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There are well over 450 SEO tools in the world. The number has grown by 100 in my 2026 count because of many new AI visibility tools (GEO).
How do you know which SEO tools are worth checking out?
I’ve now tested over 180 tools, and keep an eye out for new ones coming. So maybe I saved you about 350 hours of research 😉
Below I review the top 20 tools. Big 2026 update where I especially dive into GEO features (AI visibility).
By the way: If you are looking for the most simple tools my colleague Lukas made a list of the easiest SEO tools for beginners too.
Which SEO tools are best as of January 2026?
As of January 2026, there are over 450 free and paid SEO tools on the market (if I include GEO)
Here are the 20 SEO tools that stood out the most to me in 2026
| Name | Category | USD/month | Features | SEO automation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🏆 🤖 🔗 | |
| Ahrefs | 💵 Paid | 129 | 🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 💬 | Yes |
| Morningscore | 💵 Paid | 69 | 🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 💬 | Yes |
| SEMrush One | 💵 Paid | 199 | 🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 💬 | Yes |
| Surfer SEO | 💵 Paid | 219 | 🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 💬 | Yes |
| Moz Pro | 💵 Paid | 99 | 🏆 🤖 🔍 🔗 | Yes |
| Rich Results Test | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🤖 | |
| PageSpeed Insights | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🤖 | |
| Compress PNG | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🤖 | |
| Answer The Public | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🔍 | |
| Claude Sonnet | 🎁 Free | 0 | ✍️ 🤖 | Yes |
| SEO.ai | 💵 Paid | 149 | ✍️ | Yes |
| AI Optimization Checker | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🤖 ✍️ | |
| Screaming Frog | 💵 Paid | 23 | 🤖 | |
| Seobility | 💵 Paid | 50 | 🏆 🤖 🔍 | |
| SE Ranking | 💵 Paid | 65 | 🏆 🤖 🔍 🔗 💬 | |
| AccuRanker | 💵 Paid | 224 | 🏆 🔍 | |
| Yoast SEO (WordPress plugin) | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🤖 ✍️ | Yes |
| Rank Math (WordPress plugin) | 💵 Paid | 8 | 🤖 ✍️ | Yes |
| Schemantra | 🎁 Free | 0 | 🤖 |
The Features column from the table above is explained here:
| Feature | Explanation |
|---|---|
| 🏆 | Rank tracker tool |
| 🤖 | Technical SEO (onpage) |
| 🔍 | Keyword research |
| ✍️ | Help to write content |
| 🔗 | Backlink tool |
| 💬 | Prompt tracking |
Review of the 20 SEO tools
1. My personal test of Google Search Console
🏆 🤖 🔗 Price: Free.
Google Search Console has become one of the best SEO tools. It is Google’s own and it gives them some advantages. Among others, no tool can match the accuracy of keywords found and traffic and visibility coming to them.
However, there is one limitation that affects all features: you can only get info on a website you own (or are invited to) which makes this tool useless for competitor analysis and e.g. finding new keywords or links. Overall: Google Search Console is a good baseline, but it’s not a complete tool in my opinion.
2026 update: End of 2024 they added Recommendations and during 2025 I did not actually end up finding it very useful, since it didn’t evolve from basic notifications like “this page lost traffic”. Ironically (since it’s such a small feature) it was the addition of being able to filter graphs by week/month/day that excited the most SEO pros, myself included. They have also added “AI-powered configuration” but that feature is again not very useful since it just allows you to adjust filter settings by chatting with the AI. What we all want is to be able to chat with AI about the entire dataset and have it perform solid analysis. Maybe next year 😉 Meanwhile open source projects allow this. Like this MCP server for Search Console.
