Every free keyword research tool looks generous until the counter appears. Ours showed up after the very first search: “2 out of 3 free daily searches available.” We opened four no-cost accounts on the same day, looked up the same keyword in each, and wrote down exactly how many lookups, rows and fields each one gave us before it asked for money.
Why Free Keyword Tools Run Out So Fast
The free plans we used allowed between 3 and 10 keyword lookups a day: Semrush’s knowledge base lists 10 reports per day for accounts without a paid SEO toolkit (Semrush KB), Mangools gave us 5 per 24 hours, and Ubersuggest gave us 3, per our October 21, 2026 test log. That is not much. A single blog post can easily need ten keyword checks before you write a word.
So what is a free plan, really? In all four accounts we used, the features stayed visible, but the number of questions you could ask was metered. Think of it as a sample of the vendor’s keyword database, sold by the lookup. That is our reading of how the plans are built, not something a vendor told us.
This guide stays on that one question: what does each free account let you do for keyword research, and where does it stop? Other free SEO jobs have their own guides: for checking positions, see how far the free tiers of rank trackers stretch.
Key Takeaways
Semrush’s free account allows 10 Keyword Magic Tool reports a day with 10 results each in the interface and none in export (Semrush KB). Mangools gave us 5 lookups a day and Ubersuggest 3, and SE Ranking has no free plan at all, only a 14-day trial. No tool we used was a completely free, unlimited keyword research tool.
Quick Verdict: The Best Free Keyword Tool for Each Need
The best free keyword research tool depends on how many keywords you check a day: Semrush lists the most free reports at 10 a day (Semrush pricing), while Mangools gave us 5 lookups in our test, with 20 keyword ideas each per its KWFinder page. Here is the short version.
| If you need… | Pick | Why, from our test and the vendor’s own page |
|---|---|---|
| The most free lookups per day | Semrush Free | 10 reports per day across its main tools |
| The most keyword ideas per lookup | Mangools KWFinder Free | 15 related and 5 competitor keywords per lookup |
| A quick check of one idea | Ubersuggest Free | 3 searches a day, plus 40 a day in its Chrome extension |
| A short burst of heavy research | SE Ranking trial | 14 days, no card, but no free plan afterward |
| Real data for your own site | Google Search Console | The queries your site already appears for, at no cost |
Does one tool win outright? No. Semrush gives more lookups but only 10 rows per report. Mangools gives fewer lookups but a longer list each time. Pick by the shape of your work, not by the brand.
If you also want free caps for audits, backlinks and rank tracking, our guide to free plan caps for audits, backlinks and rank tracking lines those up. This page stays on keywords.
How We Tested: One Keyword in Four No-Cost Accounts
We looked up the same English keyword, “generative engine optimization,” in four accounts on October 21, 2026, with the US database selected in each tool and no credit card entered anywhere. Three were real free plans. The fourth, SE Ranking, was a 14-day trial, because SE Ranking does not offer a free plan.
Here is what we used:
- Semrush: a free account. After sign-up we pressed “Skip trial” instead of starting the paid trial, then ran Keyword Overview.
- Mangools: a free account, signed up with email and password. We ran one search in KWFinder.
- Ubersuggest: a free account with Google sign-in. We ran AI Keyword Overview, then one backlink lookup.
- SE Ranking: a 14-day trial with no card. We ran one search in Keyword Research.
We copied every limit straight from the screen and kept masked screenshots. The account belongs to a small marketing website our own team runs; that site was the target of the other tasks on our list.
What did we not do? We ran one keyword lookup per tool, so we did not hit a daily cap and watch what happens next. Where a limit comes from a vendor’s help page rather than our screen, this guide says so and links to it. We read those pages again on October 24, 2026.
A note on money: Indie Stack Lab may add affiliate links to some tools later. When a link is an affiliate link, it is labeled. That did not change what we tested or what we wrote down.
