If you went looking for the "best AI marketing tools" you'd drown. Every week there's a new platform, a new list, a new thing promising to change everything. Most of it costs money and overlaps with something you already have.
This is the opposite. A short, opinionated stack of free tools and skills that genuinely earn a place in a marketer's week. Bookmark the ones that fit how you work, skip the rest.
The skills layer
Start with skills, because they make the AI you already pay for far more useful. The standout is Corey Haines' marketing skills, around 40 free skills covering CRO, copy, SEO, email, ads, and analytics, built from a real agency's processes. Install once, and your AI assistant stops being a blank slate.
For design and building work, there are free skills that turn a general AI into a capable design partner. UI/UX Pro Max carries a large database of styles, colour palettes, and font pairings, and works with Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. Impeccable by Paul Bakaus (who created jQuery UI back in the day) is one of the most popular design skills going. Anthropic's own frontend-design skill is the safe starting point, with built-in rules against the fonts and purple gradients that make AI design look like AI design.
The free AI tools layer
For research and writing, the free tiers of the major assistants do most of what a marketer needs. Claude and ChatGPT both have free plans good enough for drafting, summarising, and research. Perplexity's free tier is strong for fast research with sources.
A practical workflow visual for the ideas in this article.
For SEO, the free stack is genuinely good (covered in full in the SEO audit post in this series). The short version: Google Search Console is free and now shows how you appear in AI Overviews. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is permanently free for site owners and audits your site against 100-plus issues. PageSpeed Insights checks your site speed for free.
For images, the free tiers of the main image tools cover most social and blog needs. You rarely need a paid plan until you're producing at volume.
The honest caveat
There are better paid tools for almost every job here. Semrush and Ahrefs' full platforms outdo the free SEO stack. Dedicated content tools beat a general assistant for some tasks. The point of this list isn't that free is always better. It's that free is enough to start, and starting is the part most people skip.
Bookmark two or three of these, set them up properly, and you'll get more out of them than you would from a paid tool you never configure. Add paid tools when you hit a real ceiling, not before.
If installing a skill from GitHub looks intimidating, here's the shortcut: copy the link, paste it into Claude Code or whichever AI tool you use, and ask it to install the skill for you. Let the AI handle the technical part. You don't need to understand the commands.
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