SEO Tools Are Selling You Your Own Data

The SEO tool industry is worth billions - Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, Similarweb, they've built empires on their subscription models - and their core product? Data Google gives away for free, repackaged with a better UI.

What You're Actually Paying For

Keyword data: Google Keyword Planner is free, it's Google's own data, and yes the paid tools have more features but the source data is the same; Ranking data: Google Search Console shows your actual rankings, free, from Google itself, more accurate than any third-party tool could ever be; Backlink data: Search Console shows who links to you, and for competitor backlinks you're paying for scraped data of varying accuracy; Traffic estimates: these are guesses, educated guesses but guesses nonetheless, and ask anyone who's compared Semrush traffic estimates to actual Analytics data - they're wildly off, sometimes by orders of magnitude.

You're paying $400/month for prettier graphs and third-party estimates of data you could get for free.

The Competitor Analysis Trap

"But I need to analyze competitors!" - do you, though, and what are you going to do with that analysis? You'll see they rank for keywords you don't, you'll see their backlinks, you'll see their traffic estimates, and then what? You already knew they were competing with you, you already knew you needed better content and more authority, and the tool doesn't change the strategy, it just lets you procrastinate by "researching" instead of executing.

The Accuracy Problem

Third-party SEO tools don't have access to Google's data - they scrape, they estimate, they extrapolate - and the results are: Keyword volumes based on clickstream data and sampling, often wildly wrong for niche terms; Difficulty scores using proprietary formulas that vary by tool, where "Difficulty 45" means nothing consistent (same problem as Domain Authority); Traffic estimates off by 2-10x in my experience, sometimes more; Backlink counts where every tool shows different numbers for the same site, because none of them actually know.

You're making decisions based on data that's confidently wrong.

When Tools Make Sense

I'm not saying burn your subscriptions - tools have legitimate uses: Enterprise sites with thousands of pages where crawling tools help manage scale; Agency work where clients expect reports and tools generate reports and that's just the game; Competitive intelligence at scale where if you're tracking dozens of competitors systematically, automation actually helps.

But for a normal business doing SEO, you can do 90% of what matters with free tools - and log file analysis is another free goldmine that most people ignore entirely.

The Free Stack

Google Search Console gives you your actual rankings, clicks, and impressions, straight from Google; Google Analytics gives you your actual traffic, what people actually do on your site; Google Keyword Planner gives you keyword ideas and search volume ranges, free with an Ads account; Screaming Frog (free tier) lets you crawl up to 500 URLs, which is enough for most sites.

That's it, that's enough to do real SEO.

SEO tools are selling you the feeling of control. The data is secondary. Most of it is free elsewhere - or made up anyway.