2. My personal test of Ahrefs
🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 💬 Price: $129 per month
Ahrefs data quality is among the best on the market and the tool is especially popular in tracking backlinks and researching keywords. Ahrefs also allows you to check how your competitors are approaching SEO. Ahrefs is a great database if you know what you’re looking for. However, it is not a tool that guides you in the right direction. You need to be an expert to get the full value. If you are, Ahrefs is one of the best SEO tools. See table with features
2026 update: Quite a few things changed in the last year. I would say the biggest news is their Brand Radar paid add-on. My personal opinion is that while it is not that accurate data wise, it is still one of the better AI visibility tools out there. I would not buy the Brand Radar add-on though, it’s too expensive with a current price tag of $699/mo. To be fair, they did recently add the option to buy only 1 platform access for $199/mo. Smart move. For example ChatGPT access. For bigger brands I believe Brand Radar might be interesting. For smaller companies often not because of lacking data and high price tag. It found very little data for our brand in my test just now.
3. My personal test of Morningscore
🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 💬 Price: $69 per month
Morningscore is an all-in-one SEO tool that lets you measure the value of organic traffic to your website in Dollars. The tool uses game elements to make working with SEO and GEO fun and simple. Therefore, you don’t need to be an expert to get results. This translates into small missions that help grow your organic visibility and give you XP when completed, which makes you level up in the tool. You get access to keywords, SEO planner (missions), prompt tracking, GEO Score (AI visibility index), backlinks, health (technical SEO), SEO automation tools (like WordPress plugin) and competitor monitoring. The data quality is close to the biggest SEO tools. Disclaimer: This is our own tool. You can test it free here (no credit card).
2026 update: Dec 12, 2025 version 4 released. A big change to the tool. The design completely changed and a lot of GEO features arrived (AI visibility) as well as a brand new keyword engine. It got tested to be on par with – and in some cases more accurate than – Ahrefs and Semrush. The tool now also focuses more on SEO automation: May 2025 a WordPress plugin released that automates onsite SEO (and a similar Shopify App released in January 2026).
4. My personal test of Semrush One
🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 💬 Price: $199 per month
SEMrush One (the new name for their combined SEO and GEO tool) is a very comprehensive SEO tool that provides an overview and detailed insight into everything related to organic marketing, not just SEO. Personally, I never considered Semrush among the best SEO tools. The user experience is fragmented, with almost 50 different sub-sections (see left side on the image below). However, their data is strong and they are the biggest SEO tool on the market, so I can’t make this list without also mentioning Semrush. See table with features.
2026 update: Semrush decided end of 2025 to include their AI visibility features either as add-on or in the Semrush One subscription starting at $199, so I updated the price accordingly here. I have mainly played around with the new Visibility Overview feature, which scores your brand in AI. I didn’t like it for several reasons: The UX is not my cup of tea. Took me 30 minutes just to understand it. The data was not good in my test. I checked the US market and got French and german prompts displayed. And it only covers like 10 countries, but to be fair the list is growing. I see they add new countries regularly.
5. My personal test of Surfer SEO
🏆 ✍️ 🔍 💬 Price: $219 per month
Surfer SEO in recent years have developed many features taking it from a great content optimization tool into a full SEO and GEO tool. To be fair only if you choose their mid tier plan of $219/month. And you still don’t get any powerful backlink tools. Core features are still content help and content writing (with AI) in my opinion though, and those are mostly available from the lowest plan of $99/month. It compares your content to those that rank highest on Google and shows you where your content lags versus theirs. It’s a simple idea but not easy in practice, so the Polish guys behind the tool have executed it well. For example, if you work with content on a daily basis, this tool is definitely worth checking out.
2026 update: As I wrote the initial review 3 years ago, the tool cost $29 / month. Now the plan that offers a full tool, where you get both SEO and GEO features costs $219/month. It’s still a fair price if you are hardcore around your SEO and GEO. I have not been able to play much around with the new GEO features and AI tracking, but I have asked friends and they say that it’s a solid experience. So once again, quality software, but you definitely also pay for it.
