Free AI SEO tools: 11 that are genuinely free in 2026.

This is the tool most people mean when they say free AI SEO tool, and for the text half of SEO it earns the spot. Paste in a keyword list and it groups the list by intent. Give it the three pages that rank and it writes a brief with the questions they all answer and the one they miss. Hand it a draft and it tightens the intro, moves the answer to the top and rewrites twenty title tags to length. All of that works on the free plan, because all of it runs on text you supplied.

It stops working the moment you ask for a fact it would have to measure. There is no keyword database inside the model, so a monthly search volume from ChatGPT is a sentence shaped like a number, and it cannot see your rankings either. The prompts, the setups and the failure modes are in our ChatGPT for SEO guide, and if the drafts come back sounding machine-written, how to make ChatGPT write like a human covers the fix.

Two things on the free plan matter for SEO work. The first is projects: a workspace where you upload a brand and voice document, your style rules, a product facts sheet and a list of your own URLs, so every brief and draft starts from the same inputs instead of an empty chat. Five of them is enough for five sites or five content lines. The second is connectors, which let Claude read from tools you already use instead of answering from memory.

It has the same blind spots as every assistant on this page: no search volume, no view of your rankings, and a habit of filling a missing number with a plausible one. Set the project instructions to forbid unsourced figures and run a separate check on every draft. The three setups that work, with seven prompts you can paste, are in our guide to using Claude for SEO.

Gemini is the entry that changed the week this list was written. Press coverage that week reported Google moving accounts without a plan onto Flash-Lite and taking the larger Flash and Pro models out of the free model picker, and the picker in the screenshot above matches. A small model is fine for rewriting a paragraph, summarising a competitor page you paste in, or drafting twenty meta descriptions. It is the wrong tool for a 2,000-word article that has to hold an argument together.

The 32,000-token context window (about 24,000 words, shared between what you paste and what it writes back) is enough for a brief and a few competitor pages, not for a whole content library. Google also says heavier features such as Deep Research may be unavailable when demand is high. If you are deciding whether a paid Gemini tier is worth it for writing, the lineup is compared in which Gemini model to write with.

Perplexity does the one thing the three assistants above do badly on their own: it shows where each sentence came from. Every answer carries numbered citations, so a claim is a click away from the page that made it. For SEO that is two jobs. One is sourcing: before a statistic goes into a draft, ask for it here and open the citation to check the page really says it. The other is reconnaissance: ask the question your buyers ask and read which sites get cited, because those are the pages you are competing with for the answer.

Three Pro Searches a day is a real constraint, so spend them on the questions that need several searches stitched together and use basic search for the rest. How the engine chooses its sources, and what makes a page citable, is in our Perplexity SEO guide, and the wider field is in AI search engines compared.

This one is ours, so read it with that in mind. We built it because the common way to check a meta description is to count characters, and Google does not cut on characters. It cuts on rendered width, and a wide W takes more room than a narrow i, so two descriptions of the same length can end in different places. The free meta description generator measures the pixels and flags any candidate that would be clipped mid-sentence.

The honest comparison is with asking an assistant for the same thing. ChatGPT or Claude will write you twenty descriptions in one reply, and for a bulk rewrite across a whole site that is the better tool. This is for the page that matters, where you want five distinct angles and a length you can trust. Google often shows its own snippet instead of your description, so treat the result as your best pitch for the click, not a guarantee of what appears.

Also ours. A title tag has one job the body headline does not: survive truncation. Search results cut titles from the right, and a keyword that sits at character 45 is the first thing to disappear on a phone. The free SEO title generator takes a keyword and an intent (informational, commercial or navigational), writes ten candidates with the keyword up front, and labels each one so you can see at a glance which fit.

It is deliberately narrow. It writes the tag that appears in search results, not the H1 a reader sees on the page, and those two can and often should differ. For the on-page headline there is a separate headline generator, also free. Neither one looks at what currently ranks for the keyword, so read the top results yourself before you pick. If every page on the first screen is a how-to, the listicle-count title is the wrong shape however good it sounds.

The third one of ours, and the odd one out: there is no AI in it. It is arithmetic. Tokenise, count, divide. It is on a list of AI SEO tools because it is the check you run on what the AI wrote. A model asked to target a phrase will sometimes use it once in 1,500 words and sometimes eleven times in the first three paragraphs, and it is a poor judge of its own output. The free keyword density checker counts for it, and the same paste always returns the same number.

Density is a sanity check, not a ranking lever. Google has not published a target figure, and tuning a page to one would be a mistake. What the number tells you is whether the page is plainly about the topic you think it is, and whether a draft has tipped into repetition a reader would notice. Pair it with the reading level checker for the other thing AI drafts get wrong, which is prose that reads harder than it needs to.

This is the direct alternative to the two generators of ours above, and you should try both. The meta description tool takes a description of your page (up to 2,048 characters), a writing tone and a language, and returns three variants. That is a different trade from ours: fewer options and no pixel measurement, in exchange for tone control, a language selector and no stated daily cap. If you write in a language other than English, start here.

The breadth is the point. An alt text generator and a paragraph rewriter are small tools, but they are the ones you reach for forty times in a week of publishing, and having them on one page beats writing a fresh prompt each time. The meta description generator works only from the text you type in. It does not draw on the keyword or backlink data the platform is known for, so the output is only as specific as your description. For tools built around longer copy, see our comparison of AI copywriting tools.

Most ways of finding out whether AI engines cite your site cost money or mean typing prompts by hand. This one is a report in a free tool you can verify in a minute, and it comes from the company running the engine, not from a third party sampling it. The grounding queries are the useful part. They are the phrases the system used when it went looking for content and landed on yours, which tells you what your pages are being retrieved for, as opposed to what you hoped they would rank for.

Read it for what it is. A citation is not a click, the grounding queries are a sample, and the report covers Microsoft's surfaces and its partners, so it is not a view of Google's AI Overviews or Gemini. Low-traffic sites will see thin data. As a free baseline it is hard to beat, and it is a fair test of whether you need one of the paid AI visibility trackers at all. The page-side work that earns citations is in our guide to getting cited by language models.

This is the least glamorous AI feature on the list and the one sitting on the best data. Everything an assistant tells you about your rankings is a guess. Search Console is the record of what Google actually served, and the awkward part has always been the filter panel. Now you can type a request, such as queries from phone searches containing a word over the last six months, or the blog pages this quarter against the same quarter last year, and the report configures itself.

The workflow it unlocks is the one that pays. Filter to queries where you sit in positions 8 to 20 with real impressions, export the list, and hand that list to one of the assistants above to cluster and brief. Now the assistant is working from measured data instead of inventing it. Google is clear about the limits: the feature configures the view and does not answer questions, it works on the Search results report only, and it can misread a complicated request, so check the filters it applied. For the rest of the free measurement stack, see our list of free rank trackers.

The Bing report above tells you when your pages were cited. This answers a different question: when someone asks an AI model about your category, does your brand come up, and is what it says accurate and positive? You get a score and a written read on each dimension, which is a quick way to find out whether you have a problem worth a proper look.

Treat it as a smoke test. The page itself says the read is based on what the models say from their training data, so it is a snapshot of reputation, not a record of live answers with sources, and one run tells you nothing about a trend. Sentiment carrying 40 of the 100 points also means a little-known brand with nothing bad said about it can score respectably. The full report sits behind a form, which is the price. If the score sends you looking for what to do next, start with how to rank in ChatGPT.