Daily Lookup Limits Compared
Daily keyword lookups ran from 3 searches in Ubersuggest to 10 reports in Semrush (Semrush KB), and Semrush and Mangools also cap how many keyword rows each lookup returns. The table puts every keyword limit we found on one screen.
| Limit | Semrush Free | Mangools Free | Ubersuggest Free | SE Ranking trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keyword lookups | 10 reports per day | 5 per 24 hours | 3 searches or reports per day, shared | Counter read “Account limit: 3/10” |
| Rows per lookup | 10 in the interface | 15 related and 5 competitor keywords | Not checked | Not checked |
| Export | 0 rows | Not checked | Not checked | Not checked |
| What else draws on the same budget | Every keyword tool, plus 10 seed keywords per hour | Separate budgets for SERP and site lookups | Backlink and other reports | Separate counter for backlinks |
| Reset we saw or read | Daily | “23h … to reset” after one lookup | Daily | Not shown |
| Source | KB and pricing page | KWFinder page and our account menu | Help center and our screen | Our trial screen |
Two rows need a second look. “Keyword lookups” is the number most lists quote, but “Rows per lookup” changes what one lookup is worth. Ten Semrush reports with 10 rows each is 100 keyword rows a day. Five Mangools lookups with 20 ideas each is about the same. So are the two plans closer than they look? Yes, for raw keyword ideas they are.
The third row matters for planning. Ubersuggest counts its 3 daily searches across the whole app, so a backlink check eats into your keyword budget. On our account, one keyword lookup and one backlink lookup left a single search for the rest of the day.
Semrush Free: 10 Reports a Day, 10 Rows Each
A free Semrush account includes “10 reports per day across all vital tools,” with 1 demo project and no credit card required, according to Semrush’s pricing page. For keyword research, the Keyword Magic Tool’s own limits tab narrows that down further.
What the knowledge base says
Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool article lists these limits for an account “Without SEO Toolkit”:
- Reports per day: 10.
- Results per report: “10 in user interface, 0 in export.”
- Seed keywords per hour: 10, which “counts towards the daily limit.”
The same tab adds that “export and metrics update features, as well as the AI-powered tools (PKD and Potential Traffic), are not available on a free subscription.” PKD is Personal Keyword Difficulty, a score adjusted to your own domain.
There is one wrinkle. That tab still lists paid limits under Semrush’s older Pro, Guru and Business names, while the current pricing page sells plans called SEO, Starter, Pro+ and Advanced. The free row reads the same in both places: 10 reports a day.
Semrush’s own guide to the free account adds the rule that matters most for planning: “Every new search (in any Semrush keyword research tool) counts toward your daily limit” (Semrush blog). Keyword Overview and Keyword Magic Tool share one budget.
What one free lookup returned
When we ran Keyword Overview on the free account, the report was complete: search volume, global volume with a country split, Keyword Difficulty, intent, CPC, Competitive Density and an ads count. A line under it read: “Go beyond basic volume and discover advanced metrics with Semrush Pro.”
Which data needs a paid plan? Historical keyword data. Semrush’s Keyword Overview article says it “is available exclusively to Guru and Business tiers of the SEO toolkit,” again using the older plan names.
Getting to the free account takes one careful click. After the sign-up survey, Semrush showed a plan page for a Pro+ trial at $299/month after 7 days. The free path was the smaller “Skip trial” button. If you want the trial instead, read how to use Semrush’s free trial without being charged before you start it.
For every metric on that free report and what it means, see our metric-by-metric look at a free Semrush keyword report. For what each paid tier adds, see what each paid Semrush plan costs and unlocks.
Mangools KWFinder Free: 5 Lookups and 20 Keyword Ideas
Mangools’ free plan gives “5 lookups per 24 hours, 15 related and 5 competitor keywords per lookup,” according to the KWFinder page. Our account matched the lookup count: after one search, the menu showed 4 of 5 keyword lookups left, with about 23 hours to go before the reset.
Separate budgets for each tool
Unlike Ubersuggest, Mangools splits its free allowance by tool. Our account menu showed three separate counters, each at 4 of 5 after our test:
- Keyword lookups in KWFinder.
