Best free SEO tools in 2026: 5 we ran on the same page
Short answer: The best free SEO tools depend on your question: one page or a whole site, speed or markup, a public address or your own Google data. So judge every tool by seven criteria: account or installation, time to result, what it checks, data from real visitors (CrUX), checks for AI crawlers and robots.txt, limits of the free version, and privacy. We plan to run five tools on one test page with six known errors and to publish what each one reports. We will not name a winner.
Test status (4 November 2026): This article describes a test that has not been run yet. The method is fixed below; we will add the results after the run (planned for 5 November 2026). Until then, nothing here claims a result.
Disclosure: SEOgrinder is our own tool, and it is one of the five. We build it, so we are not neutral. That is why the test page, the six errors and the method are fixed in this article before the run, and why we do not use our own website as the test object.
What does “free” mean in an SEO tool?
The word “free” covers at least four different things, and it does not tell you which one you get:
- Free and open: you enter an address and get a result, without signing in.
- Free with an account: no cost, but you sign in first.
- A free tier with limits: a reduced version costs nothing, and a paid version removes the limit.
- Free with a quota: every check costs nothing, but there is a daily cap.
Three of the five tools in our plan show how different this is, in the words of their own pages. Screaming Frog says its “lite” version is “free to download and use – without any sign up or email capture” and is “restricted to crawling up to 500 URLs in a single crawl” (Screaming Frog). That is a free tier with a limit. Google calls Search Console “a free service offered by Google” and lists “a valid Google account” as a requirement (Search Console Help); for URL Inspection it adds “a per-property daily limit of live inspections” (URL Inspection). That is an account plus a quota. The publisher of SEOquake calls it “a free on-page SEO checker extension for Chrome” whose core reports “work without an account” (Chrome Web Store).
We read these pages on 4 November 2026. Vendors change them, so check the date and the vendor's page before you rely on a limit.
How to judge the best free SEO tools: seven criteria
Seven questions, in the order you meet them. You can ask every one of them yourself, with any tool.
| Criterion | The question to ask | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Account or installation | Must you sign in or install something before the first result? | Every extra step costs time and is a decision about your data. |
| Time to result | How many minutes pass from the first click to the first finding? | Use a clock, and count the setup too. |
| What it checks | One page, many pages, or Google's view of one address? Raw HTML or the rendered page? | A tool answers the question it was built for, not every question. |
| Real-visitor data (CrUX) | Does it show field data from real visitors, and for which period? | Lab data shows what a test sees; field data shows what people experienced. |
| AI-crawler and robots check | Does it read robots.txt and the rules for bots such as GPTBot or ClaudeBot? | A bot follows the group written for its own name, not only the general one. |
| Limits of the free version | How many URLs, checks or features, and what removes the limit? | The limit decides whether the tool fits the size of your site. |
| Privacy | Does the check run on your computer or on the vendor's server, and what must you hand over? | You decide what you share: an address, an account, access to site data. |
What it checks. The question “raw HTML or rendered page?” matters most when text is built in the browser. Google writes that the screenshot of the rendered page in URL Inspection “is available only in a live test” (URL Inspection). Screaming Frog says: “By default it will crawl the raw HTML of a site” (Screaming Frog), and that in the free version “advanced features such as JavaScript rendering, custom extraction, and API integrations are also restricted”. This matters beyond Google: in a 2024 analysis by Vercel and MERJ, the crawlers of OpenAI and Anthropic named in it did not execute JavaScript (Vercel). That is the 2024 state and has not been re-verified since. Our article on AI crawlers and JavaScript shows three one-minute tests.
Real-visitor data. PageSpeed Insights takes its field data from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) for the previous 28 days, and only if the page has enough data. A page that is new or has few visitors may have none. Then PageSpeed Insights falls back to the whole site, and if that has too little data too, it shows no field data at all (Google). A brand-new test page may therefore show an empty field-data section. That is a property of the page, not a fault of the tool, and we will write it down that way.
