Home Resources Blog Free & Paid AI SEO Tools You Need
Published on April 29th, 2025

Free & Paid AI SEO Tools You Need

The big first-page race is highly reliant on AI tools today. Remember November 2022, when AI first appeared, and we had a major insecure moment as a marketer or writer? While some insisted on sticking with their old ways, people who looked at artificial intelligence as an opportunity are the ones winning today. 

Today, AI and SEO work hand in hand. Unlike what we believed previously, AI has been a productivity booster for marketing workflows. From tracking performance trends and generating content ideas to diagnosing strategic deficits and predicting the success of SEO strategies, it’s an indispensable tool in the search engine realm. 

But which AI SEO tools are actually worth trying out, and how can they improve your optimization strategy? We’ve compiled a list of tools that proved to be most helpful in our routine operations. Let’s take a peek at the top trending AI SEO tools of 2025. 

 

Does AI Really Help With SEO?

Imagine being a business owner who has to juggle multiple tasks at once. From managing inventory to overlooking marketing efforts, staying on-trend with the product demand, and generating demand if it isn’t up to par, there’s only so much you can do yourself. Even when you decide to hire help, it might seem the most mundane tasks like scraping data, brainstorming content ideas, and reporting take up most of the time. This leaves no room for events, collaborations, creatives, and content updates. 

With AI tools in the mix, a lot of the work is automated and optimized. For example, your team can generate content ideas for the entire month with a single prompt. They will be able to create content faster and better, leaving space for additional planning and social engagements. To put it simply, it is a circle of improved productivity. The catch? You have to learn to use it correctly. 

AI SEO tools can be a true success with the right prompt, and that’s what you need to master in order to get the best outcome from your AI-based search. For that, it’s essential to understand the critical elements of marketing, such as audience segmentation, writing tone, and content format. 

Let’s discover how you can use AI prompts to do various search engine optimization tasks:

 

How to Use AI In SEO

  1. Explore topics that align with your consumer queries. 
  2. Generate keyword and hashtag ideas for blogs, web pages, and social media posts. 
  3. Create a content structure for any selected topic. 
  4. Generate schema markup codes for press articles, product pages, and more. 
  5. Find, analyze, and assess your competitors to unlock potential ranking opportunities for your own business. 
  6. Locate outreach sites for business listing, guest posting, and more. 
  7. Integrate AI platforms with analytics tools to review and report important performance tracking metrics like traffic, CTR, and keyword positions.

 

An All-Rounder SEO Partner

ChatGPT — SEO Copilot 

ChatGPT attracts approximately 400 million users weekly, which is about 1% of the total internet users. This is a huge percentage given that the internet has virtually unlimited traffic coming in every single day. 

AI SEO Tools

Source: Exploding Topics

Many SEOs now use ChatGPT as an AI assistant to optimize their daily tasks and marketing operations. It’s the best AI SEO tool to get started, as it’s easy to use and has unlimited capabilities, even in the free GPT-3.5 version. While people use it primarily for content, switching gears on the prompts can also allow keyword research, technical audit, and graphic design. Here is what this Redditor with 15 years of experience has to say regarding using ChatGPT for SEO.

AI SEO Tools

You can stick with the free version of ChatGPT or upgrade to the paid GPT 4.0 with additional features— totally depends on what your current requirements are. Either way, the real game-changer is how you use your prompts. Let’s check out some of the best ChatGPT prompts you can use for different SEO tasks.

How does ChatGPT respond to this prompt? Provide a comprehensive list of keywords in the form of tables separated by the four types of search intent: informational, transactional, navigational, and long-tail query

For this prompt, ChatGPT provided a detailed outline of the topic, complete with H2s and H3s. 

 

What Can You Use It For?

So, what exactly can you use this AI model for — SEO-wise? The simple answer is: Everything. But here are some tasks it is most commonly used for. 

