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CognitiveSEO

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Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: not determined

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by CognitiveSEO · cognitiveseo.com

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CognitiveSEO: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai CognitiveSEO: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai (dark)

Add ?theme=dark to the image address for dark backgrounds. The badge shows the category and the month of the latest evaluation, and EU-Made where that is the product’s provenance. It never shows a score.

CognitiveSEO at a glance

Vendor
CognitiveSEO
Headquarters
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026
Data hosting
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026
Free plan
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026
Panel verdict
The AI panel rates CognitiveSEO 2.5/5, the mean of 6 judges. CognitiveSEO is an SEO platform scored here across technical audit, keyword and content, rank and index data, reporting and API, data portability, sovereignty and pricing transparency. how scores are made
As of
Vendor pages captured 13 Oct 2026; evaluated by the panel 15 Oct 2026. all sources

CognitiveSEO alternatives, European ones first →

Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Agency Owner

Weighted verdict

Runs forty client sites and rebills the licence. Wants multi-client management, white-label reports a client can receive unedited, and per-seat costs that do not punish a growing team. Reads "contact us" on a pricing page as a margin problem.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Agency Owner

Panel median The Agency Owner This judge’s scores over the panel median. Each label opens its reasoning below.
Scores per criterion, in stars out of 5
Criterion Panel median The Agency Owner
Crawling & technical audit 3 of 5 3 of 5
Keyword research & content guidance 3 of 5 3 of 5
Rank tracking & index quality 2.5 of 5 3 of 5
Reporting, integrations & API 3 of 5 3.5 of 5
Data portability & exit 2 of 5 2 of 5
European sovereignty 0.5 of 5 1 of 5
Pricing transparency 0.5 of 5 0.5 of 5

Crawling & technical audit

How this is scored

Site crawling at real scale: what the crawler finds, how deeply it checks, whether Core Web Vitals and indexation problems are diagnosed rather than merely listed.

0 — No site crawler; the product is keyword data only.

3 — A crawler with a low page cap that reports broken links and missing tags, with no prioritisation and no rendering of JavaScript.

5 — Scheduled crawls at a stated page limit, JavaScript rendering, issue categories with severity, and Core Web Vitals pulled per template.

8 — Log-file or Search Console integration to compare what the crawler sees against what Google fetched, indexation and canonical diagnosis, structured-data validation, and issues prioritised by traffic impact rather than count.

10 — The audit is diagnostic rather than a list: crawl budget analysed, rendering differences surfaced, regressions detected between crawls with the deploy that caused them inferrable, and remediation guidance specific enough for a developer ticket.

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The Agency Owner

The crawler runs 100 pages to unlimited with JavaScript rendering, scheduled recrawls weekly to monthly, issue categories feeding a one-to-hundred health score, canonical and hreflang checks, a compare-crawls view and a Top 3 fixes list — real mid-table substance for forty sites. We found no public information on log-file or Search Console data to check what Google actually fetched, crawl budget analysis, structured-data validation, or issues ranked by traffic impact, so remediation stays a list rather than a diagnosis. The PageSpeed key being one I supply myself is handy for staging but the guidance is not developer-ticket specific. 2 8 1

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Keyword research & content guidance

How this is scored

Keyword discovery, intent classification, SERP feature analysis and on-page guidance — judged on the depth of the German-language data as much as the English.

0 — A keyword list with volumes from one source and no intent or difficulty signal.

3 — Volume and difficulty for major markets, with thin or stale German data and no SERP feature detail.

5 — Keyword research with volume, difficulty and intent across German and other EU markets, SERP feature presence, and basic on-page recommendations.

8 — Topic clustering, competitor gap analysis, SERP composition tracked over time, content briefs with entity coverage, and cannibalisation detection.

10 — Research and guidance close the loop: opportunity sized against realistic traffic, content scored against what currently ranks rather than against a keyword density heuristic, and recommendations that reference the specific pages in the customer's own site.

