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3rd Party Tools Becoming Irrelevant. Change My Mind.
Posted by on November 9, 2025 at 11:03 amI've been in SEO 10+ years. I run a digital marketing agency & I have been an advocate for Ahrefs since day 1.
However, a tool I would religiously use daily, I now glance at for 5 minutes once a week & get no value from… for a hefty price tag (which also increased last year).
Keyword data was always taken with a pinch of salt, but it was especially powerful for specific use cases, such as large e-commerce sites where you need to compare an underperforming category against a competitor – now this data is wiped out – I find little to no value. I know if a keyword is on the first page from many other free places.
Reporting on backlinks is pointless as it's just manipulated to shit & anyway you should be focused on trust, authority & brand building over DA nonsense.
It feels like these tools are scrambling to stay in the game (Ahrefs social media manager?? Ick.)
AI "mentions" are just a gimmick. It could work for RAG (which Google baso is now anyway) but how can you report on something so intricate such as natural language, where the exact same conversation can output different results every time based on so many factors?
GSC, Screaming Frog & GA will continue to be my gods & I actually love the data accuracy improvements since the scraping changes, as impressions & position are finally close to being accurate.
Ahrefs currently feels like that girlfriend I know I should dump, but she keeps guilt-tripping me.
What solutions have you found?
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1 Reply
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with the last update & the num=100 there’s no point in using semrush… apart from seeing volumes or KD. And the AI views or questions that come from AI tools can be saw in GSC, just filter with regex for queries longer than 10 characters and you have them.
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>currently feels like that girlfriend I know I should dump, but she keeps guilt-tripping me.
That’s the “SEO services” in a nutshell.
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Sedestral, a modern SEO tool designed for modern SEO while a lot of great tools remained stuck in 2015
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Same: GSC + GA4 + Google ads keywords tool + screaming frog
That’s 95% of the job.
I have a client that has a semrush account, it’s cool to spy your competition once in a while, ok for position reports and that kind of things but too expensive for what it is IMO. Not a staple.
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Feeling similar, we use SEMrush but same case here
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With respect to AI, what’s important is the underlying knowledge that the AI systems have, and if you can get that accurate + well populated, then it will be expressed into all the different forms of answers.
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So they are called the tools, data accuracy cannot be expected to these 3rd party tools, my website traffic never matched in SEMrush and Ahref. So I used to use these tools only for the overview not for sure.
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I dropped to the <$40 a month Ahrefs plan but can’t give it up since I love their dashboard so much for quick metrics and technical health. I like seeing the 100 health scores lined up on the left and when one changes I know to jump right in it. It’s worth it for that alone.
I love their site scans and quick and easy view of any issue.
I use SERankings for organic rankings and automated white label reporting… and their app is great for a fast view of kw rankings and I often take screen shots of those to touch base with clients.
Drop BrightLocal in for LocalSEO and that rounds out my big 3 toolset for tracking and reporting.
For keyword research… combine top level research data from the paid tools with a check in Goggle Ads Keyword Planner to verify. -
I agree with your gods. I will add my newly favored god, Bing webmaster.
I too am using semrush, Uber suggest, and to the public, ahrefs, and moz even less these days and am contemplating canceling some of them.
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Ya, I dumped those paid tools years ago.
I don’t even link build much anymore either.Seems a lot of their business are people new to marketing looking for any kind of edge they can find to make up for their ignorance.
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What would you suggest as a work around then for KW research? While their rank tracker is useless these days Ahrefs is good for SERP analysis and understanding KD etc
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100% I have a similar take. Absolutely zero value left in these tools.
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Whats changed in SEO for you to say that the things you used to use in Ahrefs are no longer necessary or do you think you’ve changed how you do things that no longer need them?
With AI visibility – do you think its important to see how you rank for different prompts?
I still maintain SERP tracking because for me the SERPs underpin the AI visibility
Screaming frog is something hopefully we will never need
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For me since 2016 they never worked. I didn’t understand why people pay for these tools. Everything was just afiliate marketing promoting them.
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