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Search engine optimisation software, an SEO tool and an SEO platform compared, and what each word changes about the purchase

The three words describe three different purchases with different licences, different billing and different failure modes. Here is which one you are actually shopping for, and the one case where the cheapest word is the right answer.

Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 22 October 2026

People use software, tool and platform as if they were synonyms for the same purchase. Vendors do not. The word in the product name tells you how it is licensed, how it bills you, and what happens when you stop paying, and those three things decide more about your experience than any feature list.

The criterion on this page: what do you still have on the day you stop paying? It is checkable from each vendor's own page, it applies to every product in the category, and it separates the three words cleanly.

The three purchases

WordWhat it usually meansWhat you keep if you stop payingRight when
Software, usually desktopA program you install, which runs on your machine and crawls from your own connection. Screaming Frog and Sitebulb Desktop are the clear examples. Screaming Frog publishes a free 500 URL crawl limit and puts saved crawls, scheduling and JavaScript rendering behind the licence, read 21 October 2026. Sitebulb publishes Desktop as an install for Windows or Mac.Your exported crawls and reports, and often a version of the program that still opens them. The data was on your disk the whole time.You audit sites, you want the crawl to come from your own machine, and you care about keeping the evidence.
Tool, usually a single jobOne narrow job done well, in a browser or as an extension. A keyword checker, a density counter, a SERP preview, a schema validator.Nothing, and it rarely matters, because the job was a five minute answer and not an archive.You need one answer this afternoon. Buy nothing annual for this.
Platform, usually a subscription suiteA hosted account holding your projects, your tracked keywords, your crawl history and your reports. Semrush publishes an entry SEO tier at 5 websites to monitor and 500 keywords tracked daily, read 21 October 2026. Moz Pro, Ahrefs and Rank Math Pro work the same way; Rank Math publishes an agency tier supporting 500 client websites and 50,000 tracked keywords.Only what you exported. Your history, your tracked lists and your crawl archive are in their account, not yours.Several people need the same numbers, or you need a history longer than your memory.

Where the platform word earns its price, and where it does not

It earns it when more than one person has to read the same figure, because the real product of a suite is a shared place to look. It also earns it when you need history: a tracked keyword list with two years behind it cannot be recreated later at any price, which is the single strongest argument for staying subscribed to one.

It does not earn it when one person uses two of the twelve modules. That is the common case and it is where desktop software plus one month of an index beats a yearly platform on both cost and quality of answer. A crawler that runs on your machine has no row limit imposed by a plan tier, which is why agencies that own a platform still keep a desktop crawler.

The export question, asked before you sign

Ask any platform vendor two things: can I export the raw rows rather than a PDF, and does my tracked keyword history come with me. The answer is usually yes to the first and no to the second. Knowing that in advance turns a subscription into a decision rather than a habit, and it is the reason a quarterly export into your own spreadsheet is worth the twenty minutes.

The one check none of these tools runs, and who sells it

Every tool on this page measures a search engine. None of them measures the other place your buyer now asks, which is an assistant: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews compose an answer for each asker, naming some businesses and not others, and there is no index a crawler can read to find out whose name came up. No word in the three above covers it. It is not software you install, it is not a one job tool, and the suites that have added it have added it as a module beside twelve others.

AI Knows Us sells that one measurement and nothing else. We are not an SEO tool and we are not in the ranking above, because a buyer who came here for a crawler or a keyword index should buy one of the tools named above instead. What we do is ask your buyer question in all five apps on a schedule and record which businesses were named. Our own figures, from the rendered text of our llms.txt read on 21 October 2026: one credit is one buyer question on one app once, most checks cost one credit and a Claude check costs three because Claude costs more to run. The published US floor is $149 a month for SEO Start, and that same file says SEO Start watches 0 buyer questions on 0 engines, so it is a demand harvest rather than an engine watch. The first tier that watches the five engines is Growth at $299 with 100 buyer questions and 1,200 scheduled answers a month. A managed option is published in rupees only, Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month at a three month minimum, so we are not going to convert it for you.

Where the tools on this page beat us, plainly. Ahrefs Brand Radar, read on 21 October 2026, tracks prompts on ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude. AI Mode and Copilot are two surfaces we do not read at all, and its page publishes an overage price of $0.020 per check and the cost of a Claude update at 8 checks, which is a level of unit disclosure worth holding every vendor to, us included. Semrush, whose SEO and AI search pricing page we read the same day, sells AI visibility inside the suite you may already be paying for, with 50 prompts tracked daily and 300 AI visibility reports a day on its Starter tier. Moz now publishes AI Explorer, described on moz.com as showing what the top AI agents say about your brand. If you already pay one of those three, their module is the cheaper route and you should take it. We are the single purpose option for somebody who does not want a suite.

A note on the words themselves

No competitor price table is reproduced on this page. What is quoted instead is the published limit that sets a tier, because a limit is the vendor's own statement of what you get and it does not move with the country you are reading from. That matters more than it sounds: on 21 October 2026 a fetch of one vendor's US pricing page from this machine returned Indian rupee prices, because the request left from an Indian address. A 200 response can still be the wrong page.

One more honest point about this vocabulary: "website optimisation" is drifting. Half the market now uses it for conversion testing rather than search, so a tool sold as website optimisation software may be an A B testing product with no search features at all. Read the first screenshot on the page before you read the price.

If what you actually want is one account that covers everything rather than three: all in one SEO platforms compared, and where one suite is enough. On 21 October 2026 we read every link we could see on this site, 2,169 page bodies in all, against 2,082 live pages, and 935 of them, 44.9 percent, had no inbound link from any of those bodies. That figure is an upper bound rather than a count. No other page on this site links to the one above.

Common questions about SEO software and platforms

Is SEO software different from an SEO tool?

In practice yes. Software is usually installed and licensed, a tool is usually one job in a browser, and a platform is a hosted subscription holding your data. The words are not standardised, so check how it is delivered rather than what it is called.

Can I do SEO with free software only?

Almost all of it. The gap is competitor link and keyword data, which requires somebody else's crawl of the web and is the one thing nobody gives away at useful depth.

Does a platform replace a crawler?

Not for large sites. Hosted crawls are metered by plan tier and desktop crawls are limited by your own machine, which is usually the more generous of the two.

What happens to my data if I cancel?

Assume you keep only what you exported. Export quarterly, as rows rather than reports, and the question stops mattering.

Is annual billing worth the discount?

Only once you have run a month and can name the decision it changed. A yearly licence for a tool you open twice is not a saving.

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