Ahrefs runs a free plan with no card and no expiry date, but its three most useful tools only work on sites you own.
Six tools come with that plan. Site Explorer, Site Audit and Web Analytics all sit behind ownership verification, while the SEO Toolbar, the social scheduler and the AI writing helper work without proving anything.
That split defines the whole free layer, and it is the detail most roundups leave out. Which is where the choice between paid keyword tools starts to matter, because free data stops being useful at exactly the point your list stops being obvious.
Ahrefs also runs a shelf of tools that need no login at all. A keyword generator, a difficulty checker, a backlink checker that returns the top 20 results, an authority checker, a results page checker, and a traffic estimator.
The SEO Toolbar is the exception worth knowing about. It runs without verification and without a cap, so it will feed you domain metrics while you browse ordinary results pages.
The pattern repeats everywhere else. Rival free tiers hand out a handful of lookups a day, sometimes three, sometimes five, sometimes ten tokens a month, and then politely stop.
None of that is stingy. It is just aimed at a different job than the one people expect. You can confirm a keyword you already thought of. You cannot sit down on a Sunday and generate four hundred candidates.
That distinction matters more than the tool names. The research you can do without paying anything is verification work, and verification is the cheap half of the process. Discovery is what the subscriptions actually sell.
Search Console does not guess. It reports the clicks and impressions Google recorded for queries your pages actually appeared on, which makes it the only free source in the stack reporting fact rather than forecast.
Free tool roundups skip it almost universally, because it only covers ground you have already touched. That is a mistake for anyone with a year of history, since the queries where you sit on page two are the cheapest keyword list you will ever own.
It has its own ceilings, and Google publishes them. Tables show a maximum of 1,000 rows, and Google states plainly that some rows might therefore be omitted from what you see.
Rare queries vanish too. Google says it might not track queries made a very small number of times, or those containing personal or sensitive information, and the performance tables omit rare queries to protect privacy.
The practical effect catches people out. Your totals will not match the sum of your query table, and the gap is not a bug. There is also a lag of two to three days before data appears, so nothing you published this week is measurable yet.
One more habit worth breaking. The report opens on the last three months by default, which is short enough that a seasonal term can look dead simply because you checked in the wrong quarter.
So two keywords displaying an identical figure are not necessarily equal. They are two numbers that landed in the same bucket after Google smoothed them.
For a site with authority, that hardly matters, because you are choosing between terms with enough volume that the rounding disappears into the noise. For a new site, the effect is inverted.
Rounding does the most damage at the bottom of the range, where two genuinely different terms can be smoothed into the same displayed figure. The bottom of the range is precisely where a new site should be shopping, because that is where the competition thins out, and the small wins are actually available.
The competitor gap is the hole that nothing free fills. Ahrefs will not open Site Explorer on a domain you cannot verify; the no-login backlink checker stops at twenty results, and Search Console only ever knows about you.
So anyone who wants to see which queries a rival earns money from has to pay somebody. That single restriction is what every entry-level subscription is quietly priced on.
Six tools come with that plan. Site Explorer, Site Audit and Web Analytics all sit behind ownership verification, while the SEO Toolbar, the social scheduler and the AI writing helper work without proving anything.
That split defines the whole free layer, and it is the detail most roundups leave out. Which is where the choice between paid keyword tools starts to matter, because free data stops being useful at exactly the point your list stops being obvious.
The free tiers are built for checking, not finding
On the free Ahrefs plan, Site Explorer shows 1,000 backlinks and 1,000 keywords at a time for a site you have verified. Site Audit gets 5,000 crawl credits a month for each project, and the AI writing helper allows a single document a month.Ahrefs also runs a shelf of tools that need no login at all. A keyword generator, a difficulty checker, a backlink checker that returns the top 20 results, an authority checker, a results page checker, and a traffic estimator.
The SEO Toolbar is the exception worth knowing about. It runs without verification and without a cap, so it will feed you domain metrics while you browse ordinary results pages.
The pattern repeats everywhere else. Rival free tiers hand out a handful of lookups a day, sometimes three, sometimes five, sometimes ten tokens a month, and then politely stop.
None of that is stingy. It is just aimed at a different job than the one people expect. You can confirm a keyword you already thought of. You cannot sit down on a Sunday and generate four hundred candidates.
That distinction matters more than the tool names. The research you can do without paying anything is verification work, and verification is the cheap half of the process. Discovery is what the subscriptions actually sell.
Search Console measures what the others estimate
Every free keyword tool on that list is guessing. It models volume from third-party data and sampling, then rounds the answer into something readable.Search Console does not guess. It reports the clicks and impressions Google recorded for queries your pages actually appeared on, which makes it the only free source in the stack reporting fact rather than forecast.
Free tool roundups skip it almost universally, because it only covers ground you have already touched. That is a mistake for anyone with a year of history, since the queries where you sit on page two are the cheapest keyword list you will ever own.
It has its own ceilings, and Google publishes them. Tables show a maximum of 1,000 rows, and Google states plainly that some rows might therefore be omitted from what you see.
Rare queries vanish too. Google says it might not track queries made a very small number of times, or those containing personal or sensitive information, and the performance tables omit rare queries to protect privacy.
The practical effect catches people out. Your totals will not match the sum of your query table, and the gap is not a bug. There is also a lag of two to three days before data appears, so nothing you published this week is measurable yet.
One more habit worth breaking. The report opens on the last three months by default, which is short enough that a seasonal term can look dead simply because you checked in the wrong quarter.
Google rounds the numbers you are comparing
Keyword Planner has the same honesty problem in a different shape. Google states that its search volume statistics are rounded, and warns that when you pull ideas for multiple locations, the volumes might not add up the way you expect.So two keywords displaying an identical figure are not necessarily equal. They are two numbers that landed in the same bucket after Google smoothed them.
For a site with authority, that hardly matters, because you are choosing between terms with enough volume that the rounding disappears into the noise. For a new site, the effect is inverted.
Rounding does the most damage at the bottom of the range, where two genuinely different terms can be smoothed into the same displayed figure. The bottom of the range is precisely where a new site should be shopping, because that is where the competition thins out, and the small wins are actually available.
The competitor gap is the hole that nothing free fills. Ahrefs will not open Site Explorer on a domain you cannot verify; the no-login backlink checker stops at twenty results, and Search Console only ever knows about you.
So anyone who wants to see which queries a rival earns money from has to pay somebody. That single restriction is what every entry-level subscription is quietly priced on.
