Where the data comes from

We do not crawl Google. Almost nobody who says they do actually does at the scale they imply, and we would rather tell you who we buy from than let you assume something flattering.

The provider

Search data comes from DataForSEO, a wholesale provider used by a large number of SEO tools you have heard of. Two things come from them:

• Keyword metrics — volume, cost per click, competition, difficulty inputs, intent classification
• Live SERP results — the actual result page for a keyword, market and device at the moment we ask

What that means for accuracy

Volume is modelled. It comes ultimately from Google's own advertising data, rounded and bucketed. It is directionally reliable and precisely wrong. A keyword listed at 1,600 a month might be 1,300 or 2,000; it is not 16,000. Use it to compare candidates, not to forecast traffic to two significant figures.

Positions are real. A rank check is a live query at the moment it runs, from the market and device you configured. It is a genuine observation of the result page — with the usual caveat that Google personalises and localises, so no single number is the position for everybody.

Difficulty is derived. We compute it from link and authority signals in the vendor data using our own banding. It is not a vendor field passed through, and it is not comparable to another tool's number of the same name.

Freshness

Data	How fresh
Keyword metrics	Updated by the vendor monthly; cached by us for 24 hours
SERP positions	Live at the moment of the run; cached 10 minutes to absorb double-clicks
Saved keyword metrics	As of the last refresh, and the date is shown

Coverage

Around fifty country and language markets. Major markets support the full metric set; smaller ones return keywords and volumes but no difficulty or intent, and the market picker flags which is which before you spend anything. Rather than fabricate a plausible number for an unsupported market, we leave the cell empty.

The markup

We buy data at wholesale and sell it as credits at a markup. That markup is how the product exists: it pays for the hosting, the scheduler that runs your checks at 3am, the cache that stops you being billed twice for the same question, and the person who answers your email.

If paying no markup matters more to you than any of that, the honest answer is to run something self-hosted against your own DataForSEO account. We wrote that comparison here, including the parts where it beats us.

What we do not do

• We do not resell your data or your keyword lists to anyone
• We do not train anything on your projects
• We do not have a backlink index and are not building one — Ahrefs is the answer to that question