SEO Strategy

Updated 21 September 2026 7 min read

The 6 Google SEO Tools Everyone Uses - And the One Thing They All Miss

Google's free SEO toolkit is genuinely solid, and Search Console now exposes some Google AI Search performance. The remaining blind spot is broader: none of the stack tells you how your business performs across the other answer engines, who gets named instead, or which sources keep shaping those answers.

Key Takeaways

The 6 free Google SEO tools - Search Console, GA4, PageSpeed Insights, Google Business Profile, Keyword Planner, and Google Trends - are genuinely useful and worth using.
All six remain Google-centric. Search Console now reports impressions and clicks from supported Google Search AI experiences, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, but it does not measure your visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or the Gemini app.
A growing share of consumers now use AI tools for local business recommendations - a channel your current Google SEO tools stack has zero visibility into.
AI answer visibility is not captured by Google SEO tools alone. You need direct answer-engine measurement plus checks on provider-specific search access, content extractability, entity clarity and external corroboration. llms.txt is optional housekeeping, not a proven ranking signal.
SearchScore audits all of these signals for free, scoring your site 0-100 with a prioritised fix list.

If you work in SEO or run a business with any online presence, you almost certainly have Google Search Console open in a browser tab right now. These six Google SEO tools - Search Console, GA4, PageSpeed Insights, Google Business Profile, Keyword Planner, and Google Trends - have become the default starting point for anyone trying to understand their search visibility.

And rightly so. They are powerful, free, and deeply integrated into how Google thinks about quality and relevance. But the limitation is now more specific than it used to be. Search Console has begun exposing performance from Google’s own generative AI Search experiences, while the rest of the stack remains focused on Google. None gives you a cross-engine view of what ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or the Gemini app says about you.

That gap matters more than most businesses realise. Here is an honest look at what each tool does well - and what the whole toolkit leaves out. For more on AI search and GEO, browse the full SearchScore blog.

What Do the 6 Free Google SEO Tools Actually Do Well?

1. Google Search Console

Search Console is the closest thing to ground truth for your Google performance. It shows you which queries are driving impressions and clicks, which pages are indexed (and which are not), Core Web Vitals status, mobile usability issues, and manual actions from Google’s reviewers. As of 31 August 2026, its Generative AI performance report also shows impressions and clicks from supported Google Search AI experiences, currently AI Overviews and AI Mode. That is important progress, but it remains Google-specific: it does not show how ChatGPT or Perplexity answers, which competitors were recommended instead, or Google’s private contribution calculation.

2. Google Analytics 4

GA4 answers a different question: once people arrive on your site, what do they do? Traffic sources, conversion events, user engagement, session duration, and revenue attribution all live here. The transition from Universal Analytics was painful for many teams, but GA4’s event-driven model is genuinely more flexible for measuring complex user journeys. It is indispensable for tying organic search performance to business outcomes - not just traffic numbers.

3. PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights runs Google’s Lighthouse audits against a real URL and returns your Core Web Vitals scores - Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift - along with field data from real Chrome users via the CrUX dataset. Since Core Web Vitals became a ranking signal, this tool moved from “nice to check” to “critical to monitor.” Slow pages cost rankings. This tool tells you exactly where the problems are.

4. Google Business Profile

For any business with a physical location or local service area, Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is the engine behind your Google Maps and local pack visibility. Keeping it accurate - correct category, updated hours, fresh photos, active review responses - has a direct effect on whether you appear when someone searches for your type of business near them. It is free, high-impact, and still neglected by a surprising number of local businesses.

5. Google Keyword Planner

Originally built for Google Ads, Keyword Planner is useful for SEO because it surfaces search volume data and keyword ideas straight from Google’s own index. It is not the deepest keyword research tool available - Ahrefs and Semrush provide significantly more detail - but for understanding the rough scale of demand around a topic, or finding keyword variations you had not considered, it remains a practical free option, particularly for smaller teams without paid tool budgets.

6. Google Trends

Trends answers questions about relative search interest over time rather than absolute volume. Is this topic growing or declining? Is there a seasonal spike every December? How does one term compare to another in different regions? For content planning, campaign timing, and spotting emerging topics before they peak, Trends is genuinely useful - and underused by most SEO practitioners who could get more from it with a bit of deliberate exploration.

What Are All 6 Google SEO Tools Missing?

Here is what the Google stack still will not tell you: whether ChatGPT recommends your business when someone asks for a service like yours, whether Perplexity cites your content, whether Claude or the Gemini app names you, which competitors appear instead, or which third-party sources repeatedly surround those recommendations.

Search Console’s new Generative AI performance report narrows the old blind spot for Google’s own Search AI surfaces. If one of your links is shown in AI Overviews or AI Mode, that impression can now be reported. But that is not the same as a cross-engine recommendation report, and it is not the same as Google’s new AI Contribution pilot, which separately values content Google judges to have helped generate an answer. We explain that distinction in Google AI Contribution: why Google is paying publishers that shape AI answers.

The remaining gap is structural, not accidental. Google’s tools are built to measure Google. They were never designed to tell you what happens when a user opens ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity and asks an assistant to recommend a dentist, solicitor, plumber or SaaS product. Those outcomes are measurable, but you have to measure the answer engines themselves. Here is what the six-tool stack still does not give you:

Whether a relevant search/discovery crawler is blocked - OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot are examples of provider-specific search agents. GPTBot and ClaudeBot are separate training crawlers; Google Search AI features use Googlebot rather than Google-Extended.
Whether your content is JS-gated and invisible to AI crawlers - AI bots, like all crawlers, struggle with JavaScript-rendered content. If your key pages only become visible after a JS framework loads, there is a meaningful chance AI engines are not reading them at all.
Whether your structured data is accurate - Schema.org markup can make entities and page types explicit to systems that consume it. Missing Organisation or FAQPage markup may be a semantic gap where those types are appropriate, but schema is not proof of credibility or a guaranteed AI-citation factor.
Whether you maintain an llms.txt file - This optional convention can provide a curated content map to compatible agents. Google Search explicitly says it does not use llms.txt, so its absence should not be treated as a Google or universal AI-search visibility problem.
Whether you have meaningful brand presence across the open web - AI systems are trained on the breadth and consistency of how your brand appears across third-party sources. This is a different signal from Google’s link graph, and it is not tracked by any Google tool.