6. My personal test of Moz Pro
🏆 🤖 ✍️ 🔍 🔗 Price: $99 per month
With Moz, you get an all-in-one tool for backlink analysis, keyword, and onsite optimization. They’ve been in the game since 2002 and have a great reputation. I don’t find their tools intuitive, but the data is solid. So if it’s important to you, give them a test. I can also only praise their culture and openness in an industry that is often a bit dirty and closed. Moz is strong on links data, often better than Ahrefs, which is why we also use their data in our own SEO tool, Morningscore. See table with features
2026 update: It might have been there before, but Moz put more emphasis on their Moz Pro Starter plan now by adding it on the pricing page directly. It costs $69/month. It does not include many of the tools that Moz is famous for though, so I still consider the $99/month plan the one that fits this review and the one I test. Otherwise my biggest personal experience was the new Brand Authority metric, which I think very valuable. This can also be accessed through the Moz API now, which has gotten many upgrades over the last year.
7. My personal test of Rich results test
🤖 Price: Free.
If you’re new to SEO, don’t start here. One of the hard parts of SEO: This tool helps with Schema, also called structured data. It is an extra “invisible layer” on your website that can feed Google with more info that allows you to achieve better rankings on Google. Rich Results Test can tell you if your website can achieve these extended positions on Google.
2026 update: Schema is important for both Google and AI visibility. I haven’t noticed any big changes to this tool over the last year. Don’t fix what ain’t broken! This oldie but goldie tool is as relevant as ever in 2026!
8. My personal test of Pagespeed insights
🤖 Price: Free.
The speed of your website has become important in SEO. And Google’s requirements for speed have become greater. With this tool, you can test your website speed and get a score from 0-100. Note that you get a score for both mobile and desktop speed. Both are important. This is still important in 2026.
2026 update: I have used it a lot during last 12 months, and haven’t spotted any change. Their official changelog reveals a change to Lighthouse 13.0. Here is the official article highlighting all Lighthouse 13.0 changes, but this gets too nerdy for my needs honestly. As a user I haven’t noticed changes.
9. My personal test of Compress PNG
🤖 Price: Free.
Super small tool to compress images so they take up less space and your website gets faster = Google is happy. Not only the PNG file format but also JPG, GIF, and even PDF. You can often compress file sizes by over 50%!!
2026 update: Used this tool for writing this article just now – absolutely no changes to core tool that I can spot. Don’t fix what ain’t broken 😉
10. My personal test of Answer The Public
🔍 Price: Free.
Answer The Public is a super free tool to find more “question keywords”. For example, if you have the keyword “real estate agent” you can type it in and the tool will give you a bunch of suggestions for questions related to the keyword the tool thinks people are searching for. Unfortunately, you don’t get searches/month on many of the suggested keywords, but you can put them into another tool, such as Morningscore, and then see the search volume there.
2026 update: It almost fell off my list. I would not pay for this tool alone and it got a lot more restricted in what you can access freely (see screenshot for example). It does however still generate ideas in a nice way and they did a great job improving the visuals.
11. My personal test of Claude Sonnet
✍️ 🔍 Price: Free.
This is the leading AI content writing tool. It has multiple advantages over the current ChatGPT models if you ask me. First of all, it writes better across different languages. Writing quality and intelligence is also just a bit higher. But honestly this varies month by month as the models have ups and downs and as they keep improving in a very competitive race. For me the basic recommendation is about this: Little features that make it look like Claude was designed for writing content. Sometimes it even suggests and writes entire new articles at very high quality for you related to what you wanted, just because it saw a great related topic. Great formatting and download options also often appear. Truly magical at times.
2026 update: I still love Sonnet, and their releases during the last 12 months have only made that stronger.
12. My personal test of SEO.ai
🏆✍️ 🔍 Price: $149 per month
A Danish-developed tool. I know parts of the team behind it and think they stand for good software. They have a $1 trial so you can see if it’s great. I tested it in the beginning, and have since seen demos of it adding many new features like deep web research about your topic and website publish integration.
2026 update After having a $69/month price tag for the first many years they are now charging $149/month. This is a bit steep in my opinion for what you get here, but at the same time there are many quality of life features to be had that might just suit you and make the price worth it. They offer integration to many CMS, so if you for example use a less common CMS like Drupal or Framer they also got you covered. There are a ton of competitors in this space though, for example also Surfer SEO ($219/month) and Morningscore ($69/month) on this list, so do test several and see what fits you 😊
13. My personal test of AI Optimization Checker
🤖 ✍️ Price: Free
This 100% free tool is developed by the Matti Ljungberg as a hobby project as I understand it. And he just told me his monthly data/server bill is getting quite high, so let’s hope it stays free 😅
The tool lets you insert any URL and get info about how ready it is to “rank” in AI. Here i typed in the article you are reading now and got the data you see in the screenshot. There is a lot more you can see. I got a lot of concrete feedback about this post, for example that I did not disclose my review method, which I will try to add now. But of course you must take it with a grain of salt, in the end much of this advice is a guide, not a rule.
14. My personal test of Screaming Frog
🤖 Price: $279 per year. Limited free version too.
This is an expert tool. Screaming Frog is a piece of software that you download to your computer and use to check the “onsite” health of your website. The tool allows you to crawl your website in the same way as Google’s web crawlers do, and based on the analysis of your onsite SEO – i.e. the quality of your website in the eyes of search engines – you can identify common errors and problems, analyze metadata and generate XML sitemaps. Free version is available where you can scan 500 landing pages. It’s a super nerdy tool, and I don’t find myself enjoying using it. But one thing I enjoy: It’s freaking fast!! (to the point where Screaming Frog actually ignore the robots.txt on people’s websites telling crawlers to slow down… Hmm Screaming Frog, from one of the biggest onsite crawler tools I expected a little more 😑). Use Screaming Frog if you really want to geek out about onpage SEO. This tool is by far not perfect, many “false positives” but that is because the internet is so complex, so don’t hold against these cool Brits. Most other tools will give you the same problems. 😊 There are many alternatives that make the job easier. For example SEObility, Ahrefs, and Morningscore from this list. See table with features
2026 update: The core tool is still very much the same, but they did include a lot of new features during the last 12 months, none were relevant to me though. But I guess the Lighthouse & PSI Integration is a cool new feature, that allows you to get Googles page speed analysis included in your crawl.
15. My personal test of Seobility
🏆 🤖 🔗 Price: $50 per month
SEObility started as a health (technical SEO) tool to scan your website and find improvements. I think they do that well, I’ve been a customer in the past. Today they cover the whole palette and can be called an “all-in-one” SEO tool. Their user experience is not my cup of tea, it’s a bit too grey. A German team is behind 😉. This is of course a personal preference. The data is solid though and the price is sharp. And they have a free version. Which is why they made it onto this prestigious list after all 😎
2026 update: Seobility launched version 2.0 in summer 2025. I experienced a big design update, which is nice. So my comments above about a design that wasn’t to my taste is now pending. To be fair, I did not spend enough time in the new version 2 to give my full verdict. One thing I do see though, is that the tool stays very classic SEO, which is by no means a bad thing, but you don’t get solid GEO features here.
16. My personal test of SE Ranking
🏆 🤖 🔍 🔗 💬 Price: $65
SE Ranking provides a complete toolbox of SEO tools. All-in-one tool. I was a customer for 2 years. However, personally, I found only their rank tracker really good. Their link tools were confusing and the data was not super. Technical SEO audit was so-so. It may have changed since I was a customer. Price/quality is sharp. Nice surprise: Their keyword data has gotten quite good in the last 1-2 years and their keyword research tool is now great.
