Most “best SEO tools” lists are written by people who’ve never actually ranked anything with them. This one isn’t.
I’ve been working in SEO since 2019, mainly with B2B and SaaS companies. Today, I run my own website, which brought in over $40k from SEO in 2025, and I help local businesses across North America create and implement SEO strategies.
Over the years, as an SEO content strategist and writer, I’ve tried many SEO tools.
Last year, I got so many requests from SEO tool companies to test their SEO software and write tool reviews that it was honestly overwhelming. I went through a bunch of popular SEO tools, like Writesonic, Indexly, Keywordly, Surfer SEO, Search Atlas, and more, to see which ones actually deliver on their promises.
Here’s what I’ve learned: SEO tool companies often promise a lot, but they don’t always give SEOs what we really need.
At the end of the day, we want paid and free SEO tools with accurate metrics that help us automate SEO workflows, get tasks done, and measure the impact of our work. Is it too much to ask?
Most SEO tools will claim they can do this, but in my experience, only a few actually deliver.
I wrote this article to share my top SEO tools for 2026 to grow my website, do keyword research, build SEO content strategies, automate tasks, and work with AI SEO.
No fluff, just my honest opinion and actual screenshots from my accounts so you can see how each tool works.
Let’s dive in!
How I pick SEO tools
You’re probably wondering how I decide which tools are worth recommending. Here’s my approach.
Easy to use: If a tool feels confusing right from the start, it’s a “no” from me. I want something straightforward, even for beginners.
Does it actually work? I don’t just sign up and write a review. I test every tool for weeks (sometimes months) to see if it delivers on its promises. This matters most with AI writing tools that claim they’ll help you rank. Spoiler: many don’t.
Price: Budget matters! Some of you run solo projects, others work at agencies. That’s why I include options across different price ranges.
My top SEO tools for 2026
Being an SEO content strategist means I’m constantly juggling different tools to get the work done. Over time, I’ve built up this collection of both paid and free SEO tools that I rely on daily!
These tools help me with everything from growing my own website to understanding what my target audience is looking for to delivering solid results for client projects. Each one has earned its place in my workflow by actually being helpful, not just because someone recommended it.
I’ve noticed there are endless articles about the “best” SEO tools, but honestly, most of them are pretty generic. The tools that work best are the ones that match your specific needs and the way you prefer to work.
| Tool | Best For | Pricing | Free Trial |
|---|---|---|---|
| Semrush SEO toolkit | Combines over 20 SEO tools and reports to help you with all types of SEO tasks. This toolkit also offers AI-powered reports customized for your domain. | Starts at $139.95/month. You can monitor up to 5 domains. 500 keywords for tracking. Keyword research tools, Competitor analysis tools, Position tracking daily, Backlinks and site audit, MCP Access. | 14 days |
| Search Atlas | All-in-one tool for SEO, PPC, and AI, and an alternative to Writesonic. | Starts at $99/month. With a Growth plan ($199/month), you can track visibility across ChatGPT, AI Mode, and Gemini. 50 keywords for tracking. | 7 days |
| Ahrefs | An AI SEO platform that you can use for all your SEO tasks. You can also connect it to LLMs. | Starts at $129/month. You can track up to 5 domains. | Not available |
| Ubersuggest | It’s an SEO tool co-founded by Neil Patel. It suits well for solo creators and small businesses. | Starts at $29 monthly or $290 lifetime to manage one domain. | 7 days |
| Google Keyword Planner | This is a free keyword research tool provided by Google. I mainly suggest using it for local SEO needs and paid advertising | It’s free. | |
| All-in-One SEO plugin | It’s a powerful SEO plugin for WordPress websites | Starts at $49.50 per year per one domain. | There’s a limited free plan |
| Surfer SEO | Content SEO toolkit + AI features for monitoring visibility in AI search results | Starts at $99/month. With a Pro plan ($219/month), you can track 50 prompts across popular LLMs and AI Overviews. | No free trial |
| Claude | Claude is an AI assistant built by Anthropic. You can use it to brainstorm ideas, generate creative content, solve everyday problems, and even vibe code. | Claude Pro starts at $20/month or $200 an annual subscription. With a paid plan, you can create unlimited projects and add custom connectors. | |
| Writesonic | AI SEO automation tool with a built-in AI agent | Starts at $49/month for SEO + Content automation toolkits. The Professional plan at $249/month is required for AI search-tracking tools. 100 prompts tracking. | 7 days |
| Looker Studio | This Google reporting tool turns SEO data from GA and GSC into clear, easy-to-understand reports. | It’s a free tool. | 7 days |
P.S. This post contains a few affiliate links. If you choose to use any of these tools, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I’m sharing this because I believe in being transparent. Whether or not you use these links, I genuinely support these tools as I’ve personally used all of them. 🙌
1. Semrush SEO Toolkit
- Best for: Marketing teams working in-house, agencies handling multiple websites, individual website owners, and businesses of all sizes.