- SERP lookups, for checking who ranks on a results page.
- Site lookups, for domain metrics in SiteProfiler.
So a keyword search does not cost you a SERP check. That makes 5 lookups go further than the number suggests. The menu also listed a one-time “API & MCP welcome bonus” of 100 keyword and 100 SERP lookups that do not reset.
Free or Free+?
Here’s the catch. Our account menu showed a plan badge that read “MNGLS FREE+,” not just “Free.” Mangools’ own announcement of the plan describes Free+ as a 10-day plan for new users, “like your current trial, but juicier,” with “the same trial expiration date as before” (Mangools blog). The same post says expired trial accounts are switched to the Free plan, which has no time limit.
What does that mean for you? Some of what a brand-new account shows may last only 10 days. For keywords, the difference looks small: our Free+ account showed 5 keyword lookups, the same number the KWFinder page gives for the free plan. Mangools’ FAQ also says the Free plan “is completely free,” with no credit card needed to activate it.
What the free lookup showed
KWFinder returned search volume, a trend figure, keyword difficulty, and CPC and PPC columns that read N/A for our keyword. The related keywords drifted toward broad agency terms, so we would filter that list by hand before using it.
The paid step up is large. Mangools’ pricing page lists Basic at $37.70/month billed annually, with 100 keyword research requests per 24 hours. Our look at how KWFinder and the other Mangools tools behaved on the free plan covers the rest of the app.
Ubersuggest Free: 3 Searches a Day, Shared
Ubersuggest’s free account allows “3 searches or reports per day,” according to its help center, and our screen agreed: after one keyword lookup it read “2 out of 3 free daily searches available.” That is the tightest daily budget of the four.
The shared budget in practice
What counts as a search? Almost everything. After our keyword lookup, we ran one backlink lookup, and the counter dropped to “1 out of 3 free daily searches available.” The dashboard also showed “10 Credits left,” and Ubersuggest’s help center lists 10 monthly credits for refreshing data on free accounts.
The help center lists the other free keyword limits in one place:
- Keyword lists: up to 3 lists, each with a maximum of 30 keywords.
- Adding keywords: “It is not possible to add keywords directly to rank tracking or keyword lists from these reports.”
- Chrome extension: limited to 40 searches per day (extension limits).
- Time limit: none. The free account “has no time limit.”
That extension allowance is the quiet bonus here. Forty searches a day is more than any of the free web apps we used, though it works inside your browser rather than in the full web app. We did not install the extension.
What the free report locked
The AI Keyword Overview showed search volume, SEO Difficulty, intent, CPC, SERP features and a worldwide total. The volume trend chart and the AI summary were locked with the message “Start free trial to unlock data.”
Ubersuggest’s AI Keyword Overview guide confirms the split. Free users cannot open the full historical search volume timeline or the AI Summary, see only 5 entries in Top Trends and 10 AI prompt ideas, and get no more than 10 monthly credits for refreshing SEO Difficulty and AI prompt data.
One more thing to watch: the keyword form defaulted to Chinese (Traditional Han) and Taiwan, based on where we were browsing. We switched it to English and the US before searching. A lookup on the wrong market still costs one of your three.
Our screen-by-screen account of Ubersuggest’s free plan on a real website covers the project setup. For the daily allowances on paid tiers, see our guide to Ubersuggest’s paid search allowances and lifetime deals.
SE Ranking Trial: Keyword Data Without a Free Plan
SE Ranking has no free plan; its 14-day trial asks for no card, and the pricing page says it includes “up to 10 projects, 750 tracked keywords per day, 20 AI prompts per day, and AI competitive research for up to 3 domains” (SE Ranking pricing). So it belongs in this comparison only as a short burst of research, not as a free plan you can stay on.
What the keyword counter showed
After our search in Keyword Research, the screen showed “Account limit: 3/10.” We ran only that one keyword lookup, so we can’t tell you whether the counter resets daily or covers the whole trial. Treat 10 as a ceiling to plan around and check the counter in your own trial.
