The ambitious spread of fuel cell usage is facing the aging problem, which has a significant impact on the cells’ output power. Therefore, it is necessary to develop reliable techniques that are capable of accurately characterizing the cell throughout its life. This paper proposes an adaptive parameter estimation technique to develop a robust proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) model over its lifespan. This is useful for accurate monitoring, analysis, design, and control of the PEMFC and increasing its life. For this purpose, fair comparisons of nine recent optimization algorithms were made by implementing them for a typical quasi-empirical PEMFC model estimation problem. Investigating the best competitors relied on two conceptual factors, the solution accuracy and computational burden (as a novel assessment factor in this study). The computational burden plays a great role in accelerating the model parameters’ update process. The proposed techniques were applied to five commercial PEMFCs. Moreover, a necessary statistical analysis of the results was performed to make a solid comparison with the competitors. Among them, the proposed coot- bird-algorithm (CBO)-based technique achieved a superior and balanced performance. It surpassed the closest competitors by a difference of 16.01% and 62.53% in the accuracy and computational speed, respectively.