2026 update: Nice to see the price remained stable. They did however, like many other SEO tools in the last 12 months, make a lot of adjustments to their add-ons. Meaning now a lot of features are a paid add-on. It’s quite confusing. So in that case I guess there is a hidden price increase. They added AI features which work quite well. I especially like their AI Overviews rank tracking, which is now out of beta. The tool still feels quite bulky and slow and the UX is not my cup of tea. But I would still say SE Ranking is one of the tools that keep improving and growing year after year.
17. My personal test of AccuRanker
🏆 🔍 Price: $224 per month
AccuRanker is a Danish-developed rank-tracking tool. That is, they focus on tracking keywords and their ranking on Google. They are really good at this and help big companies and agencies to track thousands of keywords. I was a customer for 1 year. So if you have a big rank tracking need and want to be able to filter deep into that data, AccuRanker is worth checking out.
Several new clients of ours have mentioned Morningscore as a good alternative to Accuranker. Of course, this depends on the need. Accuranker are kings when it comes to large and complex keyword tracking needs. And their filtering and tagging of keywords is quite deep.
2026 update: Here I am reviewing Accuranker. But they also released a new tool called AccuLLM recently, starting at $199/month. I guess AccuLLM could be seen as an add-on which allows you to track AI prompts, like several other tools on this list also allows. Also, their relatively new search volume engine has gotten quite good now. They combine data sources to give you a more precise search volume on keywords.
18. My personal test of Yoast SEO (WordPress plugin)
🤖 Price: Free and paid upgrade.
Yoast is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. You can use it to optimize the technical aspects of your SEO, and the tool also helps you in the right direction in terms of keyword optimizing your written content. If you have a WordPress website, Yoast is a super extension that will automatically make your website more SEO-friendly.
19. My personal test of Rank Math (WordPress plugin)
🤖 Price: $8 per month.
At Morningscore, we switched from Yoast to Rank Math in 2023 as many hype Rank Math these days. The tool helps with migration. It wasn’t completely painless though and the hype doesn’t quite hold up in my opinion. The free version is not worth much, so we upgraded. Cheap though. Rank Math Pro has a lot of neat little features that save time. Examples: automatic alt tags on images. Automatically find videos on the page and tell Google about them (Schema). Schema templates. Show the number of internal and external links on pages (very basic though). All in all, I’m satisfied. But if you have Yoast and are happy, stay there. Especially since the last couple of years I would not have switched, since I think Yoast did a great job adding and polishing features. But still: Rank Math is a great tool.
2026 update: Prices increased from $5 to $8 per month for the Pro plan I reviewed here. I used it a lot and everything new I experienced was not of value to me. I much rather see them for example make their schema templates truly useful. Right now very basic and does not help a lot in most cases I need them for. I also replaced their alt-tag generator function with our own WordPress plugin that generate better alt-tags that also renders server side more often. Rank Math stays on this list because they do the basics well at a still fair price, even after price increase. But I wish they would go back and polish those basics more. Especially Schema automation.
20. My personal test of Schemantra (structured data)
🤖 Price: Free
If you are an SEO geek and need to make your own Schema data, but obviously can’t remember all details in your head, then I would recommend this tool. I have used it myself to generate Schemas for Morningscore. There are many generators, but all the others I’ve tested have a very small selection. Here you get the complete list. It’s loooong.
