You can do most of the SEO work that matters for a new business on a budget of zero. What has changed is which tools belong in the free stack, because search itself changed. People now get answers from AI assistants and AI Overviews as often as from a list of blue links, and the free tool list that worked in 2020 has nothing to say about whether you show up there.
This is the stack I would set up for a startup today, organized by the job you are trying to do rather than by tool category. Where a tool has a free tier, I have tried to say exactly where that free tier stops being useful, because that is the part most lists leave out.
Two of the tools in here are ours. I have flagged them clearly in the sections where they come up, along with what the free version does and does not include, so you can weigh them the same way you would weigh anything else on the page.
The short version
Five to seven tools. If you are running more than that as a startup, you are managing tools instead of doing SEO.
Job 1: Understand how Google sees your site
Google Search Console
If you set up one thing, set up this. It is free permanently, there is no upsell tier, and it is the only tool that shows you Google’s own first-party data about your site rather than a third party’s estimate of it.
What to actually use it for, in order of value:
-
The Performance report, filtered to a single page. This is the most underused data in SEO. It tells you every query that produced an impression for that page — including queries you never targeted. That is your content brief, written by your actual audience.
-
URL Inspection. Tells you whether a specific page is indexed. An unindexed page cannot rank, and this is far more common than founders expect. Check every important page individually.
-
Impressions with zero clicks. A page with impressions and no clicks is a page that is ranking too low to be clicked, or ranking well with a headline nobody wants. Those are two different fixes, and the average position number tells you which.
Here is a real example of why item 3 matters. [FILL: this page — the one you are reading — is a good candidate. It earned 2,147 impressions and zero clicks over roughly nineteen months while ranking in the top ten for thirty-eight different queries. If you are comfortable putting that in print, it is the most persuasive paragraph on the page, and it is true. If not, use a client example with permission.]
Set it up before you do anything else. Founders who delay this spend months guessing at things Search Console would have told them on day one.
More on reading it properly: what an SEO score actually measures.
PageSpeed Insights
Free, no account needed, run it on any URL. It gives you Core Web Vitals from real Chrome users where enough data exists, plus a lab test.
The honest guidance: fix the things it flags as obviously broken — uncompressed images, render-blocking scripts, no caching. Do not chase a score of 100. A slow page loses readers, but going from 78 to 94 will not move a ranking on its own, and startups burn weeks on this.
The wider technical picture is in the technical SEO checklist and the best technical SEO tips.
Google Analytics 4
Free at any volume a startup will produce. You need it for the part Search Console cannot show you: what people did after they arrived. Set up conversion events on the two or three actions that matter — form submitted, call clicked, demo booked — and ignore almost everything else in the interface for the first year.
Job 2: Find out what your customers are actually asking
This is where most startup SEO goes wrong. Founders pick keywords that describe their product using the words they use internally, and then wonder why nothing ranks.
QuestionFinder (ours — free tier available)
Disclosure up front: QuestionFinder.io is a tool I built and ChitChat owns. Judge it on the same terms as everything else here.
It scans the question sources that surface in Google and on Reddit and returns the actual questions people ask about a topic, phrased the way they ask them. Everything it returns is a question — it drops statement-form keywords deliberately, which means you lose some useful terms but you get a much cleaner list to write from.
The part I use most: every question gets a buyer-intent score from 0 to 100 with a short explanation of why. You can sort by it. That is the difference between a list of two hundred questions and a list of the eleven that a paying customer would ask. Someone asking “what does an SEO audit cost” is at a different point than someone asking “what is SEO,” and the score separates them without you reading all two hundred.
You can also add a city and state to get local content angles rather than national ones, which matters if you serve a geography.
The free tier: $0, ten searches per month, top fifteen questions per search, subreddit signals, three saved searches, and buyer-intent scoring on everything. For a startup planning a quarter of content, ten searches a month is genuinely enough — you are not running a hundred searches, you are running four and writing from them.
Where free stops: plug your email in and it becomes unlimited.
Google Keyword Planner
Free with a Google Ads account, and you do not need to run ads to use it. It gives you keyword ideas, competition levels, and volume ranges from Google’s own data.
The catch, stated plainly: without ad spend you see ranges rather than exact numbers, and the ranges are wide. Treat it as a validation tool — it tells you whether anyone searches a term at all, which is the question that matters most before you write. It is not a forecasting tool, and the volume figures should not be the basis of a content plan on their own.
