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SpyFu

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Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: 2 of 6 dimensions proven

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

by SpyFu · www.spyfu.com

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SpyFu: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai SpyFu: 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.

SpyFu at a glance

Vendor
SpyFu
Headquarters
Incorporated in United States source, captured 3 Nov 2026
Data hosting
Outside the EU by default source, captured 3 Nov 2026
Free plan
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 3 Nov 2026
Panel verdict
The AI panel rates SpyFu 2/5, the mean of 6 judges. Technical audit, SpyFu's strongest area, scored 6: scheduled crawls with a stated default of 100 pages, a JavaScript rendering toggle, sitemap validation, and pre-written, revertible auto-fixes sorted by impact. how scores are made
As of
Vendor pages captured 3 Nov 2026; evaluated by the panel 4 Nov 2026. all sources

SpyFu alternatives, European ones first →

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

The In-House SEO Lead

Weighted verdict

Owns organic traffic for one large German site and reports on it monthly. Wants German-language keyword data that is not an afterthought, rankings she can defend when they disagree with Search Console, and audit findings specific enough to become a developer ticket.

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

Scored by The In-House SEO Lead

Panel median The In-House SEO Lead 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 In-House SEO Lead
Crawling & technical audit 3 of 5 3 of 5
Keyword research & content guidance 2.5 of 5 2.5 of 5
Rank tracking & index quality 2.5 of 5 2.5 of 5
Reporting, integrations & API 2.5 of 5 2.5 of 5
Data portability & exit 2 of 5 1.5 of 5
European sovereignty 0 of 5 0 of 5
Pricing transparency 0.5 of 5 1 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 or audit; the product is keyword, rank or backlink data only.

3 — A site audit that crawls pages and reports broken links, missing tags and redirect problems.

5 — Scheduled site audits with a stated page limit, issues grouped by category and severity with fix hints, and page speed or Core Web Vitals reported.

8 — JavaScript rendering, log-file or Search Console integration to compare what the crawler sees against what Google fetched, indexation and canonical diagnosis, structured-data validation, crawl comparison over time, 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 In-House SEO Lead

Scheduled crawls with a stated, adjustable page limit (100 pages by default), issues grouped into errors, warnings and notices plus action categories including an explicit Developer Fix group, and pre-written, revertible auto-fixes give me findings close to what a developer ticket needs. JavaScript rendering can be toggled on, sitemaps are validated against the crawl, and indexable versus non-indexable pages are separated, which takes this past a standard audit. We found no public information on Core Web Vitals or page speed measurement, Search Console or log-file comparison, structured-data validation or crawl-budget analysis, and a 100-page default crawl is small for a large site. 1 3 4

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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 — No keyword research or content guidance; the product is a crawler or rank tracker only.

3 — Keyword suggestions with search volume, for at least one market.

5 — Keyword research with volume, difficulty and search intent for Germany and other markets, SERP features shown per keyword, and on-page or content recommendations.

8 — Topic clustering, competitor keyword gap analysis, SERP composition tracked over time, content briefs or a writing assistant scored on entity or topic 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 In-House SEO Lead

Ranking difficulty, estimated monthly clicks and a per-keyword SERP breakdown covering ads, social pages, homepages and.edu/.gov results, plus AI on-page recommendations tied to primary and secondary target keywords, show real research depth, with domain diversity tracked over time and an icon flagging when one domain holds multiple positions. What I cannot credit is German-market depth: we found no public information on country-level or German-language keyword coverage, search intent classification, topic clustering or content briefs, and for a German-language property that silence matters as much as any feature. 3 5 6

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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 — No rank tracking and no backlink data; the product is an audit or content tool only.

3 — Rank tracking for chosen keywords in a chosen country, or a backlink checker.

5 — Rank tracking with country, device and update frequency selectable or stated (daily or weekly), local results, and a backlink database with referring domains and new and lost links.

8 — Daily rankings across many locations including city level, SERP feature attribution, backlink index size and refresh frequency published, 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 In-House SEO Lead

The index scale is published — over 7.2 trillion results across 152 million domains, with monthly updates and roll-ups and live ranking data — and the scope limit is stated openly: only the top 50 organic and top 23 paid results are collected, which is even used to explain why a site might rank on more terms than they list. That candour is exactly what I need when defending numbers against Search Console. We found no public information on country or device selection, local results or any backlink index, and historical retention is documented only for ads. 7 8 9

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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 — No reports, exports or integrations of any kind; results can only be viewed on screen.