  1. Brainstorm article/blog topics and create cluster topics for pillar pages. 
  2. Generate keyword lists for any given topic with LSI clusters.
  3. Produce hreflang, meta tags, and URL names. 
  4. Generate canonical tags to ensure the most important content is prioritized on SERP. 
  5. Create robots.txt or sitemap.xml templates.
  6. Troubleshoot indexing or crawl issues conceptually.
  7. Check facts and generate meme ideas for videos, images, blogs, and other forms of content.
  8. Research your audience and find niche-specific ideas and use cases.
  9. Create buyer personas using demographic data from your previous sales. 
  10. Create applications and custom bots for various content and SEO tasks, such as finding redirects for a specific website or pre-defining content guidelines.
  11. Writing code for websites and applications to improve user experience and overall productivity.

 

SemRush — SEO & Rank Tracking

SemRush has an entire AI toolkit for marketers to manage numerous tasks, such as writing assistants, topic generators, search monitors, and outreach wizards. But how do SEOs use these tools to boost efficiency? By using these tools for tasks that they truly excel in — particularly personalized SEO recommendations. 

All you have to do is set up a project on the paid version of SemRush, and you’ll be able to get AI-powered recommendations instantly. At the top of the overview page, you’ll see a complete list of SEO related issues, including ranking and visibility drops. 

AI SEO Tools

Source: SemRush

For further analysis, view a complete report from the recommendations section. This will help troubleshoot potential strategic deficiencies in advance and apply techniques to avoid further ranking drops. 

 

What Can I Use SemRush Copilot For?

  • Link-building opportunities 
  • Keyword suggestions
  • Crawl errors, broken links, and other technical issues
  • Competitor insights (and how you compare with their current SERP status)
  • Visibility insights and warnings
  • Traffic trends
  • Other SEO alerts

 

What is the Price of SemRush Subscription?

SemRush AI SEO tool can be accessed with a paid version starting at $139 per month.

 

Surfer SEO — Writing & SEO Insights

Surfer SEO is a reliable tool for AI-generated content and optimization. It integrates an AI SEO tool for SERP analysis to help you generate valuable recommendations for your target keywords. You can generate an entire article or blog for just $19 or get a monthly subscription to extend the limit for tools such as keyword research, topical map, page tracker, writer, and editor. 

Bonus Point: Get the Surfer SEO Google extension to instantly catch suggestions and improve them on the spot. 

Surfer SEO — Writing & SEO Insights

How To Use Surfer SEO

Here is a detailed breakdown of how you can use different Surfer SEO tools to boost your SEO game. 

  • Generate data-driven recommendations for keywords and content as you go.
  • Get a peak into the ideal content length and heading numbers for a particular topic.
  • Apply the blog editor tool to get content and grammar suggestions.
  • Get recommendations on where you can create internal links within a given domain.
  • Get an NLP scoring and use the humanizer to customize tone and structure to your liking. 
  • Run the SERP analyzer to check for factors like keyword usage, word count, headings, images, page speed, and backlinks for any content piece.
  • Plan a topical page with the topical mapping tool that extracts all the subtopics relevant to a core topic.

 

What is the Price of Surfer SEO Premium?

Surfer SEO is $79 on a basic trial, which is enough for standard accessibility like editing and writing (360 articles), page tracking (200 pages), keyword research, and topical mapping.

 

Is There An Alternative For Surfer SEO?

Need an alternative for human-like writing, you might like NeuronWriter. Many people prefer Surfer SEO due to its versatility and analytical input, but NeuronWriter is quite precise for content creation and optimization. So, when picking between Surfer SEO vs NeuronWriter in 2025, the winner should be the one that serves your desired purpose most effectively, whether that’s writing or analysis. 

 

SE Ranking — Strategic Planning 

SE Ranking is great for SEO agencies, individuals, as well as in-house SEO teams of small to medium enterprises. It has a comprehensive suite of AI SEO tools to help professionals strategize operations and track performance efficiently. Think of it as a powerful writing assistant and rank tracking AI software with features like troubleshooting and competitive analysis. 

If we’re being honest, we’ve got some favorites in their toolkit that have proved to be invaluable in our operations. Listing them down below, so it’s easier to navigate their functionality. 

AI Writer — provides titles, structure, and drafts upon specifying the topic and tone.

Content Editor — For AI-powered suggestions after a comprehensive analysis of your content against SERP features and ranking trends. 

Insights Tool — Gathers insights on how to improve keyword optimization and page rankings by tracking changes and notifying about potential opportunities. 

