SEOquake Review: Free, Still Shipping, and Built to Upsell Semrush

I opened a SERP last week to size up a keyword, and by habit I had five tabs going: one for the ranking page, one for its age, one for a link count, one for indexed pages, one for the cache. SEOquake collapses all five into a strip of text under each result, for free.

The verdict: SEOquake is worth installing today, at 3.9 out of 5. It is the best free SERP toolbar on the market and an honest set of on-page checks. It is also a funnel, and the moment you want anything beyond the page in front of you, you are looking at a Semrush invoice.

The verdict: 3.9 out of 5

I score review tools on five things, so the number means something rather than vibing at a product. Here is how SEOquake lands on each.

• SERP metrics at a glance: 5/5. The overlay is the whole reason the extension exists, and nothing free does it better.
• Page-level diagnostics: 4/5. SEO Audit, keyword density, and link tables are real tools, not decoration.
• Data depth: 3/5. You get Semrush estimates, not index-level access, and the difference shows.
• Cost: 5/5. Free, with no account gate on the parts you use most.
• Prioritization: 2/5. SEOquake reports. It never ranks, never tracks, never tells you what to do on Monday.

That averages to 3.8, and I round to 3.9 / 5 because free changes the calculus: a tool that costs nothing gets graded on whether it is worth the install, and this one is.

What is SEOquake?

SEOquake is a free SEO browser extension published by Semrush Inc. that adds search-engine metrics directly into your browser, both as a toolbar and as an overlay under each organic result. It runs on Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari.

• Delivery model: a browser extension, not a hosted app. Everything happens client-side against the page you are looking at.
• Owner: Semrush, which acquired the project and has published it under the Semrush Inc. name for years.
• Scale: over 1,000,000 users on the Chrome Web Store listing alone, with 3 million-plus downloads claimed across browsers.
• Price: free, permanently, with no trial mechanics and no seat count.

Is SEOquake still maintained in 2026?

Yes, and this matters because half the free SEO extensions people recommend have been abandoned for years. The evidence is mixed but readable.

• The code ships. The Chrome Web Store lists version 3.13.5, published 18 May 2026, credited to Semrush Inc.
• The brand does not. Visit seoquake.com today and you get a 301 redirect to an SEO checker page on Backlinko, which Semrush also owns. There is no standalone product site left.
• Read that honestly. The extension is maintained; the marketing around it has been folded into other Semrush properties. That is a maintenance posture, not a growth one.

SEOquake features, and how good each one is

Six things do the work. I have graded each on whether I actually reach for it.

The SERP overlay

This is the flagship. Once enabled, a compact metrics strip appears beneath every organic result on Google and Bing, plus a sidebar panel that lets you sort and export the whole page of results.

• What it shows: Semrush rank, indexed page count, domain age, link counts, social signals, and around twenty other parameters you can toggle on or off.
• Why it earns its row: it turns a five-tab reconnaissance job into a single glance at a SERP you were already looking at.
• The limit: the parameters are configurable but the data behind them is Semrush’s, so two SEOs with different tool stacks will read the same SERP differently.

The SEO bar

A persistent toolbar at the top of the browser window carrying core metrics for whatever page you are on. It is the same idea as the overlay, applied to one page instead of a result set.

• Useful for: a running read on a page while you scroll it, without clicking into a panel.
• Annoying because: it costs vertical space on a laptop, and most people I know disable it and use the toolbar icon instead.

SEO Audit

SEOquake’s SEO Audit runs a technical check on the single page you have open and reports what it finds, including a mobile-compatibility check. It is the feature people are surprised to learn is in there.

• What it catches: title and meta issues, heading structure, image attributes, canonical and robots directives, mobile rendering flags.
• What it cannot do: crawl. There is no second page, no queue, no site view, no comparison against last month’s run.
• Where that hurts: the moment you have more than a handful of URLs, you are back to a real crawler such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.

Keyword density

A density report with a configurable stop-word list, broken out by one-word, two-word, and three-word phrases. It is well built and it is measuring something that stopped being a ranking lever a long time ago.

• Still useful for: catching a draft that never says the thing it is supposed to be about, or one that says it forty times.
• Not useful for: hitting a target percentage. There is no target percentage. Anyone selling you one is selling you 2011.

Internal and external link tables

SEOquake extracts every link on the page into sortable internal and external tables, with nofollow status flagged. This is the feature I use second most after the overlay.

• The outreach use: see instantly whether a resource page’s outbound links are followed before you spend an hour on a pitch.
• The audit use: spot an orphaned template, a stray staging link, or a footer stuffed with 200 internal links.
• The gap: it reads the links on the page, not the links pointing at the page. Backlink analysis still needs Ahrefs or Majestic.

