- The stock photo sites that won't come back to bite you
- Written content that's legally yours to use
- Video, music, and the audio library everyone forgets exists
- The places that look free but aren't
- My own version of the mistake
- Turning free content into something that helps your business
- The uncomfortable bit nobody mentions
- A quick checklist before you publish anything free
- Frequently asked questions
The short version: Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, Google Fonts, government data sites, and the YouTube Audio Library are free and legal, but "free" only holds up if you check the license every single time, because the same photo can be free on one site and a £750 invoice on another. The bigger issue nobody mentions is that free content is also the content your competitors are using, so it can make your site look identical to fifty others in your niche.
Related reading: Where to Get Royalty Free Photos for Your Business.
The stock photo sites that won't come back to bite you
Start here, because photos are where most small business owners get caught out. Unsplash has over 5 million images under a licence that lets you use, copy, and modify photos for commercial purposes without asking permission or crediting the photographer, though a credit is always appreciated. Pexels works the same way and also gives you free stock video. Pixabay covers photos, video, and illustrations under a similar licence.
Burst, which is Shopify's free stock photo library, is worth knowing about specifically if you sell anything, because a chunk of the collection is shot for product pages, flat lays, and small business scenes rather than generic office handshakes.
The rule that matters more than the site you pick: read the actual licence page, not the homepage tagline. Some "free" libraries restrict you from using an image on a product for resale, or in a way that implies a person in the photo endorses your business. That distinction has ended up in actual disputes.
Written content that's legally yours to use
Government and public sector data is the most overlooked source here. UK gov.uk publishes statistics, reports, and guidance under the Open Government Licence, which means you can reuse it, adapt it, and quote from it commercially as long as you acknowledge the source. Same goes for US government sites under most federal agencies. If you write about business, tax, employment law, or health and safety, this is a goldmine of accurate, citable, free material.
Wikipedia content is released under a Creative Commons licence, so you can quote and adapt it as long as you attribute it and share adaptations under the same licence. That last part trips people up, they'll lift a paragraph, tweak three words, and call it original, when the licence asks for attribution either way.
Press releases are free content too, and businesses forget this. A company's own press release is written to be reused, quoted, and republished by journalists and bloggers. If a supplier, a local business, or an industry body sends one out, you can build a piece around it with attribution and never touch a copyright issue.
User-generated content is the free content people undervalue most. A genuine customer review, a testimonial you got permission to share, a comment pulled from your own social posts, these are yours to use because the person gave them to you directly. It's also the content that converts best, because it doesn't read like stock filler.
Video, music, and the audio library everyone forgets exists
YouTube's own Audio Library is free, has thousands of tracks and sound effects, and is built specifically so creators can use the music commercially without a copyright strike. Free Music Archive is another solid source, though check the specific licence per track since not all of them allow commercial use.
For video, Pexels and Coverr both offer free stock footage you can embed on landing pages. Embedding a YouTube video on your site (rather than downloading and reuploading it) is also completely legal, because you're linking to content the owner already published publicly, you're just not allowed to rip the file and host it yourself.
The places that look free but aren't
Google Images is a search engine, not a licence. It shows you photos from all over the web with zero indication of who owns what or what you're allowed to do with it. I've seen small business owners right-click and save an image straight off a Google search result, stick it on a homepage, and get a legal letter eighteen months later because the photographer's agency runs reverse image searches specifically to find unlicensed use.
"Royalty free" does not mean free. It means you pay once instead of paying royalties every time it's used, which is exactly how Getty Images and Shutterstock work. People confuse the two constantly, and it's an expensive confusion.
Screenshotting someone's blog post, copying their product descriptions, or lifting an "About" page and swapping the company name isn't a grey area, it's straightforward copyright infringement, and it's also lazy in a way that shows.