- Best features: AI Assistant with personalized suggestions, Keyword Magic Tool, On-Page SEO Checker, SEO Audit, Keyword Strategy Builder, plus many more tools.
- Pricing: Starts at $139 monthly for the Semrush Pro plan. If you want both SEO and AI capabilities, Semrush now offers their new Semrush One plan, a 14-day free trial.
Semrush is an all-in-one marketing tool that can help you grow your website, covering everything from SEO and content to social media and paid ads.
As an SEO strategist and content writer, I’ve used Semrush for years. I rely on it for keyword research, performance tracking, creating SEO and AI SEO strategies, and optimizing content for rankings.
Semrush’s platform has evolved a lot over time. It’s very different from what it used to be.
Today, Semrush offers more than 55 features. They’re organized into seven toolkits, which makes it easier to find the right tools for each task without feeling overwhelmed.
Semrush has also been acquired by Adobe, which came as a surprise to many users. Because of that, it’s likely the platform will keep growing and introduce even more AI-driven marketing features in the near future.
Here’s a simple overview of the current Semrush toolkits:
SEO Toolkit: It helps with all kinds of SEO tasks, including keyword research, domain analysis, link building, and site audits to help you build a solid SEO strategy and grow organic traffic.
Content Toolkit (formerly ContentShake AI): It can help with the entire content process, from creating briefs to writing and optimizing content.
AI Visibility Toolkit: It’s a new addition for tracking brand visibility in AI search results. It contains 100M+ prompts, which power the Visibility Overview, Prompt Research, and Competitor Research reports.
It also covers multiple countries to track AI visibility across ChatGPT, AI overview, AI mode: US, UK, Canada, Australia, India, Spain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Brazil, Italy, Japan, United Arab Emirates, Mexico, and Sweden.
Social Media Toolkit: Lets you manage all your social media accounts from one dashboard.
Advertising Toolkit: It can help you research, plan, launch, and optimize paid ad campaigns.
Local Business Toolkit: It focuses on managing your Google Business Profile and online reviews.
Traffic and Market Toolkit: Helps you analyze competitors to understand what’s working for them and how they’re growing.
SEO Toolkit in detail
Below is my quick overview of Semrush’s SEO and AI features from the Semrush SEO Toolkit that I find the most useful in day-to-day work.
Semrush Copilot: This is an AI assistant that keeps an eye on your site and flags important SEO changes. It alerts you about technical problems, keyword opportunities, keywords you’ve lost rankings for, competitor ranking changes, lost backlinks, broken pages, and changes in your organic search visibility.
It can spot important changes before you notice them and keeps you updated. It’s honestly one of my favorite Semrush features.
Key Topics: This helpful report shows you your competitors’ top-performing topics by traffic, without having to check each page one by one. It’s great for finding fresh content ideas quickly. You’ll need a Semrush Guru plan to access this feature.
AI Visibility Overview: The Domain Overview section now includes your domain’s AI Visibility score, showing daily updates of mentions and citations. You can track how well your brand shows up in AI-generated search results across different countries.
I find the Google SERP Positions Distribution report really useful, too. It shows how your domain ranks across organic results, featured snippets, and AI results.
Personal Keyword Difficulty: This AI-based metric shows how hard it would be for your specific domain to reach the top 10 results for a given keyword.
Topical Authority: This score shows how relevant your domain is for particular keywords.
Keyword Strategy Builder: This tool uses AI to suggest topic clusters based on relevance and traffic potential.
At the beginning of 2026, I used to plan an “AI SEO” category for my website. Semrush suggested many related keywords. I won’t use all of them, but several are a great fit for my site.
Position Tracking: This is one of my favorite seo tools that shows daily ranking changes. They recently added the ability to track your website’s visibility in AI Overviews.
If you have Semrush One Pro+, you can also monitor your brand’s visibility in ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode.
Site Audit
In addition to standard technical checks, Semrush now includes an AI Search Health report. This shows how well your website is optimized for large language models.
What is an SEO audit tool?
An SEO audit tool scans your website to find technical, on-page, and structural issues that can affect search visibility. It helps you understand what’s holding your site back and what to fix first.
A higher report score means your content is easier to access, better structured, and more likely to appear in AI-powered search results.
Semrush SEO vs. Google Search Console
Semrush’s metrics align more closely with reality than most alternatives.
