Google wrote a page about how to judge tools like ours
Search Central now publishes guidance on evaluating third-party SEO tools and advice. Applied honestly, it is uncomfortable for most of the category, including us. Here is our answer to it.
In June 2026 Google added a page to Search Central called “Google Search's guidance on using third-party SEO tools, services, and advice”. It is short, and it is aimed squarely at the industry that sells things to site owners.
We sell one of those things. So rather than summarising it as though it were about somebody else, here is the guidance and our answer to each part of it.
What the page actually says
Three claims do most of the work.
Third-party tools do not have access to Google's internal ranking data, and cannot guarantee performance. Google does not evaluate third-party services, so any suggestion that a tool is Google-endorsed should be treated with suspicion. And the recommended primary source is Search Console, because it “provides you with key information and data directly from Google Search itself”.
The section carrying the argument is titled “Think critically about using third-party SEO tools and services”, and the practical instruction is to check a tool's recommendations against Google's official guidance before making significant changes to a site.
None of that is controversial. It is only awkward because a good part of the category is built on the opposite assumption.
Applied to us, honestly
Where our numbers come from. Most of what this product reports is not ours. Search Console data, GA4 data, PageSpeed data: those come from Google's own APIs, and we are a reader of them. That is the category Google is pointing at when it says to prefer data directly from Search.
Which numbers we invented. Some of them are ours, and it would be dishonest to blur that. An E-E-A-T score, a GEO or AI-visibility score, a schema completeness check — those are our opinions, expressed as numbers because numbers are easier to act on than paragraphs. Google does not publish an E-E-A-T score. Nobody has one. Ours is a structured reading of your page against published guidance, and the correct way to read it is “this is what one opinionated tool thinks”, not “this is your standing with Google”.
What we will not claim. No internal ranking signals, because nobody outside Google has them. No guaranteed outcomes, because the platform itself declines to guarantee that it will crawl, index or serve any given page. No Google endorsement, of any kind, ever.
Diagnostic only, on purpose. This product reads and reports; it does not change your site. That is partly a safety decision and partly this: a tool that both invents a score and then acts on it has removed the one step where a practitioner's judgement was supposed to happen.
The part that cuts deepest
The instruction to check a tool's recommendations against Google's own documentation is the sharpest thing on the page, because most audit findings do not survive it.
Try it on your last report. For each issue it raised, find the Google documentation that says it matters. A surprising share of them resolve to conventions, tool defaults, or things that were true in 2016. Some of them are real and urgent. The point of the exercise is that you cannot tell which from the severity badge, because the severity badge was assigned by the vendor.
We would rather you ran that exercise on our output than not. A finding we cannot attribute to published guidance is a finding we should not be reporting, and the rule we hold our own analyzers to is that one: every claim maps to a Google Search Central document, or it is labelled as our reading rather than as a fact.
What this means for choosing anything
Four questions, all answerable in an afternoon:
- Which of these numbers come from Google's APIs, and which did the vendor invent?
- For each recommendation, is there a Google document that says it matters?
- Does the tool distinguish “we measured this” from “we think this”?
- What does it refuse to claim?
The last one is the most informative and the least asked. A tool that claims nothing is useless, and a tool that claims everything is worse than useless, because you have to audit its output before you can use it — at which point you have done the work twice.
Frequently asked questions
Does Google endorse any SEO tool?
No. The guidance says Google does not evaluate third-party services and to be wary of claims that suggest otherwise. Any badge, certification or wording implying Google approval of a tool is the vendor's own.
Can a tool see my rankings the way Google does?
No. Third-party tools have no access to Google's internal ranking data. Rank trackers sample results from outside; they are estimates of a personalised, localised, changing surface, not a readout of your position.
So are third-party tools useless?
No, and the page does not say that. It says to think critically and to check recommendations against official guidance. Tools are good at gathering, comparing and noticing at a scale a person cannot. What they cannot do is tell you what Google thinks, and the ones that pretend to are the problem.
What should I use as my primary data source?
Search Console, per Google's own recommendation, because it is data from Search itself. Tools are most defensible when they read that data and help you interpret it, rather than substituting their own measurements for it.
Is an SEO score a real thing?
Not as a Google metric. Any score out of 100 is a vendor's model of quality. That can be genuinely useful as a checklist with a number attached, as long as everyone involved knows whose opinion it encodes.
Sources
- Google Search's guidance on using third-party SEO tools, services, and advice — every claim quoted above
- Do you need an SEO? — updated alongside it, on evaluating an SEO you hire
- Google Search Essentials — including the statement that Google does not guarantee crawling, indexing or serving
- Search Console — the data source Google recommends preferring