On-Page SEO Checker — weighs all on-page factors to provide a score that reflects its quality, and spots improvement areas. This includes text content, title, URL structure, internal links, external links, UX, UI, and indexing among other factors. 

 

What Does SE Ranking Premium Cost? 

You can use it for free with a 14-day trial. After that, you may have to pay $67 per month to continue. 

 

PAVE AI — Google Analytics Reporting & Insights

PAVE AI is a modern world data reporting AI tool that offers data driven recommendations to improve a website’s performance. It connects with data sources like Google Analytics, AdWords, and social media ad channels to create actionable strategies that help you get back on the SEO success bandwagon.

The AI model analyzes each dataset based on over 16 million combinations to provide you with insights that help achieve specific brand goals. The reported data might look something like this.

AI SEO tools

This particular example can help you determine your ideal audience by gender and age. It seems that in this case, targeting more males will be a reliable tactic, as these visitors have converted to provide the most leads. 

How To Use PAVE AI For SEO?

PAVE AI can be a valuable tool as an SEO professional, given you know the right way to utilize it. Here are some pro tips to boost SEO using the PAVE AI model.

  • Convert Google Analytics data into actionable SEO and marketing reports.
  • Identify what type of traffic, pages, and campaigns are resulting in most conversions, and using this data to drive future strategic decisions. 
  • Use it as a data analyst providing data-driven insights for SEO campaigns. 

 

What Does PAVE AI Cost?

The starter pack allows ten thousand monthly sessions per site, which should be enough for SMBs. It costs $39, but you can also opt for their Growth or Professional package for extended limitations. 

Screaming Frog + AI Integrations

Screaming Frog allows multiple API integrations, including those with AI SEO tools, doubling over its utility in the technical SEO sphere. This is why we’ve added this tool to our list, so we can cover all bases for SEO. 

Its major selling point is that you can see how search engine bots crawl your site in real time, but now SEOs have found a way to apply it for several other tasks using OpenAI integration. This elaborate crawler can work in conjunction with AI to create auto-generated reports, as well as interpret and fix errors. One smart way to apply it is by extracting embeddings from URLs and mapping pages to optimize internal linking and page tagging.

Additionally, the Custom JavaScript feature of Screaming Frog can communicate with ChatGPT, which lets you use its crawling function for an array of SEO tasks, like generating bulk ALT text, data scraping, and content analysis. For this to work, you must first learn how to crawl with ChatGPT using Screaming Frog. 

 

What Does Screaming Frog Cost?

The downside is that you will probably need the paid version to make use of any AI integrations, which means paying $259 per year. 

 

Free AI SEO Tools

Clearscope

Clearscope is primarily a content optimization AI tool with multiple functionalities, including keyword research, website analytics, and writing support. This AI-powered tool focuses on improving SEO with reliable content auditing assets for keyword discovery, performance tracking, and other insights. 

With a limited tool suite that packs power, Clearscope has landed itself a reliable position in the SEO and marketing sphere. Unlike most AI content optimization tools that analyze written copies to provide keywords and ranking suggestions, Clearscope needs a published page link and a focus keyword to create a report.

 

How To Use Clearscope?

Once you provide the link and a keyword, Clearscope provides you with the following:

  • Writing suggestions
  • Word count suggestion
  • Readability analysis
  • Keyword recommendations via an intelligent language algorithm
  • Outline suggestions
  • A measure of content relevance (content grade)

AI SEO TOOLS

Source: Clearscope

Clearscope also integrates some useful analysis tools to track website performance. Predict the ranking potential of a website or page with useful page metrics, like traffic, links, and keyword positions. The tool also renders page value predictions – known as “SEO value” in Clearscope terminology – to determine the monetary value for each page assessed. 

Lastly, you can integrate Clerascope’s content interface to Docs and WordPress in order to edit directly on these tools. Get a breakdown of competing posts, or use the Term Map to get a visual display of competitors’ keywords.

 

How Much Does Clearcope Cost? 

Clearscope is a relatively expensive tool compared to other content optimization models, but its versatility makes up for the price gap. The paid plans start from $189/month and extend to over $400 for custom packages. 

 

Perplexity — Fresh & Resourceful Information

Perplexity is another content optimization AI tool that revolves around an information-centric model. Upon receiving guidelines, it scours the internet to find relevant information to make it readily available for the user.