Google Trends
Free, and useful for a narrow set of questions: is interest in this growing or dying, is it seasonal, and how do two terms compare against each other. Startups should use it mainly to avoid building a content plan on a term that is in structural decline.
It shows relative interest, not volume. A term can have a beautiful Trends line and forty searches a month.
Ubersuggest free tier
Basic keyword suggestions and competitor terms. Usable, capped daily. [FILL: state the current free daily search limit — it has changed several times and a stale number here is the kind of thing readers catch.]
Honest assessment: the free tier is thin enough that most startups get more out of Search Console query data plus QuestionFinder than out of Ubersuggest. Included because it comes up in every list and you will wonder why it is missing.
Going deeper on the research itself: how to do keyword research as a beginner, keyword research tips for strategy, and why long-tail queries are where small sites win.
Job 3: See what competitors are doing that you are not
This is the biggest hole in most free SEO stacks. The paid tools that do competitive analysis well cost a hundred dollars a month and up, so free lists skip the job entirely and startups end up optimizing in a vacuum.
CheckThemLinks (ours — free)
Disclosure: CheckThemLinks.com is also ours. It is free to use, and it asks for an email address before it runs the analysis.
You give it your page and a competing page — a specific competitor URL, not “find my competitors for me,” because automatic competitor detection tends to return directories and other pages you cannot learn anything from. You can also add a short description of your business, service area, and what makes you different, which changes the recommendations from generic to specific.
It compares the two pages across seventeen on-page factors, scores the gap, and explains it. What comes back:
-
Where you are behind, and by how much
-
Quick wins, ordered
-
A rewritten meta title and description
-
A content brief for closing the gap
-
Up to twenty-five backlink prospects — sites linking to the competitor that do not currently link to you
-
Five internal-link sources from your own indexed pages, with suggested anchor text
-
PDF and CSV export
That internal-link output is the one I would point a startup at first, because it is the thing nobody does and it costs nothing to act on. Every page we have looked at recently had the same problem: good content, zero internal links pointing to it.
Limits: five comparisons per day per email address. Completed reports stay available for thirty days, so you can reopen one instead of re-running it.
The recommendations follow current Google guidance deliberately — no keyword-density targets, no “LSI keywords,” no exact-match anchor stuffing, no retired schema advice. If you have used older audit tools you may notice the absence of familiar-looking suggestions. That is intentional.
Run a comparison at CheckThemLinks.com
Manual SERP reading
Free, and still the best competitive research there is. Search your target query, open the top five results, and read them properly. Ask what each one answers that yours does not, what format Google is rewarding, and whether a Reddit thread is ranking — because that usually means Google cannot find a good answer, which is an opening.
Ten minutes of this beats an hour in any tool. More on the formal version: keyword gap analysis.
Job 4: Find technical problems
Screaming Frog, free version
Desktop crawler, free up to [FILL: confirm current URL limit] URLs, which covers most early-stage sites. Run it before a launch and after a redesign. What to look for first: pages returning errors, redirect chains, missing or duplicated title tags, pages with no internal links pointing to them.
That last one is worth the download on its own.
Search Console URL Inspection
Already covered, but it belongs here too. It is the only tool that answers “is this page indexed” authoritatively, because it is Google answering.
Full sweep: on-page SEO checklist.
Job 5: Get visible in AI answers
This is the section that did not exist in the earlier version of this article, and it is now the reason most people arrive here.
AI Overviews and assistants answer a growing share of questions without sending a click. Being in those answers is a different job from ranking, and the tooling for it is young, expensive, and mostly unnecessary for a startup. Here is the honest version.
What actually works, for free
Test the prompts yourself. Open the assistants your customers use and ask the questions your customers ask. Write down whether you appear, who does, and which sources get cited. Do it monthly, in a spreadsheet. It is manual and it does not scale, and for a startup it is still the highest-value thing on this list, because it tells you exactly which competitors own which answers.
Structure content so it can be quoted. An AI answer needs a self-contained sentence it can lift. Put the answer directly under the heading that asks the question, before the explanation. If your answer is in paragraph four after a windup, there is nothing clean to take. This costs nothing and it is most of the work.
