# 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.

Published: 2026-08-20T11:00:00.000Z

Canonical: https://thatseoagent.com/en/blog/google-on-judging-seo-tools

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

:::faq
### 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](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/third-party-seo) — every claim quoted above
- [Do you need an SEO?](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/do-i-need-seo) — updated alongside it, on evaluating an SEO you hire
- [Google Search Essentials](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials) — including the statement that Google does not guarantee crawling, indexing or serving
- [Search Console](https://search.google.com/search-console/about) — the data source Google recommends preferring