If you’re thinking about improving the SEO for your website, you might also be considering
advice from third parties and using third-party SEO services and tools. This guide provides our
recommendations for evaluating external SEO resources and tools to make sure they align with
official Google Search guidance.
Evaluate and verify external SEO advice against official Google guidelines
There’s plenty of third-party SEO advice on the internet related to SEO, search listings, and AI
experiences (sometimes called AEO for “answer engine optimization” or GEO for “generative engine
optimization”). While some advice is helpful, others may misinterpret or make claims about what
“Google says” or how Google ranking systems work. In general, good advice either qualifies their
claims as opinion based on data or experience, or backs up their claims by citing official Google
Search guidance.
We recommend carefully evaluating any advice you might be considering implementing against our
official SEO guidance, including our
guidance on optimizing for generative AI,
and making your own informed decisions.
Think critically about using third-party SEO tools and services
If you’re planning to do SEO yourself, you may be considering third-party SEO services and
tools, such as:
- Assisting in sitemap generation
- Establishing indexing directives
- Offering to generate “SEO-optimized” content for you
- Providing advice they claim will improve the ranking of your existing content
- Promising improvements for AI experiences and search formats (also known as “AEO” or “GEO” tools)
Some of these services may be helpful in your work, while others may make claims or imply that
what they do is somehow “acceptable” or “approved” by Google Search. Google doesn’t evaluate third-party
services, so be wary of such claims and those making them. Keep in mind that using a service or tool
doesn’t guarantee ranking success.
Some third-party services provide data that some users of those tools misinterpret as somehow being
from Google. Third-party tools don’t have access to our internal ranking data. They can’t guarantee
performance. Any predictions are their own and like predictions generally, may not happen.
Cómo lo aplicamos
Third-party tool scores are directional, not diagnostic. We report Search Console data as fact and tool metrics as estimates, and we tell clients explicitly when a competitor’s ‘authority score’ is a vendor’s model rather than something Google measures.
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