Compare URLs and CSV export

Two smaller features that quietly matter. Compare URLs and Domains puts several properties side by side on the same parameters, and the export button dumps a SERP or a link table to CSV.

• Compare is the pitch tool: three domains, one table, no subscription, useful in a sales call.
• Export is the escape hatch: it gets SEOquake’s data into the spreadsheet where the actual thinking happens.

SEOquake pricing: what free gets you, and where Semrush starts charging

SEOquake costs $0. There is no pro tier of SEOquake, no per-seat fee, and no trial that expires. The pricing question is really a question about the funnel behind it.

Here is where each rung sits, with Semrush figures verified on semrush.com in August 2026.

The three-year math

Pre-calculated, so you do not have to. Annual billing on Semrush saves up to 17%.

• SEOquake, three years: $0. That is the entire point of it.
• Semrush SEO at monthly billing: $1,668 a year, $5,004 over three years.
• Semrush SEO billed annually: $1,407.96 a year, $4,223.88 over three years.
• Semrush Advanced billed annually: $5,468.04 a year, $16,404.12 over three years.
• CrawlRaven, three years: a one-time $49 at the launch price for 3 sites, or $99 for 10 sites, paid once rather than every month. Lifetime pricing steps up as licenses sell, so check the pricing page for the current batch. See pricing for today’s number.

The honest framing: SEOquake and Semrush are not substitutes for each other, and neither is a substitute for an audit that ranks its own findings. Read our full Semrush review before you take the upgrade path the toolbar is pointing you down.

SEOquake in practice: how much are the numbers worth?

Reading SEOquake’s output well means knowing which numbers are facts and which are models. The extension does not draw that line for you, so here it is.

• Reliable: indexed page counts, domain age, on-page link counts, nofollow status, heading and meta structure. These are checkable facts about a page.
• Directional: Semrush rank and estimated traffic. Modelled figures, useful for comparing two domains, wrong if you quote them as truth.
• Decorative: social share counts. The APIs behind these have been degrading for years across every tool that reports them.

Speed is not a complaint I have. The overlay renders with the SERP and the page audit finishes in a couple of seconds, because everything is scoped to one document.

The real performance question is different: what happens after the numbers appear? SEOquake stops there. Nothing is stored, nothing trends, nothing is ranked by severity, and nothing connects a metric to the traffic it is costing you.

Setup and daily use

Setup is about ninety seconds: install from your browser’s store, and the toolbar icon appears. There is no onboarding, no project, no account wall on the parts that matter.

• First thing to do: open the parameter settings and turn off the twelve metrics you will never look at. The default overlay is noisy.
• Second thing: disable the persistent SEO bar unless you have a large monitor. The click-to-open panel does the same job without eating screen height.
• Learning curve: low, but the labels assume you already know what an indexed page count implies. A beginner will read the numbers without reading the meaning.
• Interface age: the panels look their age. Dense, functional, unmistakably a 2010s toolbar with a 2020s repaint.

One practical note: extensions that inject into every SERP do add a little overhead, and a few reviewers report the overlay pushing results down enough to be irritating on small screens. Toggling it per session is the fix.

SEOquake pros and cons

Who SEOquake is best for, and who should skip it

Same tool, very different verdicts depending on the job you are doing.

• Best for consultants and freelancers. Fast, free SERP reconnaissance before you quote a project, with nothing to expense.
• Best for anyone doing outreach. The external link table tells you in one second whether a page’s outbound links are followed.
• Best for teaching. On-page signals become visible in the browser, which is the fastest way to explain them to a junior or a client.
• Best as a second opinion. Pinned next to whatever paid stack you already run, it costs nothing to keep.

And the cases where installing it will not help you.

• Not ideal for in-house teams planning a sprint. There is no severity ranking and no link between a finding and lost clicks.
• Not ideal for agencies reporting to clients. No scheduled exports, no history, no white-label output of any kind.
• Not ideal for technical audits at scale. One page at a time is a hard structural ceiling.
• Not ideal for AI search work. Nothing in SEOquake touches AI Overviews or AI crawler access, so start with our AI visibility tools roundup instead.

What reviewers and store ratings say

I am citing numeric ratings with direct links rather than quoting individual reviews, because store review text moves and I would rather you check it yourself.

• Chrome Web Store: 4.5 out of 5. Roughly 2,600 ratings across more than 1,000,000 users, developer listed as Semrush Inc. See the listing.
• Latest release: 3.13.5, 18 May 2026. Published on the same store listing, which is the cleanest available proof the extension is still maintained.
• Firefox Add-ons. SEOquake is also published for Firefox, where user reviews skew positive but the review base is far smaller than Chrome’s. See the listing.

