.0012 / task" on dataforseo.com/pricing, on a "$50 minimum top-up" pay as you go account. If you want Keyword Planner numbers in your warehouse rather than in a spreadsheet, this is the route.

The ranking, on the stated criterion

On what each option adds over Keyword Planner, and how clearly it describes its own number, the order on 21 October 2026 ran: Keyword Planner first for demand data, because it is free and the source is Google's own query log, and Google labels it an estimate rather than dressing it up. DataForSEO second, because it resells that same Google Ads data by the task at a published rate with no subscription. Semrush third, because the organic difficulty and competitor gap are the two gaps that matter most and both are on the entry plan. SE Ranking fourth, and first on the grouping problem specifically. Ahrefs fifth here only because its disclosure about method lives on a different page from its keyword product. Moz sixth on method disclosure and first on the lowest paid entry point.

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 search that has no keyword at all

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.

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 add nothing to Keyword Planner and we are not trying to: we hold no search volume data of any kind. Where we rank ourselves first is one narrow and checkable thing: of the vendors read on 21 October 2026, ours was the only one publishing the price, the buyer questions watched, the credits, the engine count and the check cadence for every tier in a server rendered plain text file.

For the software that manages the campaign rather than researches the keywords, we keep a separate page on the PPC and Google Ads optimisation software compared, what sets each tier and which job each one does. 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 advertisers ask about the AdWords keyword tool

Is Keyword Planner still free? Yes, and you can reach it with a Google Ads account that is not running a live campaign. The ranges it shows are wider for accounts with no spend.

Why do the numbers differ from a third party tool? Because Keyword Planner groups close phrasings and most third party tools split them, and because the third party figure is modelled from a different base.

Which column should I actually act on? The cost column for an ad decision, the ideas list for a page plan, and neither for difficulty, which the tool does not report.