Air fryer accessories are a category built almost entirely on impulse. Search once and you will be offered a twelve-piece set with a cake barrel, a pizza pan, a skewer rack and a pair of silicone mitts, most of which will be in the back of a drawer within a month. The useful accessories are a much shorter list, and each one earns its place by fixing a specific, nameable problem: not enough space, food welded to the basket, guessing at doneness, or too much oil.
There is one thing you need to understand before buying any of them, and it is the reason this page is more careful than most. An air fryer works because air moves fast around all sides of the food. Every accessory you put in the basket interferes with that to some degree. A rack helps, because it lifts food into the airflow. A solid silicone pot hinders, because it blocks the perforated base the air is meant to come through. Both are sold as air fryer accessories with equal confidence, and only one of them makes your machine work better.
So the ranking below is ordered by how much a thing improves cooking, not by how much it appears in bundles. We have flagged on every pick where it costs you crispness, and the buyer's guide covers the liner question in detail — because it is the accessory most people buy first and the one most likely to be behind the complaint in air fryer not crisping.
The liner question, answered properly
This is the thing worth reading before you buy anything else. Your air fryer basket has a perforated base for a reason: air is meant to come up through it, which is what crisps the underside of your food. A solid silicone pot blocks that completely. A perforated paper liner restores some of it, but not all — the holes are smaller and fewer than the basket's. Neither is a defect in the product; it is physics, and no liner brand will tell you.
The practical rule we would give a friend: use a liner when cleanup would otherwise be miserable, and never otherwise. Sticky wings, anything with barbecue sauce, sugary bakes, breaded fish that welds itself down — liner. Fries, frozen food, vegetables, chicken you want crisp skin on — no liner, and accept the two minutes of washing. If you find yourself reaching for a liner every single cook, the real problem is the cleaning routine, and how to clean an air fryer will save you more time than the liners do.
One safety point that matters more than any of the above: never preheat with an empty paper liner in the basket. There is nothing holding it down, the fan will lift it into the heating element, and it will scorch. Put the liner in with the food on top of it, every time.
A rack is the only accessory that makes the machine better
Everything else on this list makes ownership more pleasant. A rack changes what the machine can do. A single basket cooks one layer well because that is the layer the air can reach — a rack gives you a second layer that the air can also reach, roughly doubling the volume you can cook without the overcrowding that causes soggy results. The catch is that the two levels do not cook identically; the upper level runs hotter in most machines. Swap them halfway through and you will get even results. If you own a dual-basket machine you already have this capability in a better form, which is the argument made in single vs dual basket.
Why an oil sprayer and not cooking spray
Commercial aerosol cooking sprays contain more than oil — propellants and anti-foaming agents that leave a residue which polymerises onto nonstick surfaces at high heat. Over months that builds into a sticky brown film that is very difficult to remove and that many manufacturers specifically warn against in their manuals, because it degrades the coating. A refillable mister sprays only the oil you put in it. It is a two-dollar-a-year habit change that measurably extends how long your basket stays nonstick, which matters if you would rather not be replacing baskets — see why air fryer baskets peel.
What we deliberately left off
Cake barrels and pizza pans: a solid metal pan in an air fryer is just a small oven tray, and it blocks airflow the same way a silicone pot does. If you bake often, you want a toaster oven, not an accessory. Skewer racks: fiddly, hard to clean, used once. Silicone mitts: the basket handle does not get hot on any machine we would recommend. Twelve-piece bundles: you are paying for the two useful items and storing the other ten. And parchment rounds for a square basket — check the shape of your basket, because the majority of mainstream machines moved to square years ago and half the liners sold are still round.
Check your basket shape and size before you order anything
Accessory returns are almost always a fit problem rather than a quality problem. Before buying a rack or liners, measure the internal base of your basket — not the quart rating, which describes volume and tells you nothing about the footprint. An 8-quart dual-basket has two narrow zones around 8 by 5 inches; a 6-quart square basket is around 8 by 8; a 5-quart round is a different shape again. Buy to the measurement, and ignore the compatibility list, which is usually optimistic.
