If you want a SpyFu free alternative, the honest answer is that Google already gives away a good part of what SpyFu sells. You can see a rival's live ads, look up search volumes and read your own site's queries without paying anyone. What you cannot get for free is a competitor's organic keyword list. Below is what each free option really hands you, what it keeps back, and the cheapest paid step when free stops being enough.
What people use SpyFu for
SpyFu's home page pitches the SEO and PPC keywords your competitors buy and rank for, and every ad they have tested. In practice, people open it for four jobs:
- Reading a competitor's ads.
- Seeing which searches a competitor ranks for.
- Checking search volume and cost per click.
- Finding keywords a competitor wins and you do not.
Here is how far you get on each with a budget of zero.
Free option 1: Google Ads Transparency Center
Covers job 1. Type a company or a website into the Ads Transparency Center and you see the ads that verified advertiser has run across Google Search, YouTube and Display, with the format, the regions and the last date shown.
What it keeps back: you cannot start from a keyword, and there is no spend, click count or list of keywords behind the ads. Still, for "what is my rival saying in its ads this month", it is free and it is Google's own record.
Free option 2: Google Keyword Planner
Covers job 3. Keyword Planner shows monthly search estimates and roughly what an ad on a keyword would cost.
What it keeps back: Google asks you to finish setting up a Google Ads account, billing details included, before the keyword ideas open up. It also shows nothing about who ranks or bids for a keyword.
Free option 3: Google Search Console
Covers a slice of job 2, for your own site only. The Performance report lists the Google queries your site appears for, with clicks, impressions and average position. These are real queries from Google, not estimates.
What it keeps back: everything about other sites. Search Console only works on sites you have verified, so a competitor's rankings stay hidden.
The gap free tools leave
Jobs 2 and 4, a competitor's organic keywords and the gap between their rankings and yours, have no free Google source. Any tool that shows them is building its own estimate from search data. This is the point where you pay something or go without.
The cheapest paid step: seogeoaeo.ai
If you only need those reports now and then, a full subscription is a lot of money for a few clicks. seogeoaeo.ai charges per run instead:
| What you want | seogeoaeo.ai tool | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| A rival's Google ads, sorted by how long they have run | Competitor Google Ads | 15 |
| The searches a rival ranks for, with volume and CPC | Competitor Keywords | 35 |
| Keywords a rival ranks for and you do not | Keyword Gap | 85 |
| Volume and CPC for up to 100 of your keywords | Keyword Metrics | 33 |
| Facebook and Instagram ads a rival is running | Meta Ad Finder | 5 |
The smallest plan is $29 a month for 2,000 credits, and a run that fails costs nothing. There is no credit purchase without a plan, so it is not free, but one month covers a lot of one-off lookups. You can also check your own site for free on the home page, which gives a preview of its crawl, indexing, on-page and structured data health.
When to keep paying for SpyFu
If you want to scroll through years of a competitor's ad tests, get negative match ideas for your own campaigns, or track rankings every day, SpyFu does those and the free options above do not. SpyFu says it holds more than 18 years of history across 38 countries. That is a real reason to stay. We could not load SpyFu's pricing page to compare costs, so check spyfu.com for current plans.
A no-budget routine that works
- Open the Transparency Center and read your two closest rivals' ads.
- Put your own keyword ideas through Keyword Planner for volume.
- Check Search Console to see which of them you already show for.
- When you need a competitor's keyword list, buy one month of the smallest pay-per-report plan, run the reports, and decide later if you need more.