AI crawlers and robots.txt. RFC 9309 says a crawler uses the group that matches its own name, and a group of its own means the general * group does not apply to it (RFC 9309). A tool that checks robots.txt for one crawler answers a different question from one that checks the AI bots. Google's URL Inspection, for example, shows whether robots.txt allowed Google's crawler to fetch the page. For our test the question is plain: does the tool look at rules for AI bots at all, yes or no? Background: robots.txt for AI crawlers.
Privacy. We do not rate the privacy of other vendors. For every tool we write down where it runs (desktop program, browser extension or server), what it asks you for, and where the vendor's privacy policy is. SEOgrinder works with public addresses and needs no account; a report is cached for up to 24 hours, and Check again forces a fresh run.
The five tools in our plan
For each tool we state only what its own page says. The links go to the pages we read on 4 November 2026. Where a page says nothing, this article says nothing, and we record the answer during the test.
- SEOgrinder (ours). You enter the address of a public page and get a grade, a task list sorted by effect and six areas: speed, page on Google, accessibility, technology and security, AI readiness and website. It uses PageSpeed Insights for lab data and CrUX for field data, on phones and desktop. The AI readiness tab checks seven points, among them robots.txt, the rules for AI crawlers and llms.txt. No account. Limits: it checks at most 60 internal links and 30 images of a page, the site crawl in the hosted version goes up to 500 fetches, and Check again works 3 times per user and hour. Start at SEOgrinder.
- Google PageSpeed Insights. Google says it “reports on the user experience of a page on both mobile and desktop devices”. It provides lab data from Lighthouse for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, and field data from CrUX (documentation, PageSpeed Insights). The pages we read say nothing about sign-in or limits of the web page, so we claim nothing and record both.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free version). A website crawler for Windows, macOS and Linux. The free version needs no sign-up, crawls up to 500 URLs per crawl and restricts configuration, saving crawls and advanced features. A paid licence removes the limit (product page, comparison of free and paid).
- SEOquake (Chrome extension by Semrush). The listing describes Quick View and Full Report. The on-page review covers the title tag, meta description, heading structure, canonical tag, indexability and word count; the page-level audit includes checks for robots directives, hreflang, XML sitemap availability, image alt text and structured data. A free Semrush account adds further metrics (Chrome Web Store listing).
- Google Search Console, URL Inspection with live test. It needs a Google account, and the URL must belong to the property you have open, which means you verify ownership first (one method is an HTML file upload for a URL-prefix property) or get access from an owner. Google describes the live test as a way to test “whether a page on your site might be indexable”, and also says the live test “does not test for all possible indexing issues” (URL Inspection, verification).
The test page and its six errors, fixed in advance
The test page is planned, not built yet, so there is no link. It will be a static page on a host outside seogrinder.com, and we will publish its address together with the results. These are the six errors it will contain, fixed today, 4 November 2026:
| # | Error on the test page | How to confirm it without any tool |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | No meta description | The HTML the server sends has no name="description" |
| 2 | Two H1 headings | The HTML contains two <h1 tags (our checklist treats one per page as usual practice) |
| 3 | One image without an alt attribute | One <img> tag has no alt |
| 4 | Canonical pointing to an address that answers 404 | The address in rel="canonical" returns status 404 |
| 5 | Main text only through JavaScript | The text is missing from the HTML the server sends and appears only in a browser |
| 6 | One internal link to an address that answers 404 | One linked page returns status 404 |
All six are items of our SEO audit checklist, so none of them is exotic. You can confirm each one yourself on any page:
# raw HTML, no JavaScript: count meta descriptions and H1 tags
curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -o 'name="description"' | wc -l
curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -o '<h1' | wc -l
# list the image tags and look for one without alt
curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -o '<img[^>]*>'
# canonical target and internal link: the broken one must answer 404
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://example.com/canonical-target
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://example.com/linked-pageWhy fix the errors in advance? A list published before the run cannot be bent to fit the results without anyone noticing. We will not add, remove or reword an error afterwards. If a tool reports something else on the page, we note it separately and do not count it among the six.