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My own version of the mistake
Years ago, before I was as careful as I am now, a client's marketing assistant pulled a handful of "royalty free" images from a site that had scraped them from a proper stock library and reposted them without a licence. We used three of those images across a landing page and two blog posts. About seven months later we got a letter from a licensing agency acting for the original photographer, quoting the exact URLs where the images appeared and asking for a settlement, £600 across the three uses, plus a demand to remove them within 48 hours. We paid it, removed the images same day, and I spent the next month personally checking every image on that entire website against its original source. It's a boring, unglamorous way to spend a month, and it's exactly why I now treat every "free" source with the same three questions before anything gets used: who owns this, what does the licence say, and can I prove where I got it if someone ever asks. Keep a simple spreadsheet with the source URL and licence type for every image and clip you use. It takes ten minutes per asset and it is the single cheapest insurance policy in content marketing.
Turning free content into something that helps your business
Free source material is a starting point, not a finished asset. A government stats page becomes useful when you turn it into a summary with your own commentary and a clear takeaway for your specific audience. A free stock photo becomes distinctive when you pair it with your own brand colours, your own headline, and your own voice around it rather than dropping it in raw.
If you're building anything designed to capture an email address, a free guide built from public data or a curated roundup of free resources works brilliantly as a lead magnet, but only if your site is set up to collect the address once someone wants it, which is worth checking rather than assuming, see whether your website platform includes an email list feature before you build the whole funnel around a form that doesn't exist.
Repurposing free or public domain content also works well on visual platforms. If you're pulling free images and quotes into pins to drive traffic back to your own product pages, it's worth understanding the actual rules around using Pinterest for affiliate marketing legally and effectively, because the platform's own guidelines are stricter than most people assume.
The uncomfortable bit nobody mentions
Here's the part that gets left out of every "free content" listicle: everyone else is grabbing content from the exact same six free sites you are. Unsplash's most popular photos have been used on thousands of business homepages. When your competitor's "About Us" page has the same laptop-and-coffee shot as yours, free content has stopped being free, it's costing you differentiation, which is a harder thing to buy back than a licence fee.
And there's a second layer to this that's rarely said out loud. While you're sourcing free content from other people's sites and libraries, AI crawlers are quietly doing the same thing to your own original content, pulling your blog posts, guides, and product copy into training data without asking. It's worth reading up on how to stop AI bots scraping your website content without permission if you've put real work into anything on your site, because the free content economy runs both directions. There's also a newer licensing standard worth knowing about if you want a say in how your content gets used by AI systems going forward, covered in this piece on RSL licensing for AI content and whether a small business should bother.
A quick checklist before you publish anything free
- Check the licence page of the source site, not just its homepage claim
- Confirm commercial use is explicitly allowed, not just personal or editorial use
- Note whether attribution is required, and add it even when it isn't
- Never strip a watermark to make an image look cleaner, that's a red flag agencies look for
- Keep a source spreadsheet with URL, licence type, and date accessed for every asset
- Add your own commentary or context so free content becomes original content
Related: legal (this site).
If you're building a brand, my guide on how to trademark a business name walks through the five steps in the US and UK.
Frequently asked questions
Is it legal to use images from Google search results on my website?
No, not automatically. Google Images is a search tool that indexes photos from across the web, it doesn't grant any licence to use them, and many of the photographers or agencies behind those images actively search for unlicensed use.
What's the difference between royalty free and free stock photos?
Royalty free means you pay a one-time fee instead of paying every time the image is used, so it's usually still a paid image, whereas free stock sites like Unsplash and Pexels don't require any payment at all, just an optional credit.
Can I legally copy content from Wikipedia for my blog?
Yes, Wikipedia text is released under a Creative Commons licence that allows commercial reuse and adaptation, but you're required to give attribution and, if you adapt it, share your version under the same licence terms.
Do I need permission to use a customer testimonial on my website?
You should always get clear consent from the customer before publishing their words, name, or photo, even though they gave you the review willingly, because using their likeness commercially without that confirmation can still cause a dispute.