Here’s how my website performed in December 2025 – January 2026:
- Semrush reported 30.1k monthly organic visits worldwide (GSC showed 19.9k)
- Semrush estimated 11.2k visitors to my top-performing page about AI SEO Tools (GSC showed 3.73k)
- Semrush identified 788 referring domains and 3k backlinks
Semrush shows higher traffic numbers than Google Search Console but remains more accurate than Ahrefs (which reported 77.4k visits).
Semrush MCP
With the Semrush MCP server, you can plug Semrush data into AI tools like Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, Visual Studio Code, Gemini, and ChatGPT.
In simple words, the answers you get are based on real Semrush data, not just general AI knowledge.
MCP access is now available to regular Semrush users, not only enterprise clients like before. That means you can use all 50,000 API credits when working with LLMs.
I recently began testing the ChatGPT, Claude, and Semrush integration myself. I’m still in the early stages, so I don’t have a full review yet.
But from what I’ve seen so far, you can ask almost anything, and LLMs pull insights directly from Semrush data to give you more accurate, data-backed answers.
I create SEO strategies for clients almost every day, so I wanted to see what would happen if I used Claude together with Semrush to create one.
With a Semrush integration, you can research and analyze keywords, review competitor performance and backlink profiles, and track organic trends without even logging into the platform. That’s already a strong foundation.
With Claude, I can also connect Google Search Console, pull real performance data, upload client notes, and include my draft strategies. I don’t need to keep all that information in my head anymore when building a custom plan.
2. Search Atlas
- Best for: SEO professionals, in-house SEO teams, agencies, and individual site owners.
- Best features: OTTO SEO (AI automation), AI Content Writer, Site Auditor
- Pricing: I’ve found that Search Atlas starts at $99/month for the Starter plan, which includes 2 user seats and 5 site projects. You can try it with a 7-day free trial, but you’ll need to link your credit card. There’s also a Community Edition at $29/month for managing one website, but it’s very limited.
Search Atlas launched in 2024 and quickly gained attention as a new SEO tool alternative to industry leaders like Semrush and Ahrefs.
With Search Atlas, you can:
- Analyze traffic, keywords, and backlinks for any website
- See which competitor pages and keywords drive the most traffic
- Explore backlink profiles in detail
- Find keywords worth targeting
- Optimize content and track rankings
- Run technical SEO audits
- Discover link-building opportunities and automate outreach
- Save time with the WordPress plugin and OTTO SEO automation
- Speed up content creation using the SEO Content Assistant
- And plenty more
I actually met the Search Atlas team in person at the SEO IRL conference in Toronto in Fall 2025.
I tested the Search Atlas Growth plan ($199/month) in March 2026. It comes with a solid set of features, but I noticed that Search Atlas sometimes crashes, and some reports take a while to load.
And if you’ve used Ahrefs before, you might notice the interface looks familiar. It also shares some features with Semrush, which makes it pretty easy to get used to.
I have published an in-depth Search Atlas review if you want to learn more about the tool and how it compares to Semrush.
Let me show you what the Site Explorer looks like.
I should mention OTTO SEO as one of Search Atlas’ standout features.
OTTO works like a personal AI assistant for your website.
After adding a small pixel to your site, it automatically checks for technical issues, reviews your content, and suggests improvements. Everything is managed from one simple dashboard. It’s a low-effort way to improve rankings and grow traffic without drowning in SEO tasks.
I also looked at reviews on G2 and Reddit, and opinions are mixed. Some users say the tool takes time to learn, and others wish the support team responded faster.
That said, any powerful all-in-one SEO tool comes with a learning curve. If you’re already familiar with Ahrefs, Search Atlas should feel easy to navigate.
Another big plus is pricing. It’s more affordable than Ahrefs or Semrush, with plans starting at $99 per month for two users and five sites.
If you’re curious how it compares to Ahrefs or Semrush, you can try Search Atlas free for 7 days and see if it fits your workflow.
What users say about Search Atlas
Even though I tested Search Atlas for a month in March 2026, I don’t think that was enough time to build a truly well-rounded opinion about the platform.
So, I asked my LinkedIn audience, especially people who’ve actually used the tool, to share their honest thoughts on Search Atlas.
Honestly, a lot of the feedback matched my own experience.
Here’s what Casey Cornell, the Founder of Pool Journals and Digital Consulting Owner, shared about Search Atlas:
“We use Search Atlas as our primary seo tool now as a replacement for expensive Semrush, I will say, it’s been buggy at times since they’re moving fast and always rolling out new products.
I connected it to my WP site to make changes on their 2.0 model and I didn’t like that if you removed the script at all, it will all go back to the old content. Make hard changes.
