Free SE Ranking alternative

SEO Skill: Use the free web tools with no account. For your own data, add https://seoskill.dev/mcp to your AI agent and sign in with Google (read only).

SE Ranking: Create an SE Ranking account and start a free 14-day trial. No credit card is needed. There is no permanent free plan. When the trial ends you buy a plan from the Billing page.

SEO Skill: Free web tools: backlink checker, Domain Rating, competitor keywords, SERP checker, traffic estimates, robots.txt, sitemap, schema and more. In your AI agent: Search Console reports (quick wins, low CTR, striking distance, content decay, cannibalization, traffic drops), page checks, index checks, before and after comparisons, and keyword research with your own key. A site crawler and internal links in the CLI.

SE Ranking: Rank Tracker (Google desktop and mobile, Bing, Yahoo and YouTube), Keyword Research, Competitive Research, Website Audit, On-Page SEO Checker, Backlink Checker and Backlink Monitoring, Content Editor with an AI Writer, Local Marketing and a Report Builder. Core and Growth also include AI Visibility tracking (25 prompts a day across 5 AI engines). The SE Ranking MCP server is included on every plan and in the trial. It runs on your plan's API credits (25K a month on Core, 100K on Growth, 100K in the trial) and exposes 180+ tools for research, audits, AI search data and project management. SE Ranking also publishes open-source Claude SEO skills (seranking/seo-skills) built on the MCP. The API is included on every plan and is also sold on its own.

SEO Skill: Google Search Console, Google Analytics, URL Inspection, Clicky, and DataForSEO or Ahrefs with your own key. Bing Webmaster Tools in the CLI. Free Domain Rating by Ahrefs on research rows.

SE Ranking: SE Ranking's own databases: 5.5B keywords, 188 country databases and 2.2B domain profiles, per its MCP page, Live search engine checks for tracked rankings, with a cached copy of each result, Search volume built from Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends, refined by SE Ranking, AI search visibility data (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode and more), Google Search Console (keyword data and backlink import), Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, Matomo and Google Business Profile

SEO Skill: Your browser for the web tools. Claude Code, Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor, VS Code, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Le Chat and any remote MCP client for your own data.

SE Ranking: Web app, Claude (web and desktop), Claude Code, ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor, VS Code, v0, Windsurf, Zed, Gemini CLI

SEO Skill: Yes

SE Ranking: Yes. Official connectors in the Claude and ChatGPT directories, on every plan and in the trial.

SEO Skill: Every on-demand tool, with no usage cap and no time limit.

SE Ranking: Free 14-day trial with no credit card. The pricing page lists up to 10 projects, 750 tracked keywords a day, 20 AI prompts a day and AI competitive research for up to 3 domains. Its FAQ adds 3 manager seats, 10 reports a day each for competitive, keyword and backlink research, and full API and MCP access with 100,000 credits. No permanent free plan. Some free tools work without an account.

SEO Skill: The weekly site audit is $50 a month per site: weekly crawl, daily Google index checks, stored history, drop and return alerts, and a Monday email and webhook. Cancel any time.

SE Ranking: Core $129 a month, or $103.20 a month billed annually (10 projects, 1 manager seat, 2k keywords tracked daily, 250k audit pages a month, 25K API credits and MCP). Growth $279 a month, or $223.20 a month billed annually (30 projects, 3 manager seats, 5k keywords daily, 2M audit pages, 100K API credits and MCP, full historical data). Enterprise is custom, through sales. Annual billing saves 20% and is paid upfront. Prices in USD. Add-ons include extra manager seats from $16, extra keywords from $22.40, Agency Pack from $69 a month (annual only), AI visibility from $71 a month and an API add-on from $45 a month. The standalone API starts at $179 a month (annual only), or $50 per 250K credits pay as you go.

SEO Skill: Read-only Google sign-in. Your agent can start the paid audit for a site, which returns a Stripe Checkout link for you to open.

SE Ranking: Not on your site. Its FAQ says SE Ranking does not implement changes on your site. Through the API and MCP it can create and manage projects inside SE Ranking, such as rank tracking keywords and competitors. Local Marketing can schedule Google Business Profile posts, reply to reviews and sync listings. No Search Console write actions stated.

SEO Skill: Search Console and analytics rows are fetched on each request and never stored, except what the paid weekly audit keeps for its sites. Your linked accounts and saved keys are kept, encrypted.

SE Ranking: Its Google Analytics help says SE Ranking does not store data transferred from Google Analytics through public OAuth. It does not say what it keeps from Search Console. Backlinks imported from Search Console are kept in Backlink Monitoring.

SEO Skill: Google's 16 months, read live. With the weekly audit, crawl and index history for the sites you audit.

SE Ranking: Keyword Research and Competitive Research history goes back to February 2020. Core gets up to 6 months of it, Growth and Enterprise get full access. Rank tracking history builds from when a project starts and is kept while the project exists.

SEO Skill: Hosted service, with the CLI and local MCP server open source (Apache 2.0)

SE Ranking: Hosted service