17 Free SEO Tools That Replace Paid Ahrefs & Semrush Features

Replaces: the strategy work you would normally piece together from several Ahrefs or Semrush reports, or pay an agency for

Most people open an SEO tool without a plan and get lost in data. Start here instead. Enter your business, your target market, your main goal and your budget, and the free SEO plan generator builds a personalised SEO and digital marketing strategy: the channels to focus on, starter keywords, a 90-day roadmap, a suggested budget split and content ideas.

Best for: new websites, startups and business owners who want to know what to do first.

Replaces: Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, Semrush Keyword Magic Tool and Keyword Overview

Type a seed keyword and get hundreds of long-tail keyword ideas, questions and comparisons that real people type into Google, taken from live Google autocomplete data. Every keyword shows its search intent (informational, commercial, transactional or navigational), an estimated search volume and a keyword difficulty score labelled Low, Normal or High. You also get a detail view for the exact keyword you entered.

How to use it: start with a broad topic such as "dentist in Dubai", sort by difficulty, and pick low-difficulty, high-intent keywords for your first pages. Use the question keywords for blog posts and FAQs.

Good to know: Search volume and keyword difficulty are estimates calculated from public signals, not numbers from Google Ads. They are great for comparing keywords with each other; for the final decision, look at who ranks on Google today.

Replaces: parts of the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant and Ahrefs content tools

Paste your text or enter a URL to see the most used one, two and three word phrases and how often your focus keyword appears. It is a quick way to check that a page is really about its main topic, and that you have not stuffed the same keyword into every sentence, which can hurt rankings.

Tip: run it on the top-ranking competitor page too and compare which related phrases they cover that you do not. Those are your semantic SEO gaps.

Replaces: Ahrefs Rank Tracker and Semrush Position Tracking (for on-demand checks)

Enter a keyword and your domain to see exactly where your website ranks on Google, by country and by device (mobile or desktop). You also see the top 10 pages ranking for that search, which tells you who your real competitors are for that keyword.

Best for: checking your Google position for your most important keywords after you publish or update a page.

Good to know: This is an on-demand check, not automatic daily tracking. If you need to track thousands of keywords every day, a paid rank tracker is the better choice.

Replaces: Yahoo tracking in paid rank trackers

Yahoo still sends traffic, especially in some countries and age groups. Check where your website ranks on Yahoo for up to five keywords at once, by country, and see which pages beat you.

Replaces: multi-engine tracking in Ahrefs Rank Tracker and Semrush Position Tracking

Check one keyword across Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Brave in a single click and compare your positions side by side. Bing matters more than many people think: its index also feeds several AI assistants, so ranking well on Bing helps your AI search visibility too.

Replaces: Ahrefs Site Explorer and Semrush Backlink Analytics

Enter a domain or URL to discover pages that link to it. Every backlink is verified live, so you see links that actually exist today, with the anchor text, dofollow or nofollow status and the referring domain. You can also paste the URLs where you placed guest posts or directory listings to confirm the links are still there.

Best for: checking your own links, auditing link-building work you paid for, and spying on a competitor’s best links.

Good to know: Ahrefs and Semrush crawl the web non-stop and keep huge historical link databases. A free backlink checker finds and verifies fewer links, so use it for checks and audits rather than for counting every link on the internet.

Replaces: Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) and Semrush Authority Score

Get an authority score from 0 to 100 for any website, built from public data: global popularity rank, domain age, web archive history and trust checks. Compare up to five domains at once to see how you stack up against competitors, or to judge whether a website is worth getting a backlink from.

Good to know: Every tool calculates authority differently. Our score is not the same number as Ahrefs DR, Semrush Authority Score or Moz Domain Authority, so compare websites using the same tool.

Replaces: Ahrefs Site Audit and Semrush Site Audit

This is the closest free replacement for a paid site audit. The free SEO audit tool crawls your whole website, runs 23 SEO checks on every page (titles, meta descriptions, headings, images, canonical tags and more), tests mobile and desktop speed, and gives you a detailed PDF SEO audit report with clear fixes.

How to use it: run an audit, fix the critical issues first, then run it again to confirm. Repeat every month and after every website redesign.

Replaces: the broken link reports in Ahrefs Site Audit and Semrush Site Audit

Broken links waste crawl budget, leak link value and annoy visitors. The broken link checker crawls your website and tests every internal and external link and image. For each broken link you see the error code (404, 410, 500 and so on) and exactly which page and anchor text it appears on, so you can fix it in minutes.

Link building tip: run it on a big website in your niche. Their broken outbound links are opportunities: offer your page as the replacement.

Replaces: the performance and Core Web Vitals sections of Ahrefs and Semrush Site Audit

Measure performance and Core Web Vitals (Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift) on mobile and desktop using Google Lighthouse, and get the top opportunities to make your page faster. Page experience is part of how Google ranks pages, and a faster site converts more visitors into customers.

Replaces: paid sitemap plugins and crawler tools (not a feature of Ahrefs or Semrush)

Crawl your website and download a ready-to-upload sitemap.xml. It respects robots.txt and skips noindex pages, so you only submit pages you want indexed. Upload it to your site and submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Replaces: writing robots.txt by hand (not a feature of Ahrefs or Semrush)

Build a correct robots.txt in seconds: block private folders, point search engines to your sitemap, and control individual crawlers, including AI bots such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. If you want to appear in AI answers, make sure you are not blocking them by accident.

Replaces: browser developer tools and paid header checkers

Fetch the raw HTML of any page with its HTTP headers, redirect chain and response time, as a desktop browser, a phone or Googlebot. It is the fastest way to check that Google sees your content, your canonical tag and your structured data, and that a redirect is a clean 301.

Replaces: paid schema plugins (Ahrefs and Semrush only report on schema, they do not write it)

Generate valid JSON-LD structured data for organizations, local businesses, articles, products, FAQs, breadcrumbs, people and events. Schema markup helps Google show rich results, and it helps AI engines understand who you are and what your page is about, which is a core part of GEO.

Replaces: parts of the Semrush On Page SEO Checker

Create the title tag, meta description, robots, canonical, Open Graph and Twitter card tags for any page, with live length checks. Copy the finished code into your page or CMS. A clear, keyword-focused title and an honest description are still the easiest way to raise your click-through rate.

Replaces: SERP snippet previews in paid SEO suites and plugins

See how your title and description will look in Google search results on desktop and mobile, with pixel-accurate truncation warnings. Fix titles that get cut off before you publish, not after.