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Yoast SEO

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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 Yoast BV · yoast.com

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Yoast SEO: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai Yoast SEO: 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.

Yoast SEO at a glance

Vendor
Yoast BV
Headquarters
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 20 Oct 2026
Data hosting
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 20 Oct 2026
Free plan
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 20 Oct 2026
Panel verdict
The AI panel rates Yoast SEO 1.5/5, the mean of 6 judges. Yoast SEO is a WordPress and Shopify plugin judged strongest on pricing transparency (5 to 7) and data portability (3 to 6): every tier carries a public price with VAT treatment stated — €118.80 / year (ex. how scores are made
As of
Vendor pages captured 20 Oct 2026; evaluated by the panel 21 Oct 2026. all sources

Yoast SEO alternatives, European ones first →

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

The Technical SEO

Weighted verdict

Lives in crawl data and log files. Wants JavaScript rendering, crawl budget analysed, indexation diagnosed rather than listed, and regressions caught between crawls. Treats an issue list sorted by count rather than by traffic impact as busywork.

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

Scored by The Technical SEO

Panel median The Technical SEO 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 Technical SEO
Crawling & technical audit 1 of 5 1 of 5
Keyword research & content guidance 2 of 5 2 of 5
Rank tracking & index quality 0.5 of 5 0.5 of 5
Reporting, integrations & API 2 of 5 2 of 5
Data portability & exit 3 of 5 3 of 5
European sovereignty 1.5 of 5 1.5 of 5
Pricing transparency 3 of 5 3.5 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 Technical SEO

The crawl settings are real controls — robots.txt disallow rules for internal search and JSON endpoints, feed removal toggles, per-post canonical and meta robots, automatic noindex on search results — but we found no public information on a site crawler, JavaScript rendering or Core Web Vitals reporting, and the vendor states the crawl settings "do not have any effect on the crawl rate of a website". This is template-level hygiene, not diagnosis at crawl scale, and nothing in the captured pages compares what a crawler sees against what Google fetched. 2 3 5

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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 Technical SEO

The per-post loop is the product: focus keyphrase with synonyms, up to four related keyphrases, multilingual readability scoring, internal linking and orphaned-content workouts. Volume, intent, difficulty and trends arrive through the Semrush integration rather than the vendor's own data, and we found no public information on SERP feature composition, topic clustering, cannibalisation detection or the depth of German-language data; the analysis scores a post against the keyphrase rather than against what currently ranks. 1 4 5 7

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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 Technical SEO

The only ranking data in the captured pages is Google's own — impressions, clicks, CTR and average position surfaced through Site Kit by Google — with nothing documented about rankings or backlinks the vendor collects itself. We found no public information on a proprietary index, update frequency, location or device granularity; the Indexables are the customer's site metadata stored in the customer's own database, not a rank or link dataset. 6 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 — 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 Technical SEO

The REST API is included in the free plugin, documented with endpoints, code examples and integration guides, and serves metadata either as a ready-made meta tag and schema bundle or as raw key/value pairs for any frontend — an API a team can genuinely build on. But we found no public information on stated API limits, scheduled or white-label reporting, or multi-client management, and the dashboard is a WordPress sidebar view whose search performance metrics depend entirely on connecting Site Kit. 8 9 1

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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 Technical SEO

Keyphrases with scores, titles and meta descriptions export in bulk to CSV in Premium, redirects import and export in CSV at scale including regex, settings move between sites, and the free REST API reads the SEO data. The data the tool actually accumulates — the Indexables — lives in a table in the customer's own WordPress database, so it is never locked away, but we found no public information on retention terms for the subscription service itself. 7 8 10 11

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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 Technical SEO

The contracting entity is named as Yoast BV and a privacy policy and terms of service are published. But the captured pages give no hosting location, no subprocessor list, no certification and no DPA covering the data the tool ingests — we found no public information on where account and analytics data are processed or by which subprocessors. 1 11

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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 Technical SEO

Every tier is priced publicly — "€118.80 / year (ex. VAT)" for Premium, "€178.80 / year (ex. VAT)" for WooCommerce SEO, "€358.80 / year (ex. VAT)" for AI+, "$19 / 30 days (ex. VAT)" for the Shopify app — alongside a free plugin, a 14-day Shopify trial, a published refund policy and bundle inclusions listed tier by tier. We found no public information on how many sites a license covers, minimum term or per-seat costs, though no keyword caps, crawl credits or API units appear anywhere in the model to obscure the invoice. 1 8 11

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Questions about Yoast SEO

Is Yoast SEO European?

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

Where does Yoast SEO store data?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 20 Oct 2026.

Does Yoast SEO have a free plan?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 20 Oct 2026.

What are the best alternatives to Yoast SEO?

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: Yoast SEO 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 (11)

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

  1. 1 Vendor page yoast.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Crawling & technical audit — found from sitemap yoast.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Crawling & technical audit — found from sitemap yoast.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Keyword research & content guidance — found from sitemap yoast.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  5. 5 Keyword research & content guidance — found from sitemap yoast.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  6. 6 Rank tracking & index quality — found from sitemap yoast.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  7. 7 Rank tracking & index quality — found from sitemap yoast.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Reporting, integrations & API — found from sitemap yoast.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  9. 9 Reporting, integrations & API — found from sitemap yoast.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  10. 10 Data portability & exit — found from sitemap yoast.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →
  11. 11 Data portability & exit — found from sitemap yoast.com Checked 20 Oct 2026 Details →