Why not test seogrinder.com itself? We build SEOgrinder and fix our own site with its reports. Testing seogrinder.com would let the tool grade its own homework. A separate static page has no such history. Some bias remains: we chose the six errors, and we know what our tool checks. We cannot remove that. We can publish the list first, leave the page unchanged during the run and show the screenshots.
Our test: plan and documentation
Status: not run yet. We plan to run it on 5 November 2026 and to add the results to this article after the last tool has been run. The test object is the page above. The steps:
- Build the page with the six errors and confirm each one with the commands above.
- Freeze it. The page stays unchanged until the run is over.
- Run the five tools on the same address, one after the other. The clock runs from the first click until the first result is on screen, and setup counts (installation, sign-in, the Search Console property). We plan about five minutes per tool. If the Search Console setup takes much longer, we drop that tool, say so here and correct the number in the title.
- Record the version, the date and time and a screenshot of each result.
- Mark every error, for every tool: reported, yes or no. Then add the tables to this article, with the date.
A tool “reports” an error when its own result shows it as a finding, a warning or a plainly marked value, without us having to know where to look.
After the run, two tables will appear here. The first has one row per tool and the columns account or installation, minutes to result, real-visitor data (CrUX), AI-crawler or robots check, and the limits stated on the vendor's page. The second has one row per tool and one column per error, each with reported yes or no. Until then there is no table, because an empty one would look like a result.
A “no” is not a verdict on the tool. Google describes URL Inspection as showing the indexed version of one page and whether a URL might be indexable (URL Inspection). That is a different job from listing on-page errors. The table shows what each tool reported on one page, not which tool is better.
Disclosure again: SEOgrinder is our tool. We run it like the other four and publish what it reports, including what it misses. Result: follows after the last tool has been run.
Common mistakes when comparing SEO tools
- Running the tools on different pages. Every page has its own errors, so counts differ for reasons that have nothing to do with the tools. Use one page for all.
- Looking only at the overall score. A score summarises; the findings tell you what to do. Compare what each tool actually reported.
- Comparing tools with different jobs. A crawler for many pages, a speed test, Google's view of one address and a browser extension answer different questions. A “no” from the wrong kind of tool says little.
- Ignoring the limit of the free version. Screaming Frog's free version stops at 500 URLs per crawl, so a larger site is only partly covered. Look up the limit before you trust the result.
- Treating a clean report as proof. Google says “URL is on Google” does not guarantee that a page appears in Search results. No tool, free or paid, can promise rankings.
- Trusting a comparison that hides its method. Ask which page was tested, which errors it contained and whether the list existed before the run. That applies to ours too.
- Forgetting version and date. Tools change. A result is only valid for the version and the day it was recorded, which is why we write both down.
FAQ
What is the best free SEO tool?
It depends on the job. We will not crown one tool: our table will show what five tools reported on one page with six known errors, which is a narrower question than “best”.
Do I need an account for these tools?
According to their own pages, Screaming Frog's free version needs no sign-up, SEOquake's core reports work without an account, and Search Console needs a Google account. SEOgrinder needs none. For PageSpeed Insights the pages we read say nothing, so we record it in the test.
When will the results be added?
We plan the test for 5 November 2026 and add the results after the last tool has been run. Until the results are in this article, nothing here claims one.
Can a free tool find every SEO error?
No. SEOgrinder checks most of the technical foundation, not all of it, and every other tool has its own boundaries. Google, for example, says the URL Inspection live test does not check every indexing issue.
Can I run this test myself?
Yes. Build a page with known errors, confirm them with the commands above, run your tools on it and write down version, date and result for each.
Your next step
Run the free scan on your own site with SEOgrinder, start at the top of the Tasks tab and open the AI readiness tab for the robots.txt and AI crawler checks. Then look at one page with the tools in the list and compare what they report. For the full list of what to check, see our SEO audit checklist.