Best Google SEO tools compared: which of Google's own tools answers which question

Google does not sell an SEO tool. It publishes four free ones, and between them they answer most of the questions a paid suite is bought for. The four are Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, the Rich Results Test and Keyword Planner, and the reason to start here is simple: three of them report Google's own data rather than a vendor's estimate of it.

The criterion on this page is what each tool can actually report, taken from Google's own documentation rather than from a feature grid, and the same test is applied to the paid tools and to us further down. Where Google's own set is enough, this page says buy nothing.

The four tools and the question each one answers

Start with Search Console, and the reason is not that it is free

It is the only tool reporting Google's own view of your site. A third party crawler infers what Google can see; Search Console shows you what Google holds. The URL Inspection tool goes furthest of all, because it returns the rendered HTML Google has for your page, which settles every argument about whether a JavaScript framework is costing you indexing.

Verify the property, read the page indexing report, and work through the not indexed reasons before you touch anything else on your site. A noindex tag you did not intend outranks every other finding in the building.

The limit worth knowing before you plan reporting around it

Google's documentation for the performance report lists the search types you can filter by: web, broken into text based and multimodal, plus image, video and news. Read on 21 October 2026, that documentation page mentions neither AI Mode nor AI Overviews anywhere in it, in the rendered text or in the raw HTML.

That is worth knowing in advance, because a reporting pack built on the assumption that Search Console will break out assistant appearances has to be rebuilt later. Treat the performance report as a report on Google Search, which is what it says it is, and get the assistant question answered somewhere else.

Where the paid suites earn their money against Google's free set

Three places, and only three. Somebody else's data, because Google shows you your own site by design. Scale, because a free crawl runs out above a few thousand URLs. And scheduling with history, because an audit you have to remember to run is not a process. Screaming Frog publishes exactly where that line sits for crawling: its page states a free limit of 500 URLs in a single crawl with no sign up, with saved crawls, configuration, JavaScript rendering and the API integrations behind the annual licence.

The question Google's tools do not report on, and who does

Search Console tells you how you did in Google Search results. It does not tell you what an assistant said when somebody asked it who to buy from, and that answer is written fresh for each asker and differs between apps, so there is no index of it to look up.

AI Knows Us measures that one thing. It reads five apps, which are ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, asks each of them the purchase questions you pick, and keeps the record of which names came back. Our pricing page states the unit: one credit buys one buyer question on one app once, most checks cost a single credit, Claude costs three, and a Visibility API appears on the larger plans. We do not sell any of the four Google tools above and nothing here is a substitute for them. Ahrefs publishes a larger reading of this surface than ours, covering AI Mode and Copilot which we do not read at all, and its Brand Radar page states its own per engine cost of 8 checks per update for Claude. Both numbers are published, which is what makes them worth comparing.

One Google report causes more confusion than all the others combined, and it is the one that explains why a page you can see is not in the index: crawled, currently not indexed, and the two sentences Google actually publishes about it. We measured durable inbound links across 1,655 tracked pages on this site on 21 October 2026 and 696 of them had none; that page was one, so this link is doing a second job.

Questions people ask about Google's own SEO tools

Is Search Console enough on its own?

For a small site, nearly. Add PageSpeed Insights for speed and a free crawler for structure and you have a complete technical capability for nothing. What you still lack is any view of a competitor, which Google will never give you.

Does Google publish a site score?

No, and that is the most useful sentence in this whole subject. Every score out of 100 you have seen is a vendor's weighting of its own issue list. Use the issue list and ignore the score.

Why do Keyword Planner numbers differ from a paid tool's?

Because they are different measurements. Planner reports its own grouped figures for a geography you select; a paid tool reports its own index with its own clickstream modelling. Pick one source for a decision and stay with it rather than averaging two.

Can Search Console show me AI Overview appearances?

Its documented search types are web, image, video and news, and the performance report documentation named none of the AI surfaces when we read it on 21 October 2026. Plan your reporting on what it documents rather than on what it might add.

Which Google tool should I run first after a site migration?

URL Inspection on your five most important pages, then the page indexing report, then the sitemaps report. A migration breaks indexing before it breaks anything else, and those three find it within ten minutes.