SEOTesting Review: It Only Reads Search Console, and That Is the Point

Every SEO has shipped a title rewrite across forty pages, watched clicks rise the following month, and had no honest way to say whether the rewrite caused it. Maybe it was the rewrite. Maybe it was a core update.

SEOTesting exists for that gap, and it is the narrowest tool in this hub. It reads your Search Console and GA4 data and nothing else. In August 2026 that costs $50 a month for one site.

The verdict up front

SEOTesting scores 3.8 out of 5. It does one job better than anything at this price and refuses to do several others at all, which is easier to respect than to budget for. I score reviewed tools on six criteria:

• Core job performance: how well it does the thing it is built for, here proving that a change moved a number.
• Pricing transparency: whether you can price it without a sales call, and what a year really costs.
• True cost of ownership: what else you have to buy before it produces anything useful.
• Data breadth: how much of the SEO picture it can see at all.
• Maintenance signal: the public evidence that somebody is still shipping.
• Third-party validation: verified ratings from named platforms, linked below.

What is SEOTesting?

SEOTesting is a browser-based platform published by SanityCheck.io Limited, registered in England and Wales under company number 11023704. It started as an internal fix and became a product.

• The origin: in November 2016 founder Nick Swan built a tool to archive Search Console data past the 90-day window the API then exposed.
• The company: SanityCheck.io Limited was incorporated in October 2017 to sell it, and the product was renamed from SanityCheck to SEOTesting in April 2020.
• The team: three people in Bude, Cornwall. Nick Swan on development, Faith Summon on development, Vicky Webster-Garvey on customer experience and operations.
• The funding: independent and bootstrapped, which shows in a product that adds features rather than surface area.
• The customers: Shopify, Canva, Intuit and carwow are the logos on the homepage.

That history explains the shape of the product. It was built by somebody who wanted an answer, not by somebody assembling a category-complete suite.

What it actually does

The feature list splits cleanly into two halves: things that run an experiment, and things that read your data and tell you what changed without you asking.

The three test types

• Time-based SEO testing. Change something, then track performance against a forecast of what would have happened without the change. Quick to set up, and vulnerable to anything else that moved that month.
• SEO split testing. Split comparable pages into a test group and a control group, change only one, compare. This is the honest version, and it needs enough similar pages to build both groups.
• LLM tests. Measure sessions arriving from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini before and after a change. Almost nothing else at this price does this in August 2026.

The reporting side

• Content insights and decay. Pages sliding down over time, surfaced from archived Search Console history rather than a 16-month window.
• Keyword cannibalisation. Where two of your own pages compete for one query, which is the report most teams discover they needed. See our cannibalisation definition for the mechanics.
• CTR optimisation. High-impression, low-click queries ranked by the clicks a better title could plausibly win. Our CTR glossary entry covers the benchmark maths.
• LLM traffic pages. Which pages earn AI-assistant sessions, and the prompts behind them where the referrer exposes one.
• Monthly SEO report. A written executive summary correlating traffic shifts with your logged tests and known Google updates.
• Sitemap and robots.txt monitoring. Alerts when your own or a competitor's XML sitemap or robots.txt changes.
• Rank tracking from Search Console. Positions read from your own property rather than scraped, so the numbers are real averages rather than a sampled SERP.

The AI tooling deserves a separate mention. A query fan-out generator expands one topic into the questions an assistant is likely to ask, and a content evaluator scores how well the page answers them.

What a Search Console layer can and cannot answer

This is the section that should decide the purchase. Below are eight questions an SEO asks in a normal month, and whether this tool can answer any of them:

Five answered well, one partly, two not at all. The two it cannot touch are backlinks and anything requiring a crawl, and they are worth spelling out:

• No backlink index. Nothing about referring domains, anchor text, or a competitor's link profile appears anywhere in the product.
• No crawler. Rendering problems, redirect chains and orphan pages are invisible, because nothing ever fetches your HTML.
• No competitor keyword data. You can watch a rival's sitemap change. You cannot see what they rank for.
• Discovery is bounded. Search Console shows queries you already surface for, so a brand-new page starts from nothing.

