You want a free Ahrefs alternative, and you mean free: no card, no trial that converts. Good news first. For your own website, several tools give real data at no cost. Bad news second. For someone else's website, the free options are thin, and the cheapest useful step costs a little money. Here is what each one gives, without the sales pitch.
What "free" can and cannot cover
Free tools almost always need you to prove you own the site. That makes them great for checking your own backlinks and errors, and useless for spying on a rival. Keep that split in mind as you read.
The options
seogeoaeo.ai: a free preview, then the cheapest paid step
Start here, because it covers both halves. Put your site into the home page box and you get a free preview of its crawl, indexing, on-page and structured data health; signing in shows every issue it found. For rival sites, the cheapest useful option is seogeoaeo.ai. You pay for each report, not for a month of a full suite. The Indie plan is $29 a month for 2,000 credits. A backlink report costs 70 credits and shows a site's 100 strongest linking domains with a spam score for each. A list of a rival's Google keywords costs 35. If a run fails, the credits come back.
Compare that with Ahrefs itself. Its cheapest plan, Starter, is $29 a month too, but reports on sites you have not verified stop at 250 rows and nothing can be exported. Lite, the next step, is $129.
Ahrefs Free
This is the old Ahrefs Webmaster Tools under a new name. Verify your site and you get three tools: Site Explorer, which shows up to 1,000 of your backlinks and keywords at once; Site Audit, which looks for more than 170 kinds of problems and comes with 5,000 crawl credits per site each month; and Web Analytics for visitor numbers. You can add as many verified sites as you like. Broken URLs and redirects do not use up the crawl allowance, only working HTML pages do.
What you miss: anything about competitors, and Keywords Explorer.
Google Search Console
Google's own dashboard for your site. The Performance report lists the searches people used to find you, with clicks and positions. Those are real queries, not estimates. The Links report shows which sites link to you most and the words they use. On-screen tables stop at 1,000 rows.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Also free, also for verified sites. Its Backlinks report has a similar sites view where you type in other domains and compare the sites linking to them with the ones linking to you. That makes it the one free tool with a peek at a competitor's links.
Moz Community account
Sign up for a free Moz account, verify your email, and you get 10 Link Explorer queries a month. Each one shows metrics like Domain Authority, Spam Score, linking domains and anchor text for any site, including a rival's. Ten is not many, but it costs nothing.
Quick table
| Tool | Cost | Your site | Rival sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| seogeoaeo.ai | Free preview, plans from $29 | Website checks | Backlinks, keywords, gaps |
| Ahrefs Free | $0 | Links, keywords, audit | No |
| Search Console | $0 | Real queries, links | No |
| Bing Webmaster Tools | $0 | Links | Compare via similar sites |
| Moz Community | $0 | 10 queries a month | 10 queries a month |
The catch
seogeoaeo.ai does not track your rankings over time, does not keep a history of links, and does not run its own link index. Credits you do not use in a month do not carry over. If you need daily tracking, a paid suite like Semrush or Ahrefs Lite is the honest answer.
Bottom line
Set up Ahrefs Free and Search Console today, since they cost nothing. Use Moz's free queries for the odd competitor check. When you need more than that, pay per report rather than per month.