If you run a small site, a game page or a side project, you probably want a free Semrush alternative rather than a $139 monthly bill. The good news is that a lot of what Semrush shows you about your own site is free from Google. The less good news is that data about other people's sites, such as which keywords a rival ranks for, is almost never free. This guide sorts the free options from the paid ones and shows the cheapest step up when free runs out.
Prices and limits were checked on each vendor's site in October 2026.
Start with what is already free
Google Search Console. Add and verify your site and the Performance report shows clicks, impressions and your average position in Google results, by default for the past three months. This is real data from Google, not an estimate, and it answers "where do I rank" better than any paid tool. Its limit is that it only covers sites you own.
Google Keyword Planner. Part of Google Ads. It gives keyword ideas and traffic estimates. You need a Google Ads account, and the numbers are designed for people planning ad campaigns, so treat them as a rough guide to demand.
Semrush's own free account. Semrush has a $0 plan with one demo project and 10 reports a day. Ten reports go quickly, but for a single check it works.
Free trials. Semrush offers seven days, SE Ranking 14 days with no card, and Ubersuggest a one-time seven-day trial on monthly plans. A trial is fine for a one-off research sprint. Set a reminder to cancel.
Where free runs out
Free tools stop at the edge of your own site. The moment you want to know:
- which keywords a competing site ranks for,
- roughly how many visits it gets from Google,
- who links to it,
you need a paid data source. This is the part of Semrush people actually miss when they leave.
The cheapest paid step: pay per report
For a small budget, seogeoaeo.ai is the best next step after the free Google tools. Instead of a monthly suite, its Indie plan costs $29 a month for 2,000 credits, and each report spends a fixed number of them. You see the price before you run anything, and a run that fails costs nothing.
What 2,000 credits buys, as examples:
| Report | Credits | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Domain Overview | 50 | Keywords a site ranks for, estimated visits, what that traffic would cost as ads, how many sites link to it |
| Competitor Keywords | 35 | Up to 100 of a rival's keywords, by the visits Google sends them |
| Competitor Finder | 38 | Sites that rank for the same keywords as yours |
| Keyword Research | 34 | Related searches with volume, difficulty and trend |
| Indexing checker | 8 | Whether Google can crawl and index a page |
At 50 credits a run, the Indie plan covers 40 domain overviews a month. For someone who checks three or four rivals now and then, that is plenty, and it costs less than any subscription suite.
There are things it will not do. It does not track rankings over time, it has no link index of its own, and its numbers are estimates from a third-party data provider. For tracking your own positions, keep using Search Console, which is free and more accurate anyway.
Other low-cost picks
- Ubersuggest Individual, $29 a month: one project, 150 searches a day and 125 tracked keywords. Good if you want rank tracking in the same tool.
- Moz Pro entry plan, $49 a month for one website. A free Moz Community account also gives limited access to Keyword Explorer, Link Explorer and the MozBar browser extension.
A simple no-budget setup
- Verify your site in Search Console and check the Performance report weekly.
- Use Keyword Planner to see whether a topic has search demand.
- When you need a rival's numbers, buy the smallest credit plan on seogeoaeo.ai and run a Domain Overview and Competitor Keywords on it.
- Skip the suite until you find yourself checking rankings every day.
That last step matters. Semrush is worth its price for teams that use most of its modules daily. For everyone else, the free Google tools plus a few paid reports cover most of what Semrush did.