What you actually buy in late 2026

Go to rankiq.com today and the headline is not about keywords at all. It reads "RankIQ Has Evolved into Aided", and the page sells RankIQ bundled with Aided, an AI content platform, for $49. That is the price RankIQ's entry plan has carried for years. The subscription costs the same; what changed is what sits next to it.

RankIQ itself is the SEO tool Brandon Gaille built for bloggers, run by his company Gailleon, LLC. It does two jobs: a hand-picked library of low-competition keywords sorted by blog niche, and a content grader that compares your draft with the top 30 Google results for a keyword. Aided is the add-on - "1-click AI apps" for content, SEO, social and email, plus what the page calls unlimited access to Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT. No model versions are named anywhere.

Some housekeeping signs matter before you pay. The app moved from rankiq.io to rankiq.app, and when we checked on October 28, 2026 the old rankiq.io address served a certificate for a different domain, so old bookmarks and tutorial links break in the browser. The newest post on the RankIQ blog is from June 2022. The old Zendesk help centre now redirects to Zendesk's "help center closed" page. None of that stops the tool working. It does tell you where the company's attention has gone: to Aided.

Check RankIQ's current offer

The keyword library is the reason to buy it

Most keyword tools hand you a search box and a difficulty score and leave the filtering to you. RankIQ goes the other way. Its team curates keywords per blog niche - TechRadar counts more than 200 niches - picked because the pages ranking for them now are weak enough for a small blog to beat. RankIQ's own screenshot shows the scale: 125,852 keywords under "Food", 2,352 under "Air fryer", 2,457 under "Bbq".

For a food, parenting or home blogger with no SEO background, that is the whole pitch. Open your niche, pick a phrase, write. Library searches are unlimited on every plan, according to the plan breakdown Making Sense of Cents published in April 2024, so browsing never eats into your monthly allowance.

The catch is that "hand-picked" cuts both ways. Software Advice reviewers say the library cannot be sorted by the variables they wanted, and G2 reviewers reported thin coverage in some niches, personal finance among them. Another recurring complaint is that the search volumes in the library look low when you check the same phrases in other tools. If your niche is not one RankIQ's team has curated, the main feature is worth very little to you.

The grader and the 16-report cap

Pick a keyword and RankIQ builds an "AI SEO report" from the top 30 results: the words Google appears to reward in titles, the topics competing pages cover, and a target length. The Content Optimizer then grades your draft against that report and tells you what to add to compete for page 1. TechRadar says the report draws on IBM Watson. The homepage now also promises posts "optimized for AEO and GEO" - Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT mentions - without saying what in the report changes to get there.

RankIQ's own example of a post before and after optimization - a vendor claim, not our test.

The limit that shapes daily use is the report count. RankIQ's own cancellation pages confirm the standard plan includes 16 AI SEO reports a month and that the cheaper $29 plan cuts it to 8. Sixteen covers a blogger publishing three or four posts a week. It does not cover an agency, or anyone refreshing a back catalogue of 200 old posts, and reviewers say unused reports do not roll over to the next month.

Pricing, checked on October 28, 2026

Pricing is the messiest part of RankIQ right now, because the homepage contradicts itself. The same $49 offer is described as "87% Off $398" (RankIQ at $99 plus Aided's Unlimited plan at $299) and, further down, as "50% Off $99 Rate". Neither line says what you pay after the first term. The "$99 Rate" wording suggests $99 a month, but that is our reading, not a stated renewal price.

The two higher tiers come from third-party reviews, and we could not confirm they survived the Aided merger: rankiq.app shows only a sign-in screen and aided.com blocks automated readers. Treat them as a guide, not a quote.

There is no free trial, which TechRadar and Making Sense of Cents both confirm. Billing is monthly, although a request form on rankiq.com offers "2 Months Free" for switching to a yearly subscription - TechRadar's claim that there is no annual discount is contradicted by RankIQ's own page. The terms of service contain no refund clause at all, so do not plan on getting a first month back. You can pause the account without being charged. Cancelling means filling in a form rather than pressing a button in the app, and on the way out you are offered Aided's $299-a-month Unlimited plan free for as long as you stay subscribed.

What it will not do

RankIQ is a keyword-and-brief tool, not an SEO suite. TechRadar lists no backlink analysis, no technical SEO audit, no site health monitoring, no API and no native WordPress integration. Rank checking is the disputed point. RankIQ's marketing says it "Can Check Rankings", and in practice that is a Rankings Audit tab that reads your Google Search Console data. It shows how your existing posts perform. It is not a daily rank tracker for keywords you do not rank for yet.

The data is English-language and US-centric, so a blog aimed at readers in Germany or Brazil gets nothing useful from the library. The terms also forbid sharing "any of the data obtained through our service on another website or through any other means". That matters if you planned to hand keyword lists to a client or a freelance writer outside your account.

Alternatives worth comparing

RankIQ's own comparison chart sets it at $49 for 16 briefs against Surfer, Ahrefs and Semrush. That graphic dates from July 2023, and the rivals' prices on it have moved since, so read it as RankIQ's pitch rather than today's market.

RankIQ's marketing chart from July 2023. The Surfer, Ahrefs and SEMrush prices on it are out of date.

Surfer is the pick if the grader is what you want and the curated library is not: it is a dedicated content optimizer with editor integrations, and our review has its current pricing. SE Ranking fills the gaps RankIQ leaves open - rank tracking, backlinks and site audits - in one subscription. For keyword research outside the US on a small budget, Ubersuggest is the cheaper starting point.

Verdict

Buy RankIQ if you run an English-language hobby or niche blog aimed at US readers, your topic is one of the curated niches, and you want someone else to have done the keyword shortlisting. At $49 with 16 reports a month, the library saves the hours a beginner would spend learning Ahrefs or Semrush, and Aided comes along as a bonus rather than the reason to subscribe.

RankIQ's own one-year study of 2,363 Mediavine food blogs. It is a vendor study, and blogs that pay for an SEO tool are likely more active to begin with.

Skip it if you write in another language, or need rank tracking, backlinks and technical audits - SE Ranking covers those. Skip it too if you want a grader that lives inside your editor, which is Surfer's job. And think twice if a blog untouched since 2022, a closed help centre and an unstated renewal price worry you on a monthly plan with no refund clause. They should, a little.

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