AnswerThePublic free alternative: the honest options for developers

If you want an AnswerThePublic free alternative, the only truly free one is Google: its autocomplete list and People Also Ask box show the same kind of questions, by hand. If you want those questions in a script or an agent, seogeoaeo.ai's Question Finder is the pick, at 15 credits a run.

Developers usually reach for AnswerThePublic when they are writing docs, a changelog post or a landing page and want to know what people actually ask. The free account works for a quick look, but the daily limit runs out fast once you test a few phrasings, and the paid plans are built around a content suite many developers will never open.

The free options, honestly

Google by hand. Type your topic into Google, read the autocomplete suggestions, add "how", "why" or "can" in front and read them again, then expand the People Also Ask box. It costs nothing, but each topic takes a good few minutes of clicking. It does not scale, and you will copy everything into a text file yourself.

AnswerThePublic's free account. Register and you get a small number of searches per day, with more data than you see logged out. Paid plans start at US$20 a month on monthly billing, and the prices shown change with your region.

A free trial. AnswerThePublic also offers a 7-day trial of its paid plans. Useful for a single research sprint, as long as you remember to cancel.

The cheap option you can script

seogeoaeo.ai is a set of single-purpose SEO, AEO and GEO tools that charge credits per run. Its Question Finder takes a topic, a market and, if you like, a URL. It returns the questions from Google's live autocomplete, grouped by intent, and marks which ones your page already answers.

What matters for developers is that every tool runs the same way from the browser, the REST API or an MCP client such as Claude Code, Cursor or Codex. An agent call looks like this:

curl -X POST https://seogeoaeo.ai/api/v1/tools/question-finder/runs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SEOGEOAEO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"input":{"query":"rotate api keys","market":"us","url":"https://example.com/docs/keys"}}'

Point it at a docs page and you get back the questions that page does not cover yet. That turns question research into a check you can rerun after each docs update, rather than a one-off brainstorm. A run that fails costs nothing.

Which one fits

What Question Finder leaves out

It does not pull People Also Ask boxes or related-search blocks, and it has no search volume or difficulty per question. It also reads only the text in your page's HTML, so content rendered purely by JavaScript is not checked. If People Also Ask data is the core of your workflow, a dedicated PAA tool such as AlsoAsked fits better, and if you want prepositions, comparisons and alerts in one subscription, AnswerThePublic's paid plans do that.

For questions asked to AI assistants instead of Google, seogeoaeo.ai has a separate AI Question Finder that lists what people ask Google's AI Overviews or ChatGPT about a topic.

Bottom line

Free means Google by hand or AnswerThePublic's capped free account. If you would rather spend a few credits than a stretch of manual clicking per topic, and you want the result in a terminal or an agent, run Question Finder and pay for each run in credits.