The $0 SEO tool stack for a new startup

Most founders start SEO by signing up for a $100-a-month suite, clicking around a dashboard full of scores, and cancelling two months later. The data wasn't the problem. They had nothing to act on yet.

A new site doesn't need much. It needs to be crawlable, indexed, and clear about what each page is for. Then it needs a way to see which queries it's starting to show up for. All of that is free.

Short answer: Start with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, which give you the search engines' own data at no cost. Add Google's Rich Results Test and PageSpeed Insights for checks, and free single-purpose tools for titles, crawlers, sitemaps and redirects. Pay only when you've outgrown this.

Here's the stack we'd set up on a new domain, what each tool is for, and when to stop being cheap.

Layer 1: the search engines' own data

These are the only tools that show you what Google and Bing actually see. Everything else is an estimate.

Google Search Console

Search Console is the one tool you can't skip. It shows the queries you appear for, your clicks and impressions, which pages are indexed and why others aren't, and whether you have a manual action.

Google's SEO starter guide is honest about how new sites get found: "You usually don't need to do anything except publish your site on the web." But you want to know when it happens, and Search Console is how you know.

Set up on day one:

1. Verify the domain property so you capture every subdomain and protocol.
2. Submit your sitemap in the Sitemaps report.
3. Check the Page indexing report weekly once pages start appearing.

We wrote a separate guide to the five Search Console reports that matter, so we won't repeat it here.

Since August 31, 2026, Search Console also has a Generative AI performance report for all sites that have enough data. It shows impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, device and date. It doesn't show clicks, but it's the first free, official view of how often you appear in Google's AI answers.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Founders skip Bing. That's a mistake in 2026, for two reasons.

First, setup takes a minute. Bing lets you import sites from Search Console, and imported sites are verified automatically.

Second, Bing now shows AI citation data. Its AI Performance report, launched in February 2026, shows how often your pages are cited as sources in Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, plus the "grounding queries" the AI used when it pulled your content. No paid tool gets that data from the source.

Layer 2: Google's free test tools

These answer one question each, straight from Google.

• Rich Results Test. Paste a URL and see which structured data Google can read and whether the page is eligible for rich results. Use it after you add FAQ, Article or SoftwareApplication markup.
• PageSpeed Insights. Real-user Core Web Vitals when Google has enough data for your URL, plus a lab test. Fix what it flags on your homepage, pricing page and top landing pages, then stop. A perfect score is not a ranking strategy.
• URL Inspection inside Search Console. The live test shows how Googlebot fetches and renders a single page. It's the fastest way to see whether a page is blocked, redirected or missing content that loads through JavaScript.
• Google Trends. Not a keyword volume tool, but good for comparing two ways of naming the same thing. If people say "AI video editor" more than "AI video maker," you want to know before you write the page.

Layer 3: free single-purpose checkers

This is where a lot of paid-suite money goes, and where free tools do the job fine. We built our own set of free SEO tools because we needed them while running SEO on Versely, our own product. Use ours or anyone's. The point is the check, not the brand.

Before you publish a page

• SERP preview. See how your title and description look in a search result and whether they'll get cut off. Google truncates title links "as needed, typically to fit the device width," so the check is width, not a character count.
• Meta tag checker. Confirms your title, description, canonical and robots tags on a live URL. It catches the classic launch bug: a noindex left over from staging.
• Heading checker. One H1, a sensible H2 outline, no skipped levels. It's a quick proxy for "is this page easy to scan?"
• Open Graph checker. What your link looks like when someone shares it. Matters more on launch day than any ranking factor.

For the site as a whole

• Sitemap checker. Validates your sitemap and flags URLs that redirect or error. A sitemap full of redirects wastes the one file you hand search engines directly.
• Redirect checker. Follows a URL hop by hop. Use it after a domain move or a slug change to catch chains and loops.
• AI crawler checker. Reads your robots.txt and tells you which AI crawlers, like OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, you allow or block. Plenty of sites block AI search crawlers by accident through a CDN setting or an old blanket rule.
• robots.txt generator and llms.txt generator. Get the files right once. Our guide to robots.txt, llms.txt and AI crawlers explains the choices.

For structured data

• Schema markup generator and FAQ schema generator. Generate valid JSON-LD, then confirm it in the Rich Results Test. Structured data won't rank a page on its own, but it helps search engines read what the page is.

For writing

• AI title generator and AI meta description generator. Useful for getting five options when you're stuck. Pick one and edit it. Don't paste the first draft.
• UTM builder. Tag the links you post on launch platforms and directories so you can tell which ones sent real visitors.
• Word counter and slug generator. Small, boring, used every day.

Layer 4: a spreadsheet

The most useful free SEO tool is a sheet with four tabs:

1. Pages. Every URL, its target query, its title, and the date you last changed it.
2. Title changes. Old title, new title, date, and the page's clicks and impressions for the 28 days before and after. This is how you learn what works on your site.
3. Links. Every directory, launch platform and mention, with the live URL and whether the link is followed.
4. AI prompts. A fixed list of questions buyers ask, and whether ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI features mention you. We explain the method in how to measure AI visibility without paid tools.

A dashboard can't tell you why a number moved. A dated log of your own changes usually can.

What free tools won't do

Be honest about the gaps, so you don't mistake them for problems with your site.

• Competitor keyword and backlink data. Search Console only shows your own site. If you need to see what a competitor ranks for, that's where paid suites earn their price.
• Keyword volumes. You'll get relative interest from Google Trends and real impressions from Search Console once you're indexed. Before that, you're estimating.
• Doing the work. No tool writes the pages, fixes the titles or builds the links. That's still you, or someone you hire. We compare the options honestly in agency, tool or DIY.

When to start paying

A simple rule: pay for a tool when you can name the decision it will change. "I need to know which of these three competitors' pages to beat" is a reason. "I should probably have Ahrefs" isn't.

For most early products, the first money is better spent on distribution than on data: a launch that gives you a permanent product page and a followed link after human review, and a batch of relevant directories. You can compare free options side by side on our best free SEO tools page.

Then open Search Console every Monday. That habit is worth more than any subscription.