A 4.5 across a rating base that size is a strong signal for a free extension, and the recurring theme in the low ratings is layout disruption on the SERP rather than bad data.

SEOquake alternatives worth knowing

Four alternatives, and one of them is ours. Each solves a different piece of what SEOquake leaves open.

• MozBar. The other free default. Fewer parameters per row than SEOquake and it wants a Moz login, but it surfaces Domain Authority, which is still the number outreach contacts recognize on sight. See how DA compares in Moz DA vs Ahrefs DR.
• Ahrefs SEO Toolbar. Shows Domain Rating, URL Rating, and backlink counts in the SERP, with the genuinely useful figures gated behind an Ahrefs subscription. Our Ahrefs review covers whether the subscription is worth it.
• Semrush itself. The upgrade the toolbar is designed to sell. Strong on keyword and competitive data, weaker on crawl depth, and $139 to $549 a month. The Semrush review has the full breakdown.
• Screaming Frog. When the answer is a crawl rather than a page read. Desktop, deep, and unopinionated about priority. See the Screaming Frog review.
• CrawlRaven, by use case. If your problem is not “what does this page measure” but “which ten things should my team do this week,” that is the join we built: Search Console and GA4 alongside your imported Ahrefs or Semrush keyword lists and a 200-point technical crawl, returned as one ranked plan. Lifetime licenses started at a one-time $49, with a free plan for 1 website. Lifetime pricing steps up as licenses sell, so check the pricing page for the current batch.
• Free stopgap: SEOquake reads other people's results well and says nothing about how yours will look. Our free SERP preview tool renders your own title and description at Google's truncation limits, which the overlay never shows you.

If you want free tools that go a step past a toolbar without a subscription, our meta tag checker and broken link checker cover two of the checks people most often run SEOquake for.

Frequently asked questions

Basics

• Is SEOquake free? Yes, permanently, and no Semrush account is required for the toolbar, overlay, page audit, keyword density report, or link tables.
• Is SEOquake still updated? Yes. Version 3.13.5 shipped on 18 May 2026 under Semrush Inc. The seoquake.com domain now redirects to a Backlinko page, so the product site is gone even though the extension is not.
• Which browsers support it? Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Chrome carries by far the largest user base at over 1,000,000 installs.

Pricing

• What does Semrush cost if I upgrade? Verified August 2026: SEO $139/mo ($117.33/mo annual), Starter $199/mo ($165.17/mo annual), Pro+ $299/mo ($248.17/mo annual), Advanced $549/mo ($455.67/mo annual). Annual billing saves up to 17%.
• What does the free Semrush account include? 1 demo project, 10 reports per day across the core tools, and a site audit capped at 100 pages, with no credit card required.
• Is there a cheaper way to get a ranked audit? CrawlRaven is a one-time lifetime licence rather than a subscription, from a launch price of $49 for 3 sites, with a free plan for 1 website. Lifetime pricing steps up as licenses sell, so check the pricing page for the current batch.

Comparisons

• SEOquake or MozBar? SEOquake for more parameters and no login. MozBar if Domain Authority is the number your outreach workflow runs on. Installing both costs nothing.
• Can SEOquake replace a crawler? No. It audits the single page you have open. Site-wide work needs Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or a hosted audit that ranks its findings.
• Does SEOquake do anything for AI search? No. It reports classic organic results only, with no AI Overview tracking and no check on whether AI crawlers can reach your content.

Final verdict

SEOquake scores 3.9 out of 5 and belongs in your browser. It is free, it still ships, and the SERP overlay saves real minutes every week. Judged as what it is, a toolbar, it is very good.

• Install it if you look at SERPs, audit competitor pages, or explain SEO to other people. There is no downside to $0.
• Do not expect it to crawl a site, keep history, rank findings by impact, produce a client report, or say a word about AI search.
• Do not read the redirect as a shutdown, but do not plan around new features either. seoquake.com pointing at Backlinko is a maintenance signal, not a death notice.
• When you need the ranked version, CrawlRaven joins Search Console and GA4 with your imported keyword lists and a 200-point crawl and hands back one prioritized plan. Start free with 1 website, no credit card, or see pricing for the current lifetime batch.

Sources

• SEOquake on the Chrome Web Store: 4.5/5, ~2,600 ratings, 1,000,000+ users, v3.13.5 dated 18 May 2026, developer Semrush Inc.
• SeoQuake SEO extension on Firefox Add-ons: Firefox distribution
• Semrush pricing: SEO $139, Starter $199, Pro+ $299, Advanced $549 per month, verified August 2026
• seoquake.com: 301 redirect to backlinko.com/tools/seo-checker, checked August 2026