 

How To Use Perplexity To Improve Your Website SEO?

Create great content using it as an information tracker that makes large amount of content more digestible and scannable. Instead of spending hours scanning the internet sources for factual information and related topics, you can cut the process short with Perplexity. 

Here’s how to use this AI SEO tool to improve your productivity.

  • Quickly scan important information to add to content pieces needing fresh and updated information or use cases. Search for examples relevant to a particular topic and connect with existing copy to make sense. 
  • Extract and analyze information by directly uploading files and documents like SEO reports, email databases, and more. For example, if you want to extract a summarized list of keywords from a large data sheet, you can simply ask the tool to list down keywords with a volume of 500 or above. 
  • Group chat threads related to a specific topic, and use the tool to organize all collections. 
  • Perform focused research from selected platforms. For example, video SEO research from Youtube, or thread research from Reddit. 
  • Organize and draft citations. 
  • Find images and videos relevant to the target topic or keyword. 

 

What Is The Price Of Perplexity Premium?

You can use the free tool for basic functionality, or pay for maximized features. In general, Perplexity plans start from as low as $1.

DALL·E — Image Creation

Images play a pivotal role in shaping your content for better search engine performance, and DALL-E 3 is a true gem with images. This text-to-image AI model requires precisely articulated, detailed prompts to create an image that reflects your vision. 

You can use it for complex images and outputs that simulate specific emotions, physical moods, intellectual concepts, and analytical infographics. It also allows you to add text to the images in order to optimize them for SEO purposes. If the tool itself doesn’t provide the correct output, use it in integration with Canva, Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Illustrator to edit text and refine selected elements in the image. 

Let’s see how Joe Amditis, Associate Director of Operations at the Center for Cooperative Media, used this DALL-E generated image and switched text to make it more topic relevant. 

This was a raw image created by DALL-E 3, and it was edited with Adobe Photoshop to make the following changes to the text.

The tool also has a built-in editor to help improve selected areas of the images or make custom adjustments. It’s best for conversational style art and image captions, story-based images, and interactive creatives for SEO purposes. 

 

How To Use DALL-E for SEO?

  • Generate infographics to get backlinks, shares, and extended time-on-page.
  • Design unique images tailored for Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, or Pinterest posts and link them to your website content.
  • Use keyword-rich filenames and descriptive ALT text for the generated images to push through rankings. 

 

Outranking.io — SERP Insights

Outranking.io is among the most popular content optimization platforms that use AI writing, auditing, and planning to boost conversions and generate leads. This tool offers a complete SEO audit with its versatile functionality delivered via four different tools. 

Start by creating detailed and clear content briefs using the AI SEO software for briefs. Plan content layout, find related keywords, search linking opportunities, and create drafts using the SEO optimization tool. It also helps you identify the best outline and title, in addition to detecting plagiarism and informational gaps. 

The last arrow in the sling is their Content Strategy tool which is truly commendable for its intricacy and user interface. It has various features that allow you to build SEO-driven strategy using an endless array of features, like:

  • Keyword research and clustering
  • Content calendar that helps prioritize SEO topics based on their ranking potential.
  • On-page optimization recommendations to boost SEO performance. 
  • Internal linking suggestions to build site authority.
  • Topic clustering that helps develop topical relevance.
  • GSC integration lets users tap into optimization and technical issues requiring immediate attention. 

 

Next Step? Pick Your AI SEO Tools in 2025 

To sum up, tools are a great way to improve workflows, and these AI SEO platforms are among the most popular in the SEO community. If you are looking for a complete set, we suggest having one of each – content optimization tool, analysis tool, and reporting tool. 

Adapting to AI tools and finding the best way to integrate them into your everyday SEO operations keeps you one step ahead in the ranking race. 

We know how to effectively use them to accelerate our link-building plans. As a business owner or agency, you may find these helpful as well. We also offer LBHQ SEO tools to help check metrics like DA, PA, DR, and traffic to further assist your SEO strategy.  But if you can’t put up with all the hassle, we’re here to help. 

Contact us to get your website back on the ranking track!

Spread the love
Don't forget to share this post!
Published on April 29th, 2025
Updated on April 29th, 2025
Scroll to Top