Search data API, monthly, every tracked brand in every category

DataForSEO

The search data behind most numbers on this site: traffic estimates, visits by country, referring domains and live Google results.

Run by: DataForSEO LLC
Since: 2016
Refreshed: Monthly, every tracked brand in every category

DataForSEO is a data provider that sells search data through an API rather than through a dashboard. It runs its own search-result collection at scale, maintains databases of ranked keywords and backlinks, and resells Google's own advertiser keyword data under licence. Its customers are mostly the people who build SEO tools, agencies and in-house analytics teams, which is a useful signal: it is a wholesale source, not a consumer product with a marketing story attached to the numbers.

I use it because an API with documented endpoints and a published price per call is reproducible. Every figure I show from it can be re-pulled by anyone with an account and the same endpoint, and I record the month each pull covers next to the number.

Why it can be relied on

It collects its own search results rather than scraping a competitor's product, and it publishes the shape of every endpoint, so a figure can be traced to a specific call with specific parameters.
Volume data is licensed Google Ads data, not a guess: the same numbers advertisers see when they plan a campaign.
Pricing is per call and visible, which means there is no incentive for the provider to inflate a number to make a dashboard look busy.
It is the data layer under a long list of commercial SEO tools, so its estimates are the ones the industry already works with.

What is taken from it

Search traffic: Estimated visits from Google results each month, worldwide and for the United States, 24 months back, for every tracked brand in a category. This is the market-size line on the statistics pages and the totals in the industry report.
Visits by country: The latest month's estimate for each brand in the countries the pull measures individually: 8 countries for 30 categories (United States, India, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom and Australia), and 22 for AI girlfriend platforms, AI image editors, AI image generators, AI headshot generators, AI presentation makers, AI logo generators, AI interior design apps, AI ad generators and AI website builders. That is how the pages show where a category's audience is; each statistics page names the countries its category covers, and shares are of the visits in those countries, not of every visit.
Referring domains: How many sites link to each brand's domain, one reading a month, kept as a series.
Google position for the category's search: A live Google results page for each category's own search, which gives the position each tracked brand holds that month. It orders the brand lists on the statistics pages; it is an order, not a ranking.
Google Ads search volume: Monthly searches for each brand name and for each category's own search; see the Google Ads keyword data page for what that number is.

What it cannot tell me

Traffic is an estimate modelled from ranking positions and search volume, not a reading from the site's own analytics. I never present it as a visit count the operator would recognise.
It covers Google organic search only. A site with a big app, paid ads or a direct audience will look smaller here than it is, which is why I also carry an all-traffic rank from Tranco.
It measures a whole domain. A tool that lives inside a large multi-product site cannot be measured on its own, so such tools are listed on their category page but left out of the figures.
Sites that block crawlers can be undercounted. Where I know that is happening, the page says so.

Where it appears on this site

Cited as DataForSEO, with the month it covers, on every category’s statistics pages where it applies. In the AI girlfriend section, for example:

The source itself

This is the only page on the site that links out to DataForSEO. Everywhere else, a citation links here instead, so the context travels with the number.

Visit dataforseo.com

The other data sources

Written by Miles Foster, Owner and tester, RankDude. RankDude is not affiliated with DataForSEO. How tested platforms are graded is on the methodology page; the data in use is on the AI girlfriend statistics pages.