Founding year and country of the 20 SEO tools reviewed
Out of curiosity I decided to research the founding year and country of each SEO tool I reviewed here 🙂
| Name | Year Founded | Country |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | 2015 | United States 🇺🇸 |
| Ahrefs | 2010 | Singapore 🇸🇬 |
| Morningscore | 2018 | Denmark 🇩🇰 |
| Semrush | 2008 | United States 🇺🇸 |
| Surfer SEO | 2017 | Poland 🇵🇱 |
| Moz Pro | 2004 | United States 🇺🇸 |
| Rich Results Test | 2017 | United States 🇺🇸 |
| PageSpeed Insights | 2010 | United States 🇺🇸 |
| Compress PNG | 2021 | Latvia 🇱🇻 |
| Answer The Public | 2014 | United Kingdom 🇬🇧 |
| Claude (Anthropic) | 2021 | United States 🇺🇸 |
| SEO.ai | 2022 | Denmark 🇩🇰 |
| AI Optimization Checker | 2025 | Denmark 🇩🇰 |
| Screaming Frog | 2010 | United Kingdom 🇬🇧 |
| Seobility | 2013 | Germany 🇩🇪 |
| SE Ranking | 2013 | United Kingdom 🇬🇧 |
| AccuRanker | 2013 | Denmark 🇩🇰 |
| Yoast SEO (WordPress plugin) | 2010 | Netherlands 🇳🇱 |
| Rank Math (WordPress plugin) | 2018 | India 🇮🇳 |
| Schemantra | 2022 | Canada 🇨🇦 |
Explanation of categories
In the list of SEO tools above, I used icons to categorize the tools. Here is an explanation:
🔗 SEO tools for links
Link tools help you check the number of links from other websites and examine the quality of the links etc. “Link building” and “Backlinks” are among the phrases you will encounter here. If you want to know more about backlinks and why they are important for your rankings, you can read this beginner’s guide: How do backlinks work?
✍️ SEO tools to help you with content
These tools help you create content for your website. For example, writing texts and headlines for you. Many of them are boosted by AI. Super smart. Be careful not to get too seduced by them, though. Use your common sense when creating content. Ask: would you read your own content?
🔍 SEO tools for keyword research
The tools in this category help you find the best keywords and typically tell you how many searches per month a keyword has, plus a bunch more.
🏆 SEO tools for keyword rank tracking
These tools can measure the position of the keywords on which your website ranks in search engines. Tracking your website and keyword rankings is an essential part of the SEO process. The work helps you make good decisions about your content.
🤖 Technical SEO tools
Technical SEO is, in short, about everything other than your written content. The term refers to the work of optimizing your website so that search engines can access, crawl and index it.
In essence, technical SEO covers everything you can do to help Google understand the content and structure of your website. It can be difficult to fully master – which is why we recommend you try one of the following tools.
My review method
As you can maybe see in my writing I am not following any strategy or defined method. If anything the method is: My pure and honest, and sometimes also emotional, experience of being a user of these tools. I write down what I experience and see. This means I could be wrong in my judgement. But I do however always strive to fact check all claims I make. Like pricing numbers, release dates, functionality described and so on.
Morningscore vs. the other SEO tools
Right now, you’re on Morningscore.io – and our own SEO tool is in the list of recommended tools.
Of course I am biased towards my own tool, but I hope you can see from my writing above, that I try to be 100% honest and use clear personal writing. AI is NOT used for the writing of this post!
If you’re curious about Morningscore I can provide some more info here:
Morningscore is designed in a fun and simple way that motivates you to get your SEO and GEO tasks done.
Because in the end, that’s what it’s all about: getting SEO done. There are a ton of tools out there. Tools don’t alone determine whether you’ll be successful. Your effort does.
We see in case after case that our clients get more traffic because they were motivated to get their SEO fixed.
So why not try the free 14-day trial?
PS.
These tools have been removed from the list of recommendations for 2026🔻
- Keyword Tool
- Rankwatch
- Authority Labs
- Pitchbox
- LinkMiner
- SEOptimer
- Xenu’s Link Sleuth
- KWfinder
- Keywords Everywhere
- DareBoost
- Check My Links
- BuzzSumo
- Whitespark
- Twinword Graph
- Frase
- AIPRM (ChatGPT Chrome extension)
- Detailed (Chrome extension)
Reason: I haven’t had time to test these tools in the last few years and they weren’t essential to my own SEO work. This does not make them bad!
Conclusion
I hope this guide gave you some good and original insights and that you could see this was my personal opinion and not some garbage AI generated text 😉 If you have any questions, feel free to connect on LinkedIn. I only connect if you write a personal connect message.
I wish you a ton of luck with SEO and GEO in 2026 🎉