The report itself was complete for a trial: search volume, difficulty with a word label (“NOT EASY”), intent, CPC with a competition score, and a global total with a country table. We did not run into a locked field.
The default database
SE Ranking set the keyword database to Taiwan for us, the country we browsed from. We switched it to the US. Is that a big deal? On a trial with a lookup counter, yes: every search on the wrong market is one you can’t get back.
What happens on day 15
The trial ends. SE Ranking’s pricing page lists Core at $129/month, or $103.20/month billed annually, with “Unlimited keyword, competitor, backlink research.” That word “unlimited” is the main thing the paid plan buys over the trial for keyword work.
For everything else the trial did on our site, read everything SE Ranking’s no-card trial let us do. For the plans after day 14, see what SE Ranking charges once the trial ends.
Same Keyword, Four Free Reports: Which Fields Came Back
All four free reports returned a US search volume and a difficulty score for our keyword, but our October 21, 2026 test log records a country split for only two of them and a trend figure for only one. The table shows which fields each free account returned, not the numbers themselves.
| Field on the free report | Semrush Free | Mangools Free | Ubersuggest Free | SE Ranking trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US search volume | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Global volume | Yes, with countries | Not logged | Yes, worldwide total | Yes, with countries |
| Keyword difficulty | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Search intent | Yes | Not logged | Yes | Yes |
| CPC | Yes | Column shown, N/A | Yes | Yes |
| Trend | Not logged | Yes | Locked | Not logged |
| AI summary | Not logged | Not logged | Locked | Not logged |
| Upgrade prompt on the report | Yes | A discount banner instead | Yes | Not logged |
“Not logged” means our test log has no entry for that field, so check it yourself before relying on it.
Why does this matter more than the numbers? Because a free plan that hides a field you need is a dead end, however generous its counter. If you plan content by trend, for example, Mangools was the only free report that showed one.
The numbers themselves disagreed a lot. US volume for our one keyword ran from 3.6K to 9.9K across the four tools, and difficulty from 10 to 78. We broke those gaps down in our explainer on why four tools gave four different numbers for one keyword, so we won’t repeat it here. The short version: compare keywords inside one tool, not across tools.
What Free Accounts Hide Behind an Upgrade
Across the four accounts, the most common paid features were export, history and AI summaries: Semrush allows 0 export rows on a free account (Semrush KB), and Ubersuggest locked its trend chart and AI summary on our screen. Knowing these locks up front saves you from building a routine around a feature you will lose.
Here is what each tool kept behind a paid plan, from its documentation and our screens:
- Semrush: export, keyword metric updates, Personal Keyword Difficulty and Potential Traffic, plus historical keyword data. The free report pointed to “advanced metrics with Semrush Pro.”
- Mangools: more lookups and longer lists. Basic raises keyword research to 100 requests per 24 hours, and Premium to 500, per the pricing page. A 10% discount countdown banner sat on every app page during our test.
- Ubersuggest: the full historical volume timeline, the AI Summary, the full Top Trends list and more than 10 monthly refresh credits.
- SE Ranking: nothing during the trial, but the whole allowance ends after 14 days.
Which lock hurts most? For most bloggers, export. Without it, every keyword you find has to be copied into a spreadsheet by hand, which is slow but possible. History hurts less: Google Trends and your own Search Console data show how interest moves over time, for free.
Before you upgrade, ask one question: which locked field would you open every week? If you can’t name one, stay on the free plan and spend your lookups more carefully.
Google Keyword Planner and Other Free Options
Google’s Keyword Planner is free to use, but Google says you “must complete your account setup by entering your billing information to access basic features like ‘Get ideas for new keywords’” (Google Ads Help). We did not test it, so everything in this section comes from Google’s own help pages, read on October 24, 2026.
Google Keyword Planner
Is Google’s keyword research tool free? Google calls Keyword Planner “a free resource to help advertisers build keyword lists for search campaigns” (Google Ads). It is not card-free, though, and it was built for advertisers, not bloggers. Here is what its numbers mean, per About Keyword Planner forecasts:
- Average monthly searches cover “a keyword and its close variants,” averaged over 12 months by default.