I think like anything SA is a “tool” and should be used as such. Not make it your entire SEO strategy in a single product.
I use their growth plan ($199/mo) I also don’t use their AI content because it wasn’t good a while back. I think gem and Claude are prob better not tbh. I like using it for auditing, KW data, local SEO & the GBP scheduler & maps.
A lot of our clients fall under the “local seo” blanket so it’s great for what it offers there.”
Casey’s feedback really stood out to me because it highlights both sides of the tool: useful features, especially for local SEO, but also some clear limitations and bugs.
I also got a very detailed review from Sankit Javia, Head of SEO at OMG Marketing.
Here’s what he shared with me on LinkedIn:
“Working at an agency, where I ran OTTO on 5–6 sites, here’s my honest take:
The core problem: JS pixel = architectural weakness.
OTTO doesn’t actually update your CMS. It injects changes at the DOM layer via JavaScript at runtime. This means:
- AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) never see the changes, they don’t execute JS
- Google Rich Results Test often fails to detect OTTO-injected schema
- Caching conflicts are real we had a CMS where all blocks stopped rendering on the frontend; both us and the CMS support team spent days debugging before we traced it back to the SearchAtls blunders.
Content quality? Mixed at best.
Out of ~150 AI-generated blogs (~30/month), only 3–4 drove meaningful traffic. Many targeted keywords have no real search volume. Eventually, the AI content started tanking and dragged the whole site down with it.
What actually works in Search Atlas:
- GSC integration + meta title/description suggestions are genuinely useful
- Google Business Profile auto-reply is a solid time-saver
My advice: Use OTTO’s suggestions, but inject changes manually into your CMS via API never let the JS pixel render them. And if that’s all you need, you can honestly build that workflow yourself with GSC data + any CMS API for a fraction of the cost.
Don’t give the autopilot full control, it’s going to hurt a lot.”
I agree with Sankit’s take on OTTO.
Personally, I wouldn’t recommend relying on it to automate website fixes, because there’s always a risk that something can break.
Instead, I’d treat OTTO as a source of recommendations for improving your site. But when you look at it that way, it ends up functioning more like a standard SEO audit report than a true hands-off automation tool.
3. Ahrefs
- Best for: SEO teams, SEO specialists, SEO freelancers, site owners.
- Best features: AI Content Helper, Brand Radar, Rank Tracker, and Keyword Explorer.
- Pricing: Starts at $129 per month for the Lite plan. This includes five projects, six months of historical data, and 750 tracked keywords. Paying yearly gives you two months free.
- Ahrefs doesn’t offer a free trial, but verified site owners can use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free, which is a lighter version of the platform.
Ahrefs was the first SEO tool I ever used back in 2015. The interface still feels familiar, but their toolkit has expanded a lot since then.
Some of the core Ahrefs features I use:
- Site Explorer for fast domain insights
- Keyword Explorer for keyword research
- Site Audit to check overall site health
- Rank Tracker to monitor keyword positions
- Competitive Analysis to study competitors
- Content Explorer to find top-performing content
- Broken Link reports to spot dead backlinks
- And more!
Today, Ahrefs positions itself around one main goal: making businesses discoverable in search, AI, and beyond.
They’ve also introduced Brand Radar, an AI-powered feature that tracks brand mentions and citations in AI search results.
Over the years, I’ve relied on Ahrefs for:
- Keyword research
- Tracking ranking changes over time
- Monitoring new and updated pages
- Finding technical SEO issues
- Analyzing competitors’ best pages
- Tracking new and lost backlinks
- And plenty more
However, I paused my Ahrefs subscription in July 2025 after noticing that its performance data often doesn’t match reality, and this issue still hasn’t been fully resolved.
For example, as of January 2026, Ahrefs shows my site getting around 77.4k organic visits per month. I wish that were true. In reality, my site receives up to 18k monthly visits across all channels.
From my experience, Ahrefs tends to inflate organic traffic and keyword metrics. It’s something to keep in mind when reviewing the data.
I’ve used Ahrefs since 2015 and still rely on their Webmaster Tools to monitor my website’s performance.
Below, there are a few takeaways from my experience using Ahrefs, especially if you run an agency and are choosing the best SEO software:
- Unlike Semrush, Ahrefs doesn’t charge extra for separate toolkits. Everything is included in your plan, with optional add-ons if needed.
- Traffic trends over time are usually accurate, even if the exact numbers are not.
- Ahrefs shows how often content is updated, which is a surprisingly useful signal.
- You can quickly check the AI Content Metric for any page to estimate how much AI is used in content creation.
If you’re exploring alternatives, I’ve also published a detailed comparison of Ahrefs alternatives, backed by real data.
