Google Search's guidance on using third-party SEO tools, services, and advice

If you're thinking about improving the SEO for your website, you might also be considering advice from third parties and using third-party SEO services and tools. This guide provides our recommendations for evaluating external SEO resources and tools to make sure they align with official Google Search guidance.

If you're considering hiring a company to perform SEO services, check out our guide that includes more tips on how to choose and evaluate their work.

Evaluate and verify external SEO advice against official Google guidelines

There's plenty of third-party SEO advice on the internet related to SEO, search listings, and AI experiences (sometimes called AEO for "answer engine optimization" or GEO for "generative engine optimization"). While some advice is helpful, others may misinterpret or make claims about what "Google says" or how Google ranking systems work. In general, good advice either qualifies their claims as opinion based on data or experience, or backs up their claims by citing official Google Search guidance.

We recommend carefully evaluating any advice you might be considering implementing against our official SEO guidance, including our guidance on optimizing for generative AI, and making your own informed decisions.

Think critically about using third-party SEO tools and services

If you're planning to do SEO yourself, you may be considering third-party SEO services and tools, such as:

• Assisting in sitemap generation
• Establishing indexing directives
• Offering to generate "SEO-optimized" content for you
• Providing advice they claim will improve the ranking of your existing content
• Promising improvements for AI experiences and search formats (also known as "AEO" or "GEO" tools)

Some of these services may be helpful in your work, while others may make claims or imply that what they do is somehow "acceptable" or "approved" by Google Search. Google doesn't evaluate third-party services, so be wary of such claims and those making them. Keep in mind that using a service or tool doesn't guarantee ranking success.

Some third-party services provide data that some users of those tools misinterpret as somehow being from Google. Third-party tools don't have access to our internal ranking data. They can't guarantee performance. Any predictions are their own and like predictions generally, may not happen.

Whether you use a third-party tool or not, we strongly encourage using our first-party tool, Google Search Console, which provides you with key information and data directly from Google Search itself.