- Volumes are rounded, so totals across several locations “might not add up as you’d expect.”
- Competition reads low, medium or high, and it describes advertisers, not organic results.
- Bids come as a range: a low estimate near the 20th percentile and a high one near the 80th.
That close-variants rule is why Keyword Planner can show a bigger number than tools that split variants apart. It’s a different count, not a wrong one.
Google Search Console
Search Console is the one free source of real data, but only for your own site. Its Performance report shows clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for the queries your site appeared for, with three months shown by default (Search Console Help). It will not suggest keywords you don’t rank for yet. Our guide to finding the queries your site already ranks for in Search Console walks through the report.
Google Trends
Google Trends shows interest, not volume. Google says it divides each data point by total searches for the place and time, then scales the result “on a range of 0 to 100” (Trends Help). So it can tell you a topic is rising, but not how many people search for it. Use it next to a free keyword tool, not instead of one.
What about a free AI keyword research tool? Ubersuggest’s AI Keyword Overview is the closest we used: it worked on the free plan, but its AI Summary was locked. For YouTube and other platforms, our guide to free and paid YouTube keyword tools covers tools built for video search.
How to Do Free Keyword Research Without Running Out of Lookups
You can research keywords for free by giving each tool one job: in our test, Ubersuggest’s 3 daily searches were enough to check one idea, while Mangools’ 20 ideas per lookup were better for building a list. This routine is our judgment from the limits we saw, not a separate test.
A weekly routine that fits inside the free caps:
- Start with your own data. Open Search Console and note queries where your pages already get impressions. Those cost you no lookups at all.
- Build the list in one tool. Use Mangools KWFinder for seed searches: 5 lookups can return up to 100 related and competitor ideas in a day.
- Check the shortlist in Semrush. Spend its 10 daily reports on the few keywords you will actually write about, because each report shows only 10 rows.
- Use Ubersuggest for a quick second look. Save its 3 searches for one or two final checks, or use the extension’s 40 daily searches while you browse Google.
- Fix the country first. Two of our four tools did not start on the US database. Check the setting before every search.
- Write the results down. Free plans keep little history and no exports in Semrush’s case, so copy what you need into a spreadsheet the same day.
How many keywords does that cover? Roughly 100 ideas from Mangools, 10 deep checks in Semrush, and a few sanity checks in Ubersuggest, every day. That is plenty for a blog that publishes a few posts a month. For turning that list into posts, see our guide to turning a keyword list into blog posts that get found.
So is there a free unlimited keyword research tool? Not among the ones we used. Every free plan had a counter, and even Google’s tools come with a catch: Keyword Planner wants billing details, and Search Console only knows your own site. The trick is not to find an unlimited tool. It is to stop wasting lookups.
A short checklist before your next search session:
- Write your seed keywords before you open any tool.
- Set the country and language first, every time.
- Spend Semrush reports on finalists, not on brainstorming.
- Keep one spreadsheet as your keyword list, since free exports are limited.
- Trial a paid plan only when one locked field would change a decision.
References
- Semrush Knowledge Base: How does Keyword Magic Tool work?
- Semrush Knowledge Base: What is Keyword Overview?
- Semrush: SEO + AI Search Plans and Pricing
- Semrush: What Can You Do with a Free Semrush Account?
- Mangools: KWFinder
- Mangools: Mangools is FREE again! Meet our new Free & Free+ plans!
- Mangools: Frequently Asked Questions
- Mangools: Plans and Pricing
- Ubersuggest Help Center: Free Account: Key Features and Limits
- Ubersuggest Help Center: Chrome Extension Visibility and Search Limits
- Ubersuggest Help Center: AI Keyword Overview: A Complete Guide
- SE Ranking: Pricing and plans
- Google Ads: Keyword Planner
- Google Ads Help: Use Keyword Planner
- Google Ads Help: About Keyword Planner forecasts
- Search Console Help: Performance report (Search results)
- Google Trends Help: FAQ about Google Trends data