Ahrefs vs. Google Search Console
The data accuracy in Ahrefs tends to show inflated numbers. My December 2025 — January 2026 website analysis revealed:
- Ahrefs reported 77.4k organic visits (vs 4.71k in GSC)
- An estimated 16,123 visits to my top page on AI SEO tools (vs 1,595 in GSC)
- Identified 2k keywords (fewer than other tools)
- Found 591 referring domains and 1.6k backlinks
In my opinion, this significant overestimation makes Ahrefs nowhere near reliable for absolute metrics. These discrepancies lead me to focus on trends and relative changes rather than raw numbers when using this SEO tool.
4. Ubersuggest
- Best for: Site owners, SEO beginners, SEO startups, and hobbyists.
- Best features: Top SEO opportunities report, Chrome extension, Keywords by Traffic report
- Pricing: Starts at $29 monthly or $290 lifetime to manage one domain. The Business plan is $490 lifetime. There’s a 7-day free trial and a limited free plan.
For $290, you could pay for a month or two of at least one SEO tool. With Ubersuggest, that same amount gets you a lifetime plan if you’re managing one domain.
I bought Ubersuggest’s lifetime Individual plan for $290 in December 2024 to track my site’s performance, watch competitors, and do keyword research. Since then, I’ve been using it daily.
I believe Ubersuggest is a solid SEO tool, especially for small businesses and side projects that need something affordable.
Neil Patel, a co-founder of the tool and a digital marketing expert, acquired Ubersuggest in 2017 with the goal of building an SEO platform that could compete with much more expensive options.
Here’s what you get for $29 per month or a one-time $290 payment:
- One user seat for one domain
- 150 searches per day
- Tracking for up to five competitors
- Insights into competitors’ top pages and keywords
- Scanning up to 1,000 pages per domain
- Access to 20,000 keyword suggestions
- 200 content ideas
- Tracking up to 2,000 backlinks from the past three years
- Monitoring new and lost backlinks over the last 30 days
- Access to SEO training and support
Ubersuggest does a good job of tracking keyword rankings and updating them often. For some of my top keywords, it actually reflects changes more accurately than Ahrefs.
The Individual plan lets you track up to 125 keywords for one site. If that’s not enough, you can add 250 more keywords for just $5 per month.
Unlike Ahrefs, Ubersuggest includes both the Keyword Overview and Keyword Ideas tools, which help you generate keyword ideas starting from a seed keyword.
You can use the Keyword Research Toolkit to review those ideas and find the best keywords for specific countries. Filters make it easy to narrow the list down to what really matters.
I don’t fully agree with Ubersuggest’s keyword volume numbers. They often feel too high.
For example, Ubersuggest shows around 5,400 monthly searches for “AI SEO tools” globally in January 2026, while Ahrefs reports about 1,300. Based on my own data, the lower number makes more sense. My article ranks #1 for that keyword and related terms and brings in roughly 1,700 to 2,500 visits per month.
On the flip side, Ubersuggest’s keyword difficulty scores seem okay when I compare them with Ahrefs and Semrush.
I was curious about where their data comes from and found a post explaining how they estimate organic traffic. They look at:
- Monthly search volume for each keyword
- Website rankings and position data
- Average click-through rates for those positions
- Page-level traffic and, when relevant, data from other countries
You can find my detailed Ubersuggest vs. Semrush comparison in a separate article.
Even though opinions about Ubersuggest on Reddit are mixed, I agree with one common take. It’s a reliable tool for tracking. If you’re running a small business or working on a side project, it’s definitely worth considering.
I had a chance to meet Neil Patel at the Full Circle Conference in Toronto, April 2026, and ask him a few questions.
Besides asking about AI and SEO, I also asked him about Ubersuggest and where it’s heading. Specifically, why tracking AI visibility in Gemini is a paid add-on (even for lifetime users).
Neil told me that it’s expensive for them to get actual data and keep it updated for users. That’s why they made it paid for lifetime users. And the next LLM to be added to Ubersuggest for tracking will be Claude — super excited about it since I’m heavily using Claude for all business-related tasks.
5. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a free tool from Google that gives powerful local SEO insights.
This tool, originally made for Google Ads, has become essential for my local SEO campaigns.
My workflow includes Keyword Planner mainly during the keyword research phase.
You can research monthly search volumes, competition levels, and seasonal trends for keywords within targeted regions, cities, and counties.
You can filter keyword data by location, language, and search networks. You can also narrow results to specific cities or regions, which suits businesses in local markets perfectly. Historical metrics and forecasting features help users spot seasonal trends that affect local search behavior.
