SEO now runs on two frontlines. Google still ranks pages, but ChatGPT and Google AI Mode decide which sources to cite. The core inputs are unchanged — relevant answers, technical health, and authority — and seven free tools can measure most of them without touching your budget.
Map the free stack to the workflow
Semrush’s free plan is the heavyweight here: it bundles AI visibility checks, technical audits, keyword research, backlink analysis, authority scoring, and rank tracking in one dashboard. Google Search Console shows how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks your site. PageSpeed Insights checks Core Web Vitals. Google Keyword Planner gives a first read on demand, while Ubersuggest, AnswerThePublic, and AlsoAsked are useful for brainstorming and question mapping.
What changes from tool to tool is the ceiling, not the basic capability:
- Semrush free: 3 AI visibility checks and 3 rank checks per day, 100 pages per monthly audit, 10 shared keyword requests daily, and tracking for 10 keywords.
- Google Search Console: free and essential, but data arrives with a 24-48 hour delay.
- Ubersuggest: 3 searches per day, so it works for small projects rather than large research sprints.
AI visibility is the new ranking surface
Traditional rankings show whether Google places you in a list. AI visibility shows whether a model cites your brand in an answer. Semrush’s AI Visibility Tool checks a domain’s presence across ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, breaks it down by topic, and shows how you compare with competitors.
The mechanism behind those citations is query fan-out. When someone prompts an AI search engine, the query is split into related sub-questions, then the engine retrieves sources to answer them. That makes question-based keywords more valuable than they look. In Semrush’s test, the Questions tab in Keyword Magic Tool returned more than 30,000 question keywords from one seed term in under a minute. Covering those questions in an FAQ or a content section gives your pages more ways to be retrieved and cited.
Use a simple filter: measure, prioritize, fix
Start with Google Search Console to find pages Google is not indexing and pages that lost a significant amount of traffic in the last 90 days. Run a technical audit next; indexing and speed issues quietly cap everything else you do. Then move into keyword selection, but do not treat Google Keyword Planner’s competition column as an organic difficulty score — it reflects advertiser bidding, not ranking difficulty. Filter by search volume, question format, and your own domain’s difficulty instead.
Finish by checking your AI visibility score and your rank positions against competitors. The free limits are designed to give you a useful sample, not a full-scale operation. Use them to spot the fixes worth making, the questions worth answering, and the gap between your Google rankings and your AI citations.
Source: Semrush Blog