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The Agency Owner

Volume, a zero-to-hundred difficulty score and a three-way intent split of brand, informational and commercial are documented, topic clustering exists, and Content Assistant grades a page against keyword groups with green, orange and red markup — genuine on-page guidance rather than a density counter. We found no public information on SERP feature analysis, cannibalisation detection, or the depth of the German-language data beyond a localized search option, and the top 20, 50 or 100 Ranking Analysis is the only SERP composition on show. 3 4 5

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Rank tracking & index quality

How this is scored

The proprietary data: ranking accuracy and frequency, backlink index size and freshness. Scored on what the vendor documents about their own data, because nothing here can be verified from outside.

0 — Rankings and backlinks with no stated update frequency, no country or device granularity, and no documentation of how either is collected.

3 — Weekly rankings for one country and device, a backlink index with no stated refresh cadence or size.

5 — Daily rankings with country, language and device selection, local results, and a backlink index with a documented crawl frequency.

8 — Rankings at stated frequency across many locations including city-level, SERP feature attribution, backlink index size and refresh published, lost-and-found link detection, and historical data retained for the life of the account.

10 — The vendor is accountable for their own data: methodology documented, index size and freshness published and updated, historical rankings retained and exportable in full, and discrepancies against Search Console explained rather than hidden.

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The Agency Owner

Rankings are documented at a daily or weekly cadence on Google, Bing and Yahoo, desktop and mobile, universal or local, with history charts running back to the full tracked period and new-and-lost link alerts including a dedicated API command — an honest, documented core. We found no public information on the size or refresh cadence of the backlink index, the methodology behind the cognitiveSEO PageRank metric, SERP feature attribution, or city-level granularity. The indexation and malware check metered in credits scaled to referring subdomains is a cost coupling I cannot evaluate on the evidence. 5 8 6 2

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Reporting, integrations & API

How this is scored

Getting the data out and in front of someone: dashboards, white-label reporting for agencies, Search Console and analytics integration, and an API a team can build on.

0 — On-screen views only; export is a manual CSV and there is no API.

3 — Scheduled PDF reports and CSV export, one analytics integration, no API worth building against.

5 — Customisable dashboards, scheduled reports, Search Console and analytics integration, and a documented API with stated limits.

8 — White-label reporting with client access, data-warehouse or BigQuery export, multi-site and multi-client management, and an API with credit costs published per endpoint.

10 — The tool is a data source rather than a destination: full historical export in open formats, a versioned API with a deprecation policy, integrations the vendor maintains, and reporting an agency can hand a client unedited.

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The Agency Owner

White-label with a custom logo and subdomain, client and colleague accounts with limited or full access, one account dashboard spanning every campaign, shareable dashboard URLs and automated personalised PDF reports are the multi-client machinery I rebill against, and it is all documented. The API carries named commands across link, rank and social data with per-subscription credits and an error log, though the captured pages place it at higher-tier subscriptions, and we found no public information on per-endpoint credit costs, Search Console integration, or warehouse and BigQuery export. Usage history visible for only the last 30 days is thin for auditing what an integration actually did. 8 5 10 7

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Data portability & exit

How this is scored

Whether the ranking and crawl history — the only thing a multi-year subscription actually accumulates — remains the customer's when they leave.

0 — No bulk export; history is visible in the interface and nowhere else, and ends with the subscription.

3 — CSV export of current views only, with historical data capped or unavailable in bulk.

5 — Bulk export of rankings, keywords and crawl results including history, via interface or API.

8 — Complete historical export in open formats without credit metering that prices it out of reach, plus a documented retention period after cancellation.

10 — Exit is designed for: the full account exportable including every historical data point, API access sufficient to mirror the data continuously, and a stated grace period during which the archive remains retrievable.