The free nature of this tool does mean some limitations exist: metrics and the competition level are estimates!
Data appears in broad ranges instead of exact numbers, and access requires a Google Ads account even without running ads.
Nevertheless, I believe that’s one of the best and free SEO tools for local SEO that you’ll ever need to research and analyse keywords and create SEO content strategies.
6. All-In-One SEO plugin
All in One SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps you optimize your site without needing custom code or multiple tools.
I use it to handle pretty much all on-page SEO tasks in one place. Things that would normally require extra plugins or technical setup are built right in, which makes the whole process much easier.
I use the All-in-One SEO plugin to do the following on my website:
- Automatic generation of the XML sitemap
- Meta title and description optimization
- Schema markup generation, so search engines better understand your content
- Social sharing controls to manage how your pages look on social media
- Image alt text optimization, including file names
- Breadcrumb settings to improve navigation and crawling
- Security options that protect your SEO settings
- Easy robots.txt editing
- .htaccess file management
These features make it possible for beginners to set up solid SEO from the start, without feeling overwhelmed.
Unlike external SEO tools, All in One SEO works directly inside WordPress. You get real-time suggestions while writing and editing content, which makes optimization feel natural instead of forced.
Worried about site speed? The plugin is lightweight and doesn’t slow your site down, even with all its features enabled.
7. Surfer SEO
- Best for: In-house marketing teams, SEO content writers, site owners, and agencies that publish content at scale. If you create content regularly and want it to rank in Google and AI search, Surfer is a strong choice.
- Top features: Surfer AI, AI Tracker, Topical Map, Content Editor, Content Audit
- Pricing: Pricing starts at $99 per month. This includes optimizing 30 pieces of content, tracking 100 pages, running 100 keyword searches per day, and generating five AI-written articles. The Scale plan costs $219 per month and unlocks more advanced AI features.
I used to think of Surfer SEO as just an on-page content tool. Over time, it’s grown into a much more complete platform with features that are genuinely useful for site owners and content teams.
Here’s a quick breakdown of Surfer’s main tools and AI features:
Content Editor: This tool works as your AI writing assistant. You can use it to improve an existing draft or generate and optimize new content from scratch. Once your draft is ready, Surfer compares it to top-ranking competitors and suggests keywords, structure changes, and internal linking ideas.
If you turn on Auto-Optimize, Surfer will automatically add missing keywords and content sections. I recommend reviewing the final version to make sure it still sounds natural and isn’t overdone.
In my own example, I provided a detailed outline and used Surfy to generate and optimize the content based on recommendations. If the writing feels too stiff, you can use the AI Humanizer to quickly make it sound more natural.
If you believe your content lacks depth, the Coverage Booster feature is designed to help you particularly with this issue. In a nutshell, it suggests facts and topics based on what top-ranking pages include, so you don’t miss important points. Overall, this feature is great for generating ideas and filling gaps.
I always suggest double-checking facts before adding them. As an SEO content writer, I also recommend adding something original that competitors haven’t covered yet. That’s what makes content more valuable and helps it stand out.
Using Coverage Booster is simple. You review the suggested improvements and apply only the ones that genuinely add value to your article.
Content Audit: After connecting your site through Google Search Console, Surfer reviews how your pages are performing and suggests updates to improve organic visibility on a page-by-page level.
To be honest, this report replaces the long manual content audits many of us used to do. Surfer checks your pages daily and highlights areas for improvement. You can apply the changes yourself or let Auto-Optimize take care of them.
Topical Map: This report shows how well your content clusters are covered and highlights missing topics. If you spot a relevant topic you haven’t written about yet, you can easily add it to your content plan.
Surfer also includes essential SEO tools like Rank Tracker for daily keyword monitoring and Keyword Research for exploring topic clusters and traffic potential.
Beyond the standard SEO and content tools, Surfer has added AI-powered features to stay aligned with recent AI SEO changes. These include Surfer AI and AI Tracker.
Surfer AI: It can help you create long-form content of 2,000 words or more that’s optimized for rankings. After entering your prompt and clicking “Write with AI,” you can have a full article ready in about 15 to 30 minutes.
It currently supports multiple languages, including English, German, Dutch, Polish, French, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Czech, Japanese, and Norwegian.
AI Tracker: This tool acts like a visibility monitor for your brand. It tracks mentions of your brand, products, or target prompts across AI-powered search platforms such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.
Here’s how it works:
- Add your brand, prompts, and preferred language
- Review and refine the prompts if needed
- Let AI Tracker analyze your domain
- Receive weekly visibility insights
AI Tracker is included in the Scale plan for up to five prompts. If you need more coverage, you can add it for $95 per month and track up to 25 prompts with daily updates.
8. Claude
Claude is an AI assistant built by Anthropic. You can use it to brainstorm ideas, generate creative content, solve everyday problems, and even vibe code.
This year, I started using Claude for content on my website and for local SEO tasks at my full-time job. I’ve been using it daily since January 2026. Here’s what I’ve trained it to do really well:
Analyze my domain and compare it to competitors
Review my entire website to understand my tone and writing style
Mimic my writing style
Add internal links after analyzing my site
Create templated product and service pages
Paraphrase old content naturally, based on my instructions
Analyze SERPs for a target keyword and suggest better metadata
Generate schema for site pages
Improve outputs based on ongoing conversations inside dedicated projects
Turn blog posts into social media content and build a content calendar
Create newsletters using my templates
- Create SEO content strategies
And honestly, that’s just the beginning.
Every task above is something I intentionally trained Claude to handle by creating a separate project for it. If you’re on the free plan, you can create up to six projects and use the latest model, Sonnet 4.6.
From my experience, Claude can absolutely match your tone and create content that sounds human. But it doesn’t happen automatically. You have to train it, and this part takes time.
Below you can see an excerpt from a 13-page SEO content strategy Claude with Semrush MCP helped me generate.
The goal behind the strategy is double my site earnings in 2026.
I shared everything with Claude, including
• top-performing partners
• revenue-driving pages
• my draft plan
• internal notes and context
As a result, I’ve got a detailed strategy showing exactly how to hit my goal.
What took me days to complete, Claude generated in a few minutes using all my input data and equipped me with a solid SEO plan for my site.
That’s powerful and scary at the same time.
Have you tried creating content with Claude?
9. Writesonic
- Best for: Content marketers, Content writers, small and mid-size businesses, SEOs.
- Best feature: SEO Checker and Optimizer, Humanizer, Chatsonic (AI agent) to create chatbots for your website.
- Pricing: It starts at $49 per month per user seat with one project. There’s a 7-day free trial with no credit card required, plus a free plan.
Writesonic works a lot like Semrush’s Content Toolkit, offering support for every step of content creation and SEO from topic research and writing to optimization, publishing, and performance tracking.
Here’s what it can do:
- Research: Three dedicated features help you find high-potential keywords, discover what your audience is searching for, and group related topics into clusters.
- Writing: Tools like AI Article Writer 6.0, article rewriters, and social media templates let you build custom outlines, create content briefs, and write long-form posts up to 5,000 words, such as listicles or how-to guides.
- Generate content in your style: You can upload your own writing, and Writesonic will analyze it to match your tone and style in AI-generated content.
- Content optimization: The built-in SEO Checker and Optimizer (similar to ContentShake AI or Ahrefs’ AI Content Helper) evaluates how well your content is optimized for rankings. You can also run content gap analysis, identify missing topics, and automatically add internal links.
- Content publication: You can publish directly to WordPress and other platforms without leaving the tool.
- Content repurposing: This feature lets you turn content into newsletters or social media posts using templates. Humanizing AI-generated content helps make it feel more natural and conversational.
- Reporting: By connecting Google Search Console, you can track impressions, clicks, top keywords, and your best-performing pages.
What’s cool is that Writsonic can pull insights from tools like Ahrefs, Keyword Everywhere, and Google Search Console. So, even without your own accounts, you get a peek at keyword data, domain overviews, and site audits.
I’ve upgraded to Writesonic Professional plan for $249 and started testing their SEO tools, including AI agents, and content writing capabilities.
I’ve figured out that they don’t offer Semrush integration just yet, even though they say that it’s available as part of their integrations.
There’s one more feature that helps it stand out: Writesonic helps you see how your brand shows up in AI search.
You can check how easy it is to find your brand in AI search engines, what people say about it, and if your site shows up for the right topics.
Many people have started using AI writing tools like this, so it’s becoming something most brands want to have.
Writesonic is free to get started. You can sign up for free without the need to enter your credit card. Super low commitment.
With the free plan, you get access to all the main AI tools and agents, plus a free site audit for up to 100 pages.
It also works in 25+ languages and comes with some helpful extras like a browser extension and one-click export to WordPress.
However, you’ll need to upgrade at least to the Writesonic Professional plan for $249 per month to use their SEO + Content + AI Search Tracking and Optimization to track how your brand appears across AI platforms.
10. Looker Studio
Looker Studio is a free Google reporting tool that turns SEO data into clear, easy-to-understand reports.
It helps create SEO reports by adding context to raw numbers.
I use Looker Studio to show my clients their website analytics data through clean visuals they can understand.