3 — Reports as PDF or CSV export, and a Google Search Console or analytics connection.

5 — Customisable or scheduled reports, Search Console and Google Analytics integration, and an API or a Looker Studio connector documented.

8 — White-label reporting with client access, data-warehouse or BigQuery export, multi-site and multi-client management, and an API with its limits and 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 In-House SEO Lead

Customisable PDF reports with section selection and ready-to-send output, plus a documented, free version 1 API that can reproduce every My SpyFu action programmatically, cover the two things I need for a monthly cycle. We found no public information on scheduled report delivery, white-labelling, Search Console or Google Analytics connections, or published API rate limits and credit costs, so the agency-grade reporting story is not documented. 2 9 10 12

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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 — The vendor states that data cannot be exported at all.

3 — CSV or Excel export of the current reports and keyword lists.

5 — Export of rankings, keywords and audit results including historical data, through the interface or an 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 In-House SEO Lead

Keyword lists can be exported whole or filtered from the interface, and the project management API gives programmatic access to My SpyFu actions. We found no public information on exporting historical rankings or audit results, on open export formats, or on any retention period after cancellation — for a multi-year subscription that is the part I would need in writing before signing. 11 12

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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. Dimensions the sources do not establish are unknown, not non-EU.

0 — Proven non-EU: a non-EU vendor and contracting entity with hosting stated outside the EU.

3 — One European element proven — an EU contracting entity or EU hosting stated — with the rest of the chain undocumented.

5 — An EU contracting entity and EU hosting both stated, and a data processing agreement offered.

8 — EU hosting on named infrastructure, EU contracting entity, a subprocessor list published with locations, 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 In-House SEO Lead

The privacy policy states SpyFu is located in the United States and that any information provided will be transferred out of the EU to the United States, and the copyright notice names SpyFu, Inc. That places the vendor and the data handling outside Europe; we found no public information on EU hosting options, a data processing agreement, or any subprocessor list. 2

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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 public "from" price or a single tier with its price.

5 — Prices per tier public with the billing period and the main limits (keywords tracked, pages crawled, projects or users) stated.

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 In-House SEO Lead

The only pricing statement across the captured pages is that the project management API is free to use; we found no public information on subscription prices, billing periods, keyword or crawl limits, seat costs, overage rates or VAT treatment. A buyer cannot compute an annual invoice from what is public. 1 12

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European sovereignty — proven facts

2 of 6 dimensions proven

Built only from facts shown on the vendor's own pages. A dimension we could not prove is left open, not scored as zero.

Hosting location Outside the EU ⚠ unverified 0/4 pts 2 Report an error
Hosting options Not determined — uncited Report an error
Open source Not determined — uncited Report an error
Data processing agreement Not determined — uncited Report an error
Transfer impact assessment Not determined — uncited Report an error

Questions about SpyFu

Is SpyFu European?

Not determined: the vendor’s pages as captured do not say where SpyFu is based. Its vendor, SpyFu, is incorporated in United States, per the vendor’s page captured 3 Nov 2026.

Where does SpyFu store data?

SpyFu stores customer data outside the EU by default, per the vendor’s page captured 3 Nov 2026.

Does SpyFu have a free plan?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 3 Nov 2026.

What are the best alternatives to SpyFu?

As of 4 Nov 2026, the panel rates SE Ranking (3.5/5), SISTRIX (3/5) and Semrush (3/5) highest among the other 37 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: SpyFu 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 (12)

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

  1. 1 Vendor page www.spyfu.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Privacy policy — found from the homepage www.spyfu.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Crawling & technical audit — found from sitemap help.spyfu.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Crawling & technical audit — found from sitemap help.spyfu.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  5. 5 Keyword research & content guidance — found from sitemap help.spyfu.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  6. 6 Keyword research & content guidance — found from sitemap help.spyfu.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  7. 7 Rank tracking & index quality — found from sitemap help.spyfu.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Rank tracking & index quality — found from sitemap help.spyfu.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  9. 9 Reporting, integrations & API — found from sitemap www.spyfu.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  10. 10 Reporting, integrations & API — found from sitemap help.spyfu.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  11. 11 Data portability & exit — found from sitemap help.spyfu.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  12. 12 Data portability & exit — found from sitemap developer.spyfu.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →