Third-party tools do not have access to Google ranking systems. Their scores, authority ratings, difficulty numbers, health percentages, are proprietary models built on their own crawls. They are useful for comparison and trend, not as targets.
What tools genuinely do well
- Finding technical faults at scale: broken links, redirect chains, missing tags, duplicate titles
- Tracking visible rank movements over time
- Estimating a competitive landscape
- Discovering queries you had not considered
What they cannot tell you
Whether Google considers your content helpful, why a specific page dropped, or what your “score” should be. A site can have a perfect health score and no traffic.
Alien Road recommends: report on Search Console data and use tools for diagnosis. We treat a tool “authority” number as an internal comparison only and never as a client KPI, because it measures the tool model of the web rather than your business. Clicks, impressions and conversions are the numbers that survive scrutiny.