What do you think SEO tools will look like in 2–3 years?
Seo tools have gotten pretty good at the traditional stuff like, keyword tracking, backlinks, technical audits, competitor research, content analysis, etc.
But search itself seems to be changing pretty quickly.
People are increasingly getting answers directly from AI instead of clicking through a list of search results, and that seems like it could change what we actually need SEO tools to measure.
I would like to know what everyone here thinks.
If you were building an seo tool from scratch today, what would you make it track that the current generation of tools doesn't?
Would you still focus mainly on rankings and backlinks, or would you measure things like brand mentions, visibility in AI answers, citations, entity presence, or something completely different?
Edit: Appreciate everyone who shared their thoughts here. There were a few interesting points around the fact that traditional SEO metrics can tell you how visible a site is in search, but they don't always tell you how a brand is being surfaced when people search through newer channels. That actually pushed me to look a little deeper into this area and spotting visiblie while exploring how brands can monitor their presence beyond traditional search rankings, particularly across ai-driven discovery. It was interesting to see how much broader the measurement side of search is becoming compared with what most of us have traditionally tracked.