The bottom line: a website can rank on page one of Google, and even earn Google AI Search impressions, while remaining invisible to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or the Gemini app. Search Console’s new report is valuable for Google’s own surfaces. It does not remove the need for direct cross-engine measurement.

What Is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of optimising a website to appear in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Unlike traditional SEO, which targets ranked link lists on a results page, GEO targets the synthesised answers that AI engines generate - where only a handful of sources get cited per query, and everything else receives zero visibility.

GEO and traditional SEO overlap heavily in crawlability, content quality, site structure and authority. What Google SEO tools do not tell you is whether the target answer engines actually name or cite you, which competing sources they use, and whether provider-specific search crawlers can reach the pages you want surfaced. That direct answer measurement is the real additional layer.

Understanding GEO is increasingly important for any business that relies on search-driven discovery. It is not a replacement for your existing Google SEO tools stack - it is the missing layer on top of it.

What Does AI Search Actually Look For?

AI search engines evaluate websites differently from Google’s algorithm. Understanding those signals is the first step to optimising for them.

llms.txt - optional agent-readiness, not robots.txt for AI

llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file at a domain root that can give compatible tools a curated summary and links to important pages. It does not control crawling and should not be described as the AI equivalent of robots.txt. SearchScore publishes one because the maintenance cost is low and it supports agent-readiness, but Google Search says it does not use the file and no universal citation advantage is established.

AI-readable structured data

Organisation, Article, Person, Product and FAQPage are standard Schema.org types that can make entities and content relationships explicit where they accurately match the visible page. They do not verify a business to every AI engine or feed answers directly into a citation system. Their defensible value is semantic clarity and, for supported Google types, eligibility for relevant search features.

EEAT signals

Google’s E-E-A-T language comes from its own quality guidance and should not be presented as a published ranking framework for every answer engine. Clear authorship, sources, original research and editorial accountability are still sensible trust signals for people and retrieval systems, but their weight varies by engine and query.

AI crawler access in robots.txt

Review robots.txt and your edge rules by documented crawler role. If ChatGPT search visibility matters, check OAI-SearchBot; for Claude search, check Claude-SearchBot; for Perplexity, check PerplexityBot. Review GPTBot and ClaudeBot separately as training choices. Correcting a genuine search-crawler block is high priority, but it is not automatically the single highest-impact fix on every site.

Server-rendered content

If your site relies heavily on JavaScript frameworks to render content client-side, key information may not be present in the initial HTML response that AI crawlers see. Server-side rendering (SSR) or static generation ensures that your content is visible in the raw HTML - no JS execution required. This is particularly important for product pages, service descriptions, and any content you want AI engines to cite.

Brand citations across the open web

AI models are trained on large corpora of web content. The more consistently and positively your brand appears across trusted third-party sources - industry publications, directories, review platforms, news mentions - the more evidence AI systems have that you are a credible, citable entity. A brand that exists exclusively on its own website is much harder for AI to corroborate. Building that external presence is a slower process than technical fixes, but it has compounding returns over time.

How Do You Fill the Gap in Your Google SEO Tools Stack?

The six Google tools covered above are worth using. Keep using them. But treat them as half the picture rather than the whole one.

The other half requires direct answer-engine measurement plus checks Google Search Console was not designed to provide: provider-specific search crawler access, renderability, entity consistency, answer extractability, external corroboration and the sources each engine actually cites. llms.txt can be recorded as optional housekeeping, not a primary visibility signal.

Many readiness defects are straightforward to fix, but the useful sequence depends on what the audit actually finds. The gap in a Google-only toolset is not that it fails to check a magic list of AI signals; it is that it does not measure whether the business is being named in answer engines or which external sources are shaping those answers.

Google’s tools tell you how you look from Google’s perspective. SearchScore tells you how you look from the perspective of every AI engine that is increasingly influencing where your next customer decides to go. Both matter. Right now, most businesses are only measuring one of them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do Google SEO tools measure AI search visibility?

Partly. Google Search Console now reports impressions and clicks from supported generative AI experiences on Google Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode. It still does not tell you whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or the Gemini app names your business, which competitors appear instead, or which external sources shape those answers. Cross-engine AI visibility therefore still needs direct answer-engine measurement.

What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of improving and measuring how a business appears in AI-generated answers from tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI features. It shares most of its technical and content foundations with SEO, then adds direct answer measurement, provider-specific retrieval checks and analysis of the external sources engines rely on.

How can I check if ChatGPT or Perplexity recommend my business?

You can test manually by asking ChatGPT (with Browse enabled) or Perplexity to recommend businesses in your category or location. For a structured audit covering all AI visibility signals - robots.txt crawler access, llms.txt, structured data, EEAT content, brand authority and technical health - run your free SearchScore audit. It scores your site 0-100 across eight categories and provides a prioritised fix list.

What is llms.txt and why does it matter for SEO?

llms.txt is a proposed machine-readable content-map convention. Unlike robots.txt, it does not control crawler access. It can be useful for compatible agent workflows, but Google Search says it does not use the file and no controlled evidence shows that publishing it creates an early-mover citation advantage.