SEOTesting pricing, verified August 2026

Three tiers are public, quoted monthly, with no contract and no per-seat charge. I read these off seotesting.com in August 2026:

• Single Site: $50/month. One website, unlimited users, 25 internal-linking credits.
• Medium: $125/month. Five websites, unlimited users, 75 credits, plus a one-to-one onboarding call.
• Large: $375/month. Twenty websites, unlimited users, 300 credits, plus quarterly training.
• Enterprise: pricing on request. Increased site allowance, custom terms, unlimited training and a customer success contact.
• Trial: 14 days, up to 30 sites, no credit card. More generous during the trial than any paid tier below Enterprise.
• Annual billing: unpublished. The page asks you to email hello@seotesting.com, which is the one genuinely awkward thing about this pricing page.

The credits are worth a sentence, because the name gives nothing away. They buy reports on InternalLinking.com, a sister product, so they are a bundled allowance from a second tool rather than a limit on this one.

What a year really costs

Twelve times the monthly price is the honest way to compare these, because there is no published annual discount to apply. That produces a very different picture per site:

CrawlRaven sits on that table for scale rather than as a swap. It is a one-time lifetime licence from $49 at launch plus a free plan for 1 site, and it ranks work rather than testing it. Lifetime pricing steps up as licenses sell, so check the pricing page for the current batch. See current pricing.

Performance in practice

The data is as good as your Search Console property, which is both the strength and the ceiling. There is no sampling, no scraping and no third-party estimate anywhere in the pipeline.

Four practical limits are worth knowing before a trial:

• Split tests need volume. A site with forty pages and a few hundred clicks a month cannot build two comparable groups, so you fall back to time-based tests and their weaker evidence.
• Fourteen days is short for a real test. Many experiments need four to six weeks to separate signal from noise, so the trial proves the setup rather than the science.
• Search Console latency applies. Data lands two to three days behind, so nothing here is a live dashboard and no test result is instant.
• LLM traffic depends on the referrer. Assistants vary in what they pass through, so prompt-level detail is patchy by source rather than complete.

Setup, interface and the daily workflow

Setup is one OAuth connection to Search Console, one to GA4, and then waiting while the history imports. There is nothing to install and nothing to configure per crawl, because there is no crawl.

• The good: reviewers rate ease of use at 4.8/5 on Software Advice, and the reports read like conclusions rather than exports.
• The daily loop: a morning email with the key metrics whenever Search Console updates, which is how most users actually consume it.
• The team story: unlimited users means you can give a developer or a client a login without a procurement conversation.
• The rough edge: one Capterra reviewer notes that typing into the tag selector and then picking a dropdown option leaves the typed characters behind.

Pros and cons

Who SEOTesting is best for

The buyer profile is specific and the tool is excellent inside it. Three situations where it earns the line item:

• In-house teams who have to defend a roadmap. A split test result is the only artefact that ends the argument about whether last quarter's work mattered.
• Agencies reporting to sceptical clients. Five sites for $1,500 a year, unlimited seats, and a monthly summary that correlates your work with the graph.
• Ecommerce and large content libraries. Hundreds of comparable pages is exactly what split testing needs, and most sites do not have them.

Who should skip it

• Anyone looking for their first and only SEO tool. You would have no keyword research, no backlinks and no technical audit.
• Small sites that change twice a year. $600 buys you two measurements, and a spreadsheet would have done.
• Teams doing competitor research. Nothing here sees outside your own properties, by design.
• Anyone who needs a technical audit. There is no crawler, so a technical audit has to come from somewhere else.

What reviewers say

Third-party ratings, checked in August 2026. Note that Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice share one review pool, so those three are one source rather than three:

• Capterra: 4.9/5 from 12 reviews, with a starting price listed at $50/month and a free trial noted.
• Software Advice: 4.9/5 from the same 12 reviews, with ease of use and customer support both at 4.8/5.
• G2: SEOTesting's own homepage cites 4.8/5. I could not load the G2 listing to confirm it, so treat that figure as vendor-stated rather than verified here.

Both criticisms say the same thing the vendor says: this is a companion product. Twelve reviews is a thin evidence base, and it is worth weighing against a top public tier of $4,500 a year.

SEOTesting alternatives, by job

Nothing on this list replaces SEOTesting outright, because almost nothing else runs controlled SEO tests at this price. Match the job to the pick:

• You need keyword and backlink research: Semrush or Ahrefs, neither of which tests.
• You need a technical crawl: Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.
• You need server-side testing at enterprise scale: SearchPilot, priced accordingly.
• You need to decide what to test: CrawlRaven, from a one-time $49 at launch.

Semrush and Ahrefs: the research half

These are the tools SEOTesting expects you to already own. They bring the backlink index, the competitor keyword data and the volume estimates that never enter a Search Console property. Detail in our Semrush review and Ahrefs review, and if the budget is the constraint, our SE Ranking review covers the cheaper all-in-one.

Screaming Frog and Sitebulb: the crawl half

The other half SEOTesting omits. Screaming Frog is the maintained desktop standard for raw crawl configurability; Sitebulb explains why each issue matters rather than exporting it. Our Screaming Frog review and Sitebulb review cover both, and the cloud options sit in our Screaming Frog alternatives roundup.

CrawlRaven: deciding what to test next

Full transparency: CrawlRaven is our tool, and it does the step before a test rather than the test itself:

• The join: Google Search Console and GA4 (built-in, one-click OAuth, synced daily) merged with your imported Ahrefs or Semrush keyword lists and a 200-point technical crawl.
• The output: one ranked plan of what to write, what to update and what to fix first, which is the shortlist a testing tool then measures.
• The audit depth: 200 checks covering rendering, redirect chains, structured data, Core Web Vitals and AI crawler access, ranked by ranking impact.
• The price: lifetime licences from a one-time $49 at launch, plus a free plan for 1 website with no credit card. Lifetime pricing steps up as licenses sell, so check the pricing page for the current batch. Current price on the pricing page.

The honest pairing: CrawlRaven to pick the ten things worth doing, SEOTesting to prove which of them worked, and a white-label report to show the client both.

Frequently asked questions

Basics

• What is SEOTesting? A browser-based testing and reporting layer over your own Search Console and GA4 data, built by a three-person company in Cornwall.
• Does it crawl my site? No. There is no crawler, so rendering, redirect and indexation problems stay invisible to it.
• Does it have backlink data? No, and it does not claim to. It sees only the properties you connect.

Pricing

• How much does SEOTesting cost? $50/month for 1 site, $125 for 5, $375 for 20, verified August 2026. Enterprise is priced on request.
• What does that cost a year? $600, $1,500 and $4,500, which is $600, $300 and $225 per site respectively.
• Is there an annual discount? An annual plan exists, but its price is not published. You have to email for it.
• Is there a trial? Yes: 14 days, up to 30 sites, no credit card required.

Alternatives

• What covers the research half? Semrush or Ahrefs, neither of which runs controlled tests.
• What covers the crawl half? Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.
• What reports to clients? Our SEO report software roundup compares nine options including white-label ones.
• What decides the experiment? CrawlRaven joins Search Console, GA4, your keyword imports and a 200-point crawl into one ranked plan, from a one-time $49 at launch.

Final verdict: is SEOTesting worth it?

3.8 out of 5. This is a specialist instrument sold at a generalist price, and whether that lands depends entirely on how much you ship.

• Buy it if you run five or more sites, ship changes monthly, and need evidence rather than a chart with a vertical line on it.
• Buy it if AI search traffic is now a number someone asks you about, because the LLM testing here is genuinely ahead of the category.
• Skip it if it would be your only tool, if your site is too small to build a control group, or if you ship changes twice a year.
• Check first that your Search Console history is long enough to be worth archiving, and email for the annual rate before committing monthly.

If the harder question is which change to make rather than whether it worked, CrawlRaven does that job and starts with a free plan for 1 site.

Sources

• SEOTesting pricing: Single Site $50/month with 1 website and 25 internal-linking credits, Medium $125 with 5 websites and 75 credits plus a one-to-one onboarding call, Large $375 with 20 websites and 300 credits plus quarterly training, and Enterprise priced on request. Also the unlimited-users statement, the month-to-month terms, the 14-day fully functional trial covering up to 30 sites with no credit card, and the instruction to email hello@seotesting.com for an annual plan. Verified August 2026.
• SEOTesting features: time-based testing, split testing, LLM tests, LLM traffic, monthly SEO report, CTR optimisation, content insights, keyword cannibalisation, content groups, sitemap and robots.txt monitoring, Search Console rank tracking, the daily email, and the AI tooling (query fan-out generator, content evaluator, persona page evaluator). Verified August 2026.
• SEOTesting about page: the November 2016 origin, SanityCheck.io Limited incorporated October 2017, the April 2020 rename, the three-person team in Bude, Cornwall, and the bootstrapped, independent status.
• SEOTesting on Capterra: 4.9/5 from 12 reviews, $50/month starting price, free trial available, and the quoted criticisms about competitor analysis and backlink tracking. Verified August 2026.
• SEOTesting on Software Advice: 4.9/5 from 12 reviews, ease of use and customer support both 4.8/5, and the quoted excerpts from Simon C., Midori C. and Joseph G. Verified August 2026.