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The Agency Owner

CSV export is per table, keyword suggestions go out as xls, and the API exposes campaign history, links and new-and-lost links, so a disciplined team could mirror rank history continuously — if they sit on the right subscription and manage credits. We found no public information on bulk export of crawl results, a documented retention period after cancellation, or a full-account export in open formats, so only part of the multi-year history is provably mine on the way out. 5 3 10 7

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European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where the account and crawl data live and who the contracting entity is. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline; weighted lower here than in categories holding personal data, because an SEO tool mostly holds the customer's own strategy rather than their customers' identities.

0 — Non-EU vendor and contracting entity, hosting unstated, subprocessors unnamed, and site or user data of unclear scope leaving the EU.

3 — EU hosting offered as an option while the contracting entity is non-EU, or the subprocessor list is absent.

5 — EU hosting as standard and an EU contracting entity, but parts of the chain are non-EU without an explained safeguard.

8 — EU hosting on named infrastructure, EU contracting entity, subprocessor list published, and any analytics or Search Console data handling described with its legal basis.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: vendor, entity, hosting and every subprocessor European, certification published, and a DPA that covers the crawl and analytics data the tool ingests.

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The Agency Owner

We found no public information on hosting location, the contracting entity, a subprocessor list, certification, or a data processing agreement covering the crawl and analytics data the tool ingests — everything this category needs is silent. An SEO tool mostly holds my clients' strategy rather than their end users' identities, so I weight this lightly, but silence on where the account data lives is still silence. 1 10

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Pricing transparency

How this is scored

The category where the headline price is least often the invoice. Whether a buyer can compute the real annual cost including keyword limits, crawl credits, API units, extra users and client seats — from public pages alone.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — A monthly headline exists, but keyword limits, crawl credits or the cost of an additional user are unstated — the invoice is unknowable.

5 — Tier prices public with the main limits given, but at least one commonly needed piece (extra seats, API credits, historical data) is unpriced or metered opaquely.

8 — Every tier priced publicly with keyword, crawl and API limits, overage rates, per-seat costs, minimum term and VAT treatment stated.

10 — Complete price computability: annual invoice derivable for a given keyword count, crawl volume, API usage and team size, with overage and every credit cost published.

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The Agency Owner

We found no public prices at all in the captured pages — not even a monthly headline per tier — so the annual cost for forty rebilled sites is not computable from public pages, which is exactly the margin problem I screen out. The credit machinery is documented, with one indexation credit covering up to 1000 referring subdomains, extra credits one-time and never refreshed, user counts limited by subscription and the API placed at the Premium subscription, but no credit carries a public price and more credits come from emailing support. Per-seat cost, minimum term and VAT treatment are unstated. 6 10 8 3

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Questions about CognitiveSEO

Is CognitiveSEO European?

Not determined: the vendor’s pages as captured do not say where CognitiveSEO is based.

Where does CognitiveSEO store data?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026.

Does CognitiveSEO have a free plan?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026.

What are the best alternatives to CognitiveSEO?

As of 21 Oct 2026, the panel rates SE Ranking (3/5), Semrush (3/5) and SISTRIX (3/5) highest among the other 32 SEO products evaluated. Ratings that look equal are rounded to half stars; the order uses the unrounded rating, then the name. The highest-rated European alternative is SISTRIX (EU-Made). Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made. The full list, with European products first: CognitiveSEO alternatives.

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

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Sources (10)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Vendor page cognitiveseo.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Crawling & technical audit — found from sitemap support.cognitiveseo.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Keyword research & content guidance — found from sitemap support.cognitiveseo.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Keyword research & content guidance — found from sitemap support.cognitiveseo.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  5. 5 Rank tracking & index quality — found from sitemap support.cognitiveseo.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  6. 6 Rank tracking & index quality — found from sitemap support.cognitiveseo.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  7. 7 Reporting, integrations & API — found from sitemap support.cognitiveseo.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Reporting, integrations & API — found from sitemap support.cognitiveseo.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  9. 9 Data portability & exit — found from sitemap support.cognitiveseo.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  10. 10 Data portability & exit — found from sitemap support.cognitiveseo.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →