The free keyword tools, and exactly where each one stops

The short answer

Google Search Console and Google Keyword Planner, used together, are the free keyword research stack, and for a site under a few thousand visits a month they are usually enough. Search Console tells you which queries already show your pages; Keyword Planner estimates demand for words you have not written about yet. Add Google Trends for seasonality and Bing Webmaster Tools for a second opinion and you have covered most of what a $30 tool would tell you.

None of those four pays this site a penny. That is worth saying at the top of a page that also links two tools which do.

What each free tool gives you

The first four rows below are free and always will be: they are products Google and Microsoft give away, not trials. The last three are the free tiers of paid tools, which is a different thing — they exist to show you what you are not buying, and the section further down marks exactly where each one stops.

Start with the one that is not an estimate

Search Console is the only tool in this list whose numbers are not modelled: they are counts of what Google actually did with your pages. Google describes it as "a free service offered by Google" and it covers only sites whose ownership you have verified.

That restriction is the whole point. Every other tool on this page is trying to guess what Search Console would say if you owned the competitor's site. Start with the real data about your own pages — queries you rank on position 11 to 20 for are usually the cheapest wins on any site — and only then go looking for words you have no data on at all.

Keyword Planner is free, and rounder than people think

Google Keyword Planner is free with a Google Ads account, and Google is unusually clear about what its number means. The help page defines average monthly searches as the average number of times people searched for "a keyword and its close variants", based on the month range, location and network you chose, averaged over twelve months by default.

It then adds two more caveats in Google's own words: "Your search volume statistics are rounded", and "historical stats like average monthly searches are only shown for exact matches". So the figure you see is a rounded average of a bundle of similar phrases. That is fine for deciding whether a topic has demand and useless for choosing between two near-identical phrasings — which is precisely the job the paid tools sell themselves on. Getting useful SEO work out of Keyword Planner goes through the settings that matter.

One thing this site will not tell you: there is a widely repeated claim that Keyword Planner hides exact volumes behind ranges unless you spend enough on ads. Google's own help pages document no such threshold, so it is not stated here as fact.

Google Trends answers a question volume cannot

Trends is free and it is the right tool for one specific question: is this getting bigger or smaller, and where. Google explains that each data point "is divided by the total searches of the geography and time range it represents to compare relative popularity", and the result is "scaled on a range of 0 to 100".

That is why a Trends number is never a search count, and why comparing a Trends value against a Keyword Planner volume is meaningless. Use Trends for shape — seasonal peaks, a term dying, a term taking off — and a volume tool for size.

Bing Webmaster Tools is the free tool people forget

Bing's Keyword Research tool is part of Bing Webmaster Tools, which costs nothing, and it gives keyword ideas with search volume, a trend line and a global breakdown showing which countries search a term most. Microsoft's documentation says you can pull "results for any timeframe in the last six months", with a default of the previous three months, filtered by country, language and device.

It reports Bing's searches, not Google's, and Bing's share of search is much smaller — so treat it as a second opinion on shape rather than a substitute for a Google-facing number. The free country breakdown is genuinely useful and most paid tools charge for the equivalent.

Where free ends

The free tier of a paid tool is a demo, and the honest way to read it is as the vendor's own ladder. Mangools publishes the same unit at every step, which makes the shape unusually clear: the free account gets 5 lookups per 24 hours, Basic at $30.50 a month gets 100 keyword lookups per 24 hours, Premium gets 500 a day and Agency gets 1,200 a day.

So free is not a smaller version of the product — it is two percent of it. The same is true of Semrush's free account, which allows 10 reports a day across the entire toolkit, meaning a single afternoon of research spends the day's allowance before lunch. Ahrefs takes a different approach: its Keyword Generator needs no account at all and accepts up to ten seed phrases, but it returns a shortened list, and the real Keywords Explorer sits behind the $29 Starter plan.

When paying starts to make sense

• You want to see a competitor's keywords. No free Google tool will do this. The competitor keyword tools note covers what the paid ones actually show.
• You want a difficulty score computed from the live results. Keyword Planner's "competition" column is about advertisers bidding, not about how hard a page is to outrank.
• You are working through hundreds of keywords at once and need them grouped. Free tools have no clustering at all.
• You have burned the daily cap three days running. That is the tool telling you its price honestly.

When you get there, the eight paid tools with their entry prices is the comparison. Until then, spending nothing is the correct answer and nobody on this page is paid to tell you otherwise.