Answer the questions with buying intent, in your own words, with your own numbers. Answer engines are pulling for specificity. “Repairs usually run $300 to $600 in our area” is quotable. “Costs vary depending on your needs” is not. This is where question research with intent scoring pays off — you are looking for the questions a buyer asks, then answering them concretely.
Check your own logs. Your server logs and analytics will show AI crawler traffic. Free, and more honest than most dashboards.
What to skip for now
The dedicated AEO platforms — the ones with names like AI rank tracker and answer visibility monitor — mostly do what monthly manual prompt testing does, in a dashboard, for a subscription. Some are useful at scale. Almost none are worth a startup’s money before there is something to measure. Most of the “best AEO tools” lists you will find are recently built pages on single-purpose domains with affiliate links, which is worth knowing before you trust the rankings in them.
The tools in this stack that help here, specifically: QuestionFinder for finding the buyer-intent questions worth answering (and its E-E-A-T signals on the paid tier, if you get to that point), and CheckThemLinks for seeing what a page that already wins the answer is doing differently.
Related reading: AI search engine optimization tools, how AI Overviews work, and how accurate AI Overviews actually are.
Job 6: Track whether any of it worked
Free rank trackers are mostly not worth the setup. Search Console already gives you average position per query per page, which is the same information with less lying in it. Filter to a page, look at position over time, and stop there.
The four things to watch, monthly:
-
Is the page indexed
-
Which queries produce impressions, including ones you did not target
-
Impressions with zero clicks, and at what average position
-
Whether impressions held or collapsed after the first few weeks
Number four catches something most founders miss. A new page often gets a short trial run in the results. If impressions spike for two weeks and then flatline, Google tested the page and moved on — which means something on the page did not earn the position, and republishing it unchanged will produce the same result.
More: how to increase organic traffic, and writing content search engines can read.
The stack by stage
Do not run all of these at once.
When free tools genuinely stop being enough
Not a sales pitch, an actual answer: free tools stop being enough when the constraint changes from information to time.
You will know because you will have a list of things you know you should do and no hours to do them. That is not a tooling problem and no purchase fixes it. Every tool on this page will tell you something useful. None of them will write the page, run the interview, fix the internal links, or publish twice a week.
The second real limit is scale. Search Console is excellent for one page at a time and painful across three hundred. Manual prompt testing works for ten prompts and not for two hundred. If you are past that point, paid tooling starts to earn its cost.
If you want a look at which of your existing pages are closest to working, that is a conversation we are happy to have — and you can get most of the way there yourself with Search Console and an afternoon. Details on how we run SEO engagements if it comes to that.
FAQs
What is the best free SEO tool for a startup?
Google Search Console, without much competition. It is free permanently, it shows Google’s own data about your site rather than an estimate, and it tells you which queries your pages already get impressions for — which is the most useful content-planning data available at any price.
Are free SEO tools enough for a startup?
For the first year, usually yes. Free tools handle keyword and question research, indexing checks, technical audits, and performance tracking. What free tools cannot give you is time, and that is the actual constraint most founders hit.
What free tools help with AEO or AI search visibility?
Very few worth paying for, and the free approach is better than most startups expect: test the prompts your customers would ask in the assistants they use, record whether you appear and who gets cited, and structure your content so an answer can be lifted from directly under each heading. QuestionFinder’s free tier helps you find which buyer-intent questions to answer. Most dedicated AEO platforms are not worth a startup budget yet.
How do I compare my page to a competitor’s for free?
Read their page against yours and note what they answer that you do not. For a structured version, CheckThemLinks (ours) compares the two pages across seventeen on-page factors, scores the gap, and returns quick wins, a content brief, backlink prospects, and internal-link suggestions. It is free, five comparisons per day.
Do I need a paid rank tracker?
Not as a startup. Search Console gives you average position by query and page, which is the same information from the source. Set up a monthly habit of reading it instead of paying for a dashboard that emails it to you.
Which free tools are completely free, with no trial?
Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, Google Trends, PageSpeed Insights, and Google Keyword Planner are free with no paid tier or expiring trial. Screaming Frog, Ubersuggest, and QuestionFinder have free tiers with limits. CheckThemLinks is free and asks for an email address.
Thomas Guardado is a seasoned digital marketing and SEO expert with over a decade of hands-on experience helping brands grow their online presence and dominate search results. Based in Connecticut, he specializes in organic search strategy, technical SEO, content optimization, and data-driven campaigns that turn clicks into customers.
Leave a comment