Picked by use case, not by marketing budget.
ChatSEO is a chat-first SEO assistant for solo founders. It is good at what it does — summarizing your Search Console data and giving high-level advice in plain language. But it isn't built for developers, agencies running many sites, or anyone wiring SEO into automated workflows. Here are alternatives by what you actually need.
If you spend most of your ChatSEO time on site audits and you'd rather get JSON your code can act on, SEO Score API is the cheapest, fastest path. If you rely on ChatSEO for backlinks, keyword research, or rank tracking, no API-first tool will fully replace it.
Different shape. ChatSEO is a chat UI; SEO Score API is a REST API. If your goal is 'someone to talk to about my GSC data,' ChatSEO is built for that. If your goal is 'audits I can call from code, run in CI, or feed to an AI agent,' that's us. Many teams use both.
We focus on one thing — automated audits — and don't pay for chat UX, content writers, or seat-based licensing. Different scope, different price.
GSC integration is the next item on our productization sprint after this comparison page ships. When it lands, audited URLs will be enriched with their actual Search Console query data.
Yes — the Basic plan ($15/mo) and higher include observed-backlink lookups via /backlinks. The data is audit-fed (a sample, not Ahrefs-comprehensive) and we say so explicitly in every response. The dataset grows with every audit.
Run an audit before you commit to anything.