Your SEO Toolkit: The Minimum Stack in 10 Minutes

You can do serious SEO with free tools, and you can set up the essential ones in about ten minutes (plus however long your DNS takes to update). This guide is the setup walkthrough: five tools, in order, and the first thing to look at in each. For the broader catalogue of free and freemium tools for research, behaviour analytics and local SEO, see Free SEO & Marketing Tools.

1. Google Search Console (non-negotiable)#

Search Console (GSC) is Google telling you directly how it sees your site: queries, clicks, impressions, indexing status, crawl errors, Core Web Vitals, manual actions. It is the ground truth every other tool approximates.

1. Go to search.google.com/search-console and add a Domain property. It covers every subdomain and protocol, and some features (like the branded queries filter) are only offered on domain-level properties.
2. Verify with the DNS TXT record it gives you, at your DNS host.
3. Submit your sitemap under Indexing → Sitemaps.

Data starts filling in within a few days. The reports you'll live in:

Features added since 2025 that are worth knowing on day one:

• Branded / non-branded filter in Performance (all eligible sites since March 2026). It is AI-classified, catches misspellings, and needs a domain-level property with enough volume.
• Custom annotations: right-click a Performance chart to note a launch, a migration or an algorithm update (120 characters, visible to all users of the property).
• Weekly and monthly views on Performance charts, and query groups in the Insights report for larger sites.
• Settings → Search generative AI: a switch (Include, Exclude, Inherit) that removes your property from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover AI features. It is set to Include by default. Leave it alone unless you have deliberately decided to opt out; Google says it isn't used as a ranking signal elsewhere in Search.

2. Bing Webmaster Tools#

Go to bing.com/webmasters and choose Import from Google Search Console. It pulls in your verified sites and sitemaps in one step.

Bing has a smaller share of searches, but two features make it worth the two minutes:

• AI Performance (public preview since February 2026): how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, which pages are cited, and a sample of the "grounding queries" behind them. As of October 2026 it is the only free first-party citation report from a major AI assistant. It does not cover ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google.
• IndexNow: a protocol for pinging Bing (and other participating engines) when URLs change. Google does not support it.

3. Google Analytics 4#

Search Console stops at the click. GA4 shows what happens next.

1. Create a property at analytics.google.com and a web data stream for your domain.
2. Add the tag to every page:

<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-XXXXXXXXXX"></script>
<script>
  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
  function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
  gtag('js', new Date());
  gtag('config', 'G-XXXXXXXXXX');
</script>

3. Link it to Search Console under Admin → Product links → Search Console links, so query data appears next to engagement data.

Since May 2026 GA4 has a default AI Assistant channel (medium ai-assistant) for visits referred by assistants on Google's list, which names ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot and Grok. It is not retroactive, and assistants not on the list still land in Referral, so keep a custom channel rule for the rest. Clicks from Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode arrive as ordinary google / organic. More in Measuring AI Visibility.

Prefer something lighter? Plausible, Fathom and Umami are privacy-first alternatives; the Free SEO & Marketing Tools catalogue compares options.

4. A crawler#

A desktop crawler simulates what search engine bots see and finds broken links, redirect chains, missing titles, duplicate content and orphan pages.

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider: the industry standard, free up to 500 URLs per crawl. Paste your homepage URL, press Start, then check the Response Codes, Page Titles and Canonicals tabs.
• Sitebulb: friendlier reporting and prioritized hints (paid, with a trial).

You'll use a crawler heavily in Technical SEO Audits and the capstone audit.

5. PageSpeed Insights and CrUX#

Open pagespeed.web.dev and test your homepage and one key template. The top section is field data from real Chrome users (the data Google uses); the bottom is a Lighthouse lab run.

Two 2025 changes trip people up:

• Lighthouse 13 (October 2025) replaced many classic audits with "insights" such as LCP breakdown and render-blocking requests. Old audit names like "Defer offscreen images" are gone from current reports. Scoring did not change.
• The CrUX Dashboard in Looker Studio was shut down at the end of November 2025. For field-data history, use CrUX Vis, the CrUX History API or BigQuery.

Newer Lighthouse versions also add an experimental Agentic Browsing category that checks things like llms.txt. That is a Chrome tooling check for AI agents, not a Google Search ranking signal: Google Search says it ignores llms.txt.

Two terminal checks#

# What does the raw HTML contain before JavaScript runs?
curl -sL -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" https://example.com | head -100
 
# How big is the HTML? Googlebot for Search reads only the first 2MB.
curl -sL https://example.com | wc -c

To see what Google actually rendered, use URL Inspection → Test live URL → View tested page in Search Console instead: some CDNs block requests that merely claim to be Googlebot.

The minimum stack, summarized#

Be wary of any paid tool that promises "AI rankings" or claims access to Google's internal metrics. Google's own AI guidance says no third-party tool has that access. Rank trackers are still useful, but since the &num=100 change tracking beyond page one costs vendors more, so expect shallower or pricier data.

Next: Free SEO & Marketing Tools, the fuller catalogue of free and freemium tools for research, behaviour analytics and local search.