SEO tools in 2026: what each one actually sees, and a rating of ten

Every SEO tool answers a narrower question than its homepage suggests. Search Console knows what Google did with your pages and nothing about anyone else's. Ahrefs and Semrush know a great deal about everyone and estimate your traffic from the outside. A crawler such as Screaming Frog reads every page you have and knows nothing about who searches for them. And since 2025 there is a new question none of the old comparisons cover: what do AI assistants say about you, and can your pages be read by them at all?

We read the official pages, pricing and documentation of ten tools on 8 November 2026, gathered the studies that measure them, and scored all ten on one rubric. One of the ten is GLLmolfar, the desktop crawler we make. It is scored by the same rules, and it does not come first.

1. Four places SEO data comes from

Before features, look at the source. Each tool gets its data in one of four ways, and the source decides what it can and cannot know. A tool that estimates your traffic is not wrong to be off by half; it is measuring from outside, and the way to check it is with data from inside.

2. What SEO practitioners actually use

There is no recent public survey that counts every tool, so two older and narrower sources have to do. In Aira and Women in Tech SEO's State of Technical SEO report, Search Console and Screaming Frog were the tools technical SEOs relied on most, well ahead of everything else (reported by Digital Information World, January 2023).

Money tells a similar story from the other side. Among businesses that bought SEO software through the spend platform Ramp in the last twelve months, 63% bought Semrush and 30% Ahrefs (Ramp, SEO category, updated 7 November 2026). That counts purchases, not users: Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free and never appear in spend data.

Search Engine Journal's State of SEO 2026 asked 371 professionals in 52 countries about categories rather than brands: 56% use analytics and reporting tools, 51.2% cross-functional platforms, and 42.3% each use AI writing assistants and technical SEO tools.

3. How big the indexes are

The third-party tools compete on the size of their copy of the web. These are the vendors' own figures, read on their pages on 8 November 2026. They are claims, not audits, and each vendor counts a little differently — Ahrefs reports 29 billion keywords after filtering out of 110 billion ever seen, for example.

4. How accurate the estimates are

A third-party tool does not see your traffic; it multiplies estimated rankings by estimated click-through rates. The largest test we found is Ahrefs' own: estimates for 1,635 sites compared with their real Search Console clicks. The median site was off by 49.5% in Ahrefs and 68.4% in Semrush, while both tracked the real numbers' shape (correlations of 0.76 and 0.74) (Ahrefs, May 2022). It is a vendor-run study, so read it as a measure of the method rather than a verdict on the rival.

An older independent test points the same way. Screaming Frog compared 25 UK sites with their Google Analytics visits: against a real 13.4 million, Ahrefs came in 17% low, Semrush 30% low and SimilarWeb 17% high (Screaming Frog, 2016). The practical rule has not changed: use third-party traffic to compare sites with each other, and your own Search Console to know your own numbers.

5. The free data has holes too

Search Console is first-party, but not complete. Google hides queries that "aren't issued by more than a few dozen users over a two-to-three month period", and the share of clicks behind them is large: 46.77% across 887,534 properties and 22 billion clicks in April 2025, up from 46.08% in 2022 (Patrick Stox, Ahrefs, February 2026). The interface exports 1,000 rows; the API gives 50,000 rows a day per site and search type (Google Search Central, October 2022).

6. AI search is the new column

Two things changed the comparison in 2025 and 2026. The search engines started reporting AI answers themselves: Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report (public preview, 10 February 2026) counts citations in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, and Search Console's generative AI performance reports (announced 3 June 2026, for all sites by 31 August) count impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Neither reports clicks from those answers.

And the tools opened themselves to AI agents. An MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT or another agent call a tool directly — pull a report, run a check — instead of a person copying tables between windows. Ahrefs, Semrush, SE Ranking and Sitebulb list one on their own pages; GLLmolfar runs one on your computer.

7. The ten, one by one

Google Search Console. Free, first-party: queries, clicks, impressions, Google's indexing verdict per URL, and now AI impressions. Cannot see competitors; hides anonymized queries; 1,000-row exports in the interface. Every stack starts here. Glossary: Search Console.

Bing Webmaster Tools. Free, first-party for Bing, and the only tool that counts AI citations from an assistant's own logs. Bing is the smaller engine, but its index also feeds Copilot. Glossary.

Ahrefs. The largest link index we could verify, Site Explorer, keywords, Site Audit and Brand Radar for AI answers. A free tier ("Ahrefs Free") covers your verified sites, with 5,000 crawl credits per project a month. Paid plans start at $29 a month (Starter) as listed on 8 November 2026; MCP and API from Lite at $129.

Semrush. The broadest suite: keywords, ads, content, local and AI visibility in every plan. A free tier of 10 reports a day; the SEO plan is $139 a month ($117.33 billed yearly); MCP from Starter.

SE Ranking. Rank tracking first, now with AI visibility (25 prompts a day across five engines) and MCP credits in its Core plan, listed at €109 a month. A 14-day trial, no free tier.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider. The reference desktop crawler for Windows, macOS and Linux. Free up to 500 URLs; £199 per user a year. Even the free version connects to OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic and Ollama and finds similar pages by embeddings.

Sitebulb. A crawler that explains each finding, on the desktop or in its cloud. Lite audits up to 10,000 URLs, Pro up to 500,000; its MCP server works on every plan. A 14-day trial.

Moz Pro. The long-standing link index behind Domain Authority, keyword research and a site crawl; AI Visibility and an API MCP server are reported to be in beta; Moz's own pages would not load for us to check them or its prices.

PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse. Free lab tests plus Chrome users' field data for Core Web Vitals, one URL at a time. Lighthouse runs in Chrome DevTools, the command line or Node, so it fits a release pipeline.

GLLmolfar. A desktop crawler for Windows and Macs with Apple silicon: a full technical crawl with JavaScript rendering, AI-bot access per crawler in robots.txt, llms.txt, passages an assistant can quote, topics and near-duplicates from embeddings computed on your computer, and Search Console read into the app and kept there. Its local MCP server lets Claude Code, Codex or another agent start crawls, read the fix list and turn a finding into a Jira task. It is a free preview: builds are not code-signed yet, and it has months of history, not years.

8. The rating

Seven criteria, scored 0 to 10 from the official pages and weighted by how much each matters to a typical site; the total is out of 100. The weights favour breadth, which is why the two suites lead. If you need only one thing, read that column, not the total: for crawling, Screaming Frog, GLLmolfar and Sitebulb score 9–10 and the suites 6–7.

9. Where GLLmolfar fits

We built GLLmolfar for the column the suites leave thin: what is on every page of your site, read the way a search robot and an AI crawler read it, with the data kept on your computer and an AI agent able to work through it. It scores 9 for crawling and for agent access, and 3 for maturity, because it is a preview. It is not a replacement for Search Console or a link index, and it does not measure whether assistants mention you — it tells you whether they can read you. Use it beside one tool from the first two columns.

10. A set of tools for your job

The rating ranks tools; a stack is what you actually run. Three typical jobs, one tool per layer, using only what the vendors' own pages confirm.

Sources

All read on 8 November 2026 unless dated. Vendor pricing and feature pages: Ahrefs pricing, Ahrefs Free, Semrush prices, Semrush MCP, SE Ranking plans, Screaming Frog pricing, Sitebulb pricing, PageSpeed Insights API. Studies and reports are linked where they are cited. Moz's pages could not be loaded for checking, so its prices are left out.