Here’s what Looker Studio offers:
- Real-time data from Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and other tools
- Custom dashboards built around your SEO goals
- Automated reports that save hours of manual work
- Historical data to spot trends and seasonal changes
I like this SEO tool because it lets you track your website’s progress over time using reliable data straight from Google. That means no more conflicting numbers from different SEO tools.
The interface can feel a bit confusing at first. But once you learn how to build clean, shareable reports that update on their own, it’s absolutely worth the effort.
I usually track content performance right after publishing. As soon as content goes live, I keep an eye on impressions, clicks, and rankings. This helps me spot movement early.
I monitor my website performance via Looker Studio monthly. For example, my GA summary report showed that 63.3% of users visiting my website in December 2025 — January 2026 came from desktop devices.
FAQ: Best SEO tools
Let’s take a closer look at the most common questions about SEO tools. My experience testing dozens of platforms has helped me guide you through the increasingly complex digital world.
What are SEO tools?
SEO tools are software that can help you understand how your website is doing in search engines and what you can improve. They can show you which keywords to target, how your pages rank, what technical issues need fixing, and what your competitors are up to.
Some tools try to do everything in one place, like Semrush, Ahrefs, or Search Atlas. Others focus on one thing, like content optimization (Frase, Surfer SEO, Rankability), backlinks, or technical SEO (Screaming Frog).
What are the best free SEO tools to improve website rankings?
If you’re just getting started, Google’s free tools are honestly hard to beat. Google Search Console can help you see how your site shows up in searchresults, which pages aren’t indexed, and why.
Google Analytics shows what visitors do once they land on a page. Unlike GSC, GA shows incoming traffic from all marketing channels, not only organic.
If you are looking for a professional SEO tool for all your SEO, AI, and marketing needs, I’d suggest checking Semrush, which is no doubt an industry leader.
Which is the best SEO tool for beginners?
Back in 2015, Ahrefs was the first SEO tool I’ve ever used. Even though they have a pretty extensive functionality, I’ve learned how to navigate it through trial and error. I believe tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Search Atlas are worth choosing when you manage client projects or if you are part of the SEO team.
However, if you are just starting and looking for a beginner-friendly SEO tool to learn SEO and AI, I suggest trying the following tools:
- Ubersuggest, which is pretty cheap and easy to use
- Ahrefs Webmasters Tool, which is free for one verified domain and offers limited SEO functionality
- Google Keyword Planner, which is a free tool developed by Google. It’s primarily used for PPC (paid advertisement), but you can use it to conduct keyword research and check search volume and competition metrics.
What are the most used SEO tools?
Market data and my industry experience point to these widely used SEO tools:
- Semrush and Ahrefs dominate the professional SEO space.
- Search Atlas is a relatively new SEO tool, positioning itself as a solid SEO automation tool.
- SE Ranking, which has pretty extensive functionality.
- Writesonic, which is becoming more popular as an AI SEO tool with their own AI agent.
- Google Search Console is nearly universal among website owners
- WordPress SEO plugins (like All-One-SEO) power millions of sites
- Surfer SEO guides the on-page optimization category.
What tools help with GEO?
GEO stands for generative engine optimization. GEO tools are the ones that can help you optimize your website for AI Mode and AI Overviews.
In my experience, you can use the following tools to optimize your site for generative AI:
- Otterly.ai – It tracks how your brand and pages show up in AI Overviews and can help you track prompts.
- Rankscale.ai – It measures prompt performance, AI visibility, competitor benchmarking, and citation tracking.
- Surfer SEO (with GEO/AI features) – It lets you optimize content for both traditional SEO and predicted AI visibility at the same time.
- Writesonic – I’ve already mentioned that this is a platform that includes AI content optimization and AI visibility analysis to improve how your content is seen by generative models.
- Qwairy – It offers a suite for tracking and optimizing your brand and content across major AI engines.
- Profound – This is an enterprise-level tool that tracks how content is mentioned and cited across many AI systems (ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI, etc.).
These tools work in different ways; some focus more on tracking visibility across AI platforms, others help you optimize content structure for better AI comprehension, and some offer a mix of both.
Are SEO tools worth using?
Yes, absolutely! SEO tools are worth using if you want to improve your website’s visibility across traditional search engines, AI Mode, AI Overviews, and LLMs.
What about Moz, Mangools, Majestic, and Raven?
I’ve tested all of them, and honestly, I don’t recommend any of them.
Raven Tools has shut down completely, even though you’ll still see people mention it online.
Moz used to be a big name, but after seeing too many bad reviews on Reddit and elsewhere, I stopped using it and recommending it.
Mangools and Majestic aren’t as reliable, and I see no point in using them when we have more powerful SEO tools, like Semrush.
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