What costs nothing, and where it stops
The free tools are better than their reputation, and they all stop in the same place
Four free tools cover most of what a small site needs: Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, the Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Google Keyword Planner. Here is what each does, what it refuses to do, and the moment you have genuinely outgrown it.
What is on this bench
The short version
Four free tools cover indexing, your own search performance, your own backlinks, a full site crawl of up to 500 URLs, and keyword research. That is most of the job for a site of a few hundred pages, and none of the four is a trial, a freemium teaser or a lead magnet.
They share one wall. Three of them only work on sites you can prove you own, and the fourth wants a Google Ads account. The entire paid SEO software category exists on the far side of that wall — looking at other people's sites, at scale, without asking permission.
Not one of these four pays Searchbench a penny. They are first on this page because on their jobs they are the right answer, and this site would rather say so than sell you something.
Google Search Console
What it is: Google's own reporting on how Google treats your site. Google's documentation calls it "a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results".
What it does that nothing else can: confirms whether Google can find and crawl your pages, shows why a page was not indexed and lets you ask for re-indexing, reports impressions, queries and click-through rates for the searches you actually appeared in, warns you about indexing and spam problems, and identifies which sites link to yours.
Where it stops: it is about your property and nothing else. No competitor's traffic, no competitor's links, no keyword you have never appeared for. It also gives an average position rather than a reading for one keyword in one city on one day, which is a genuinely different measurement.
What it costs: nothing, and there is no upgrade to sell you. Google runs no affiliate scheme, so this recommendation earns this site nothing.
Bing Webmaster Tools
What it is: Microsoft's equivalent, and a more generous one than most people expect. Microsoft's own webmaster blog introduces it as "free and full of powerful features".
What it includes, by that post's own list: Search Performance Reporting, Top Recommendations, a URL Inspection Tool, IndexNow integration and URL submission, Keyword Research and Query Data, Copilot in Bing Webmaster Tools, Backlink Insights, Site Explorer, a Sitemaps Report, a Site Scan Tool, a robots.txt Tester and Crawl Control. You can sign in with "your Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account".
Why bother, when Bing is the smaller engine: because keyword research and backlink data are included here and are not included free anywhere in Google's stack, and because a growing share of AI assistants lean on Bing's index rather than Google's. The site-scan and robots tester are useful whichever engine you care about.
Where it stops: same wall — verified properties only — and its data reflects Bing's crawl, not Google's.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider, free tier
What it is: a desktop crawler you install and point at a site. The offer on its own page is one sentence: "Download & crawl 500 URLs for free, or buy a licence for €245 Per Year to remove the limit."
What makes it unusual: the free version is not crippled. The difference the page draws between free and licensed is the crawl limit — "Crawl Limit - 500 URLs" against "Crawl Limit - Unlimited*", with the footnote that "The maximum number of URLs you can crawl is dependent on allocated memory and storage". A licence also unlocks crawl configuration, saved crawls and the advanced features.
Where it stops: at 500 URLs per crawl, which is a real ceiling but a higher one than most small sites reach. It is also a desktop application, so there is no scheduling, no history and no dashboard to send a client.
A note on the price: that page quoted this reader €245 per year, in euros, and offers a currency switcher. Whatever your own country is shown, do not compare it with a dollar figure elsewhere on this site without converting deliberately.
Screaming Frog runs no affiliate programme. Recommending it pays this site nothing, which is worth saying on the one page where a reader might reasonably suspect otherwise.
Google Keyword Planner
What it is: the keyword research tool inside Google Ads. Google's help documentation says it "helps you research keywords for your Search campaigns" and lists "Discover new keywords", "View monthly searches", "Determine cost" and "Organize keywords" among its features.
The condition nobody mentions: Google's own page states it plainly — "You must complete your account setup by entering your billing information to access basic features like 'Get ideas for new keywords'." There is no subscription and no charge for using it, but there is a Google Ads account with billing details on file. Whether that counts as free is your call; this site's job is to make sure you know before you start.
Where it stops: it is built for advertisers, so its figures are shaped for ad buying rather than for choosing what to write. Bing Webmaster Tools' keyword research is the closest free second opinion.
What free will not do for you
| The job | Covered free? | By what | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Is this page indexed? | fully | Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools | your verified sites only |
| Where am I ranking? | partly | Search Console performance report | an average, not a daily local position |
| Who links to me? | fully | Search Console, Bing Backlink Insights | your own links, nobody else's |
| Crawl the whole site | up to a point | Screaming Frog free tier | 500 URLs per crawl |
| Size a keyword list | partly | Keyword Planner, Bing keyword research | a Google Ads account with billing details |
| Score a draft | no | nothing free worth naming | this is what the paid on-page tools sell |
Read that table as a shopping list in reverse. Every row marked "fully" is a row you should never pay for. The rows marked "partly" and "no" are the only honest reasons to start a subscription.
When you have actually outgrown the free set
Four signals, and none of them is "my traffic is flat":
- Your site is past 500 URLs and the crawl keeps truncating before it reaches the part you are worried about.
- You need a position for a named keyword in a named place on a named day, and an average across everything will not do.
- You need to look at a site you do not own — its links, its keywords, its pages — and no free tool will ever let you.
- You publish often enough that a second opinion on every draft would save more time than it costs.
Each of those maps to one purchase, not to a suite. The tool map sets out which one, with what each vendor publishes as its price and the day that price was read. The cheapest paid entries there start at $29.00 and $30.50 a month.
One thing free tools are better at
Free tools cannot oversell you, because there is nothing to sell. Search Console will never tell you that a page is some given percentage optimised, because Google publishes no such score and would not hand it over if it did.
A lot of what paid SEO software adds is confidence rather than information — a score, a colour, a gauge, built on the vendor's model of what Google does. That can be genuinely useful for making decisions quickly. It is not the same as knowing, and any page that tells you otherwise is selling.