SEO Tools.

SEO tools can be divided into three groups. The first group provides measurements directly from the search engines: Google Search Console with clicks, impressions, positions and indexing status, Bing Webmaster Tools for Bing and the Google Business Profile with local metrics. These data are free and the most reliable source for your own website.

The second group checks the technology: crawlers such as Screaming Frog search a website like a search engine bot and find broken links, redirect chains, missing titles or duplicates. PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse measure loading time and Core Web Vitals. Google's Rich Results Test checks structured data.

The third group consists of paid databases such as SEMrush, Ahrefs or Sistrix. They estimate search volume, keyword difficulty, rankings and backlinks for any domain and thus make competitor comparisons possible. Their figures are extrapolations, not measurements. For the small Swiss market, search volumes in particular are uncertain; in our comparisons, SEMrush values were sometimes many times higher than those in the Google Keyword Planner.

For AI visibility, new tools are currently emerging that track whether a brand is named in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews. The methodology of these tools is still inconsistent; results depend heavily on the questions asked, the language and the location. A fixed, unchanging list of questions is therefore more important than the tool itself.