I Built 18 Free SEO Tools After 14 Years in the Industry — Here's What Each One Does published

Stephen Marshall — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:13:55 +0000

I've been in the SEO industry since 2012. Fourteen years of auditing sites, placing links, analyzing competitors, and watching Google change the rules every six months.

In that time, I've placed over 70,000 editorial links across publications you'd recognize, including USA Today, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, and many others. Zero Google penalties. Ever.

But here's the thing that always frustrated me: every time I needed to run a quick technical check, a meta tag scan, a redirect trace, a broken link sweep, I'd either have to fire up a $200/month tool or use some ad-infested free checker that gave me cached data from three weeks ago.

So I built my own.

18 free SEO tools. No signup. No email gate. No paywall. No "upgrade to see your results."

Every tool makes real HTTP requests against live pages. You get actual status codes, real meta tags, true redirect chains, not simulated or estimated data.

Let me show you the toolkit, starting with the new set of tools I've built for AI-powered search—and why each one matters.

The AI Search Tools: This Is Where Things Get Interesting

Traditional Google search is shrinking. Gartner predicted a 25% decline in traditional search engine volume by the end of 2026. Meanwhile, roughly 79% of users now rely on AI-enhanced search to find information.

That means your content isn't just competing for Google page one anymore. It's competing to get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude when someone asks a question.

This is a completely new optimization surface, and almost nobody has tools for it. So I built three.

GEO Analyzer — GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. This tool scores your content's potential for citation by AI models. It checks author attribution, data density, structured data, source credibility signals, and citation-worthiness. You get a score and specific recommendations for what to fix.

Think of it as PageSpeed Insights, but for AI search rather than Core Web Vitals.

AEO Analyzer checks if your content is structured for voice search and featured snippets by analyzing questions, answers, schema, and formatting.

If you've ever wondered why your competitor's content shows up in the "People Also Ask" box and yours doesn't, this tool will tell you why.

AI Search Visibility Checker scans your robots.txt for blocks on key AI crawlers.

Most site owners have no idea they're blocking GPTBot (ChatGPT's crawler), PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, or Google-Extended. If these bots can't crawl your content, you're invisible to AI search, and you might not even know it.

I run this on client sites regularly and find blocked AI bots about 40% of the time.

The Technical SEO Tools — The Bread and Butter

These are the tools I personally use every day. Nothing fancy in concept, but they do the job properly with live data, not cached results.

SEO Audit Tool runs 27 checks for technical SEO and content, scoring each out of 100.

I built this because most free audit tools either check five things or lock the useful results behind a signup wall.

Broken Link Checker finds dead links and redirects with real HTTP status codes.

Broken links hurt your rankings and your user experience. This finds them in seconds.

Schema Markup Generator — Generates valid JSON-LD structured data for Article, FAQ, LocalBusiness, Product, HowTo, and more. You fill in the fields, and it spits out the code. Copy, paste into your

Schema markup is one of those things that takes five minutes to implement, but most sites still don't have it. This removes the excuse.

Meta Tags Checker analyzes the title, meta tags, Open Graph, Twitter Cards, and the canonical URL for validity and provides previews.

I use this before every page goes live. Takes 10 seconds and catches the mistakes that would otherwise sit there for months.

XML Sitemap Generator — Crawls your site and generates a downloadable XML sitemap that respects robots.txt and canonical tags. Submit it to Google Search Console, and you're indexed faster.

Redirect Checker traces all redirects for any URL and flags loops—great for debugging migrations or affiliate links.

Robots.txt Generator — Visual editor for building a properly formatted robots.txt file. Set crawl rules per bot, add sitemap references, and download the file. Beats writing it by hand and risking syntax errors.

Hreflang Tag Generator generates hreflang tags for language and region for multilingual sites, reducing manual errors.

Disavow File Generator formats a .txt disavow file from pasted URLs for Google Search Console submission.

The Content & Utility Tools

These are lighter-weight, but I reach for them constantly when writing or reviewing content.

Readability Checker shows key readability scores and grade level instantly.

Keyword Density Checker finds keyword frequency and n-gram density from pasted text or a URL.

Word & Character Counter measures word, character, and paragraph count plus estimated reading time.

SERP & Social Preview — Shows exactly how your page will appear in Google search results, X (Twitter) cards, and LinkedIn posts. Preview before you publish so your title isn't truncated, and your OG image isn't cropped.

UTM Link Builder quickly creates campaign URLs with UTM tags for Google Analytics.

Programmatic SEO Analyzer checks programmatic pages for template, content, URL, and index issues at scale.

You might wonder why all these tools are free. Here's my answer.

Because I needed these tools myself, I built them for my team and figured others could use them too.

I run a link-building agency. Our business model isn't selling SEO tools; it's placing editorial links. The tools are a way to give back to the community and help people fix their technical SEO before they come to us for the off-page side.

No catch. No freemium upsell trap where you see a score but can't see the details. Every tool works fully, right now, in your browser.

All 18 tools are free at juxtdigital.com/tools, no signup needed.

If you have suggestions for tools I should build next, I'm all ears. The AI search optimization category is wide open, and I'm actively building more in that space.

If Google Has to Choose One Source, Why Should It Be Yours?

Stephen Marshall — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 12:39:27 +0000

Search used to reward effort. Optimize a page, build links, wait. That model is fading. Google isn’t just ranking pages anymore. It’s choosing sources. In many searches, users now see answers, summaries, and citations before they ever see a list of links.
Here’s the shift. Google must determine whether of several pages that say the same thing is trustworthy. The objective is no longer ranking. Being chosen is.
That’s why backlinks matter more than ever, but not in the old way. They’re no longer just signals of popularity. They’re signals of trust.

Search Is Now a Selection Problem
Look at how search behaves during elections. When accuracy matters, Google limits results to a small set of trusted domains. It isn’t experimenting. It’s choosing sources with a track record.
The same logic applies elsewhere, especially as AI content grows. Estimates suggest over 50 percent of newly published web content now involves AI assistance. More content, same ideas. Google needs external signals to separate repetition from relevance.
Backlinks solve that. When independent sites reference a page, they do what algorithms can’t. They vouch for it. That’s a research signal, not a trick.

Backlinks Are About Context, Not Volume
Authority alone isn’t enough. Context matters more. Where the link resides, who links to you, and why they link.
Dozens of generic links can be outweighed by a single reference from a relevant media outlet or industry website. It places your content inside a trusted conversation.
One example. A SaaS company publishes a clear breakdown of data privacy. Months later, a developer publication cites it while covering ongoing AI regulation debates. That link doesn’t just pass authority. It positions the company as a credible source.

What This Means in Practice
For teams like JuxtDigital, this change entails approaching link building more like publication and less like outreach, where the objective is to obtain references rather than merely placements. For companies and organizations, the emphasis changes. Fewer shortcuts. More substance. Content that’s genuinely reference-worthy.
Keep track of citations in addition to ranks. Consistency, not spikes, is the goal. Consider link building more like publication than outreach.
If Google has to choose one source, it won’t pick the loudest. It will pick the one others already trust.

DEV Community: Stephen Marshall

I Built 18 Free SEO Tools After 14 Years in the Industry — Here's What Each One Does published

If Google Has to Choose One Source, Why Should It Be Yours?