Yes — 100 credits every month, renewing forever, no credit card and no trial clock. It's a tier, not a teaser: the same endpoints and the same data sources as paid plans.

What are the limits of the free SEO API?

100 credits a month, 30 requests a minute, no batch endpoint. One credit is one billed provider call, so a domain lookup costs 1 to 4 depending on the field groups requested. Cached lookups cost 0 credits, so repeat checks are free.

What data is included for free?

Everything: Domain Rating and Ahrefs Rank, organic and total traffic estimates, engagement, top countries, keyword volume/difficulty/CPC, SERP snapshots, index checks and favicons.

What happens when free credits run out?

Requests answer 429 quota_exceeded with a clear message until the month resets (1st, UTC) — no surprise billing. Upgrading to a paid plan or adding a credit pack lifts the cap immediately.

A genuinely free SEO API

The deal

What free gets you

100 credits / month, renewing — no card, no trial clock, no expiry on the tier itself
Every endpoint — domains, keywords, SERP, index, favicon, usage
Every metric — DR, Ahrefs Rank, both traffic estimates, engagement, countries

Cache hits cost 0 — repeat lookups don't touch your quota
Same data as paid — plans buy volume, never quality
Plus the no-account checker — 3 quick looks a day in the browser

What 100 credits actually covers

One credit is one call we pay a data provider for, and a domain lookup spends one per field group it fetches fresh: fields=rating costs 1 credit, the default rating,traffic,countries costs 4. So 100 credits is roughly 100 authority-only checks, or about 25 full profiles, per month — enough for a demo environment, a side project's traffic column, or development against the real API before a launch. Cached answers cost nothing at all, so repeat checks of the same domain are free and the practical ceiling is higher than the number suggests.

And what it honestly doesn't

Free runs at 30 requests a minute, doesn't include the 200-domain batch endpoint, and when the 100 credits are spent, requests answer 429 quota_exceeded until the month resets on the 1st (UTC). Nothing degrades silently and nothing bills you — the refusal is the whole consequence. When you outgrow it, Starter is $20 for 20,000 credits.

$ curl -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_pub_YOUR_FREE_KEY" \
  "https://seometricsapi.com/v1/domains/example.com?fields=rating,traffic"

# and when you want to know where you stand:
$ curl -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_pub_YOUR_FREE_KEY" \
  "https://seometricsapi.com/v1/usage"

FAQ

The skeptical questions

Is it really free?

Yes. The free tier exists because our caching makes light usage nearly costless to serve, and because developers who build on real data upgrade when their products grow. No card, ever, on the free tier.

What are the limits?

100 credits/month, 30 requests/minute, no batch endpoint. Everything else — endpoints, metrics, provenance — is identical to paid plans.

What data is included?

All of it: authority via the Ahrefs API, dual traffic estimates, engagement, countries, keywords, SERP and index checks. The docs list every field.

What happens when credits run out?

A clear 429 quota_exceeded until the monthly reset — never surprise billing. /v1/usage shows the meter any time, and it keeps working even when the quota is spent.

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SEO Metrics API is an independent service and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Ahrefs, Similarweb or Semrush. Authority and organic-traffic metrics are retrieved from the Ahrefs API under our own subscription; visit estimates come from third-party Similarweb-style datasets. All traffic figures are estimates, not analytics.