Notes
What changed, and when
One entry whenever a published number moves: a provider changed a price, a weekly run shifted a result, a correction landed, a cohort got a new version. Nothing here is commentary.
2026-10-29Run/guides/pay-per-lookup-seo-audit
One audit of hunter.io (rankings for cohort v1’s 50 queries, volumes for the same 50, the first 1,000 ranked keywords, a backlink summary and top 100 referring domains, a 100-page on-page crawl) ran through DataForSEO and Serpstat on 29 October 2026: 113 calls, $0.60 off the Treg balance. DataForSEO settled at $0.389 for the audit (49 of 50 SERP calls returned a page, the failed one billed; volumes for 31 of 50; 8,045 ranked keywords; 75,544 backlinks from 12,692 referring domains; crawl finished in under 4.5 minutes at a 94.9 score with 21 of 57 check types firing). Serpstat settled at $0.208 but its 1,000-row ranked-keyword call consumed 1,000 credits on the provider’s own counter while settling at $0 on the ledger, so $0.708 at list; its index held 20 of the 50 queries and charged nothing for the other 30. Positions differed on the one query both routes placed the domain on; volumes were equal on 5 of 22 shared queries. Prompted by an r/Agentic_SEO post about four client audits a year on a $139 Ahrefs plan.
2026-10-15Run/guides/serp-keyword-clustering-by-route
The 5-of-10 shared-URL clustering rule was applied to cohort v1’s 50 keywords on six SERP runs between 15 September and 15 October 2026 (1,700 stored responses; 250 fresh calls on 15 October, all returned data, $1.14 off the Treg balance). On 15 September Cloro, DataForSEO, SerpApi and Treg’s routed endpoint each linked 10 or 11 keyword pairs and agreed on 10. On every run since 28 September no pair was linked by every live route. DataForSEO linked 1 to 4 pairs per run, and its two runs 30 minutes apart on 28 September had 0.20 of their links in common. The routed endpoint, served by ScrapeCreators, linked 11 to 14 pairs per run with 0.67 to 0.93 of its links in common between any two runs. On 15 October Cloro’s links matched its 15 September links at 0.75; its result lists still differed from DataForSEO’s. Prompted by a post on clustering a Search Console export through the DataForSEO MCP.
2026-10-08Run/guides/ai-visibility-tracker-live-answers
Ten prompts went through seven answer routes on 8 October 2026: 70 calls, 70 answers. Four prompts asked about September 2026 events. The ChatGPT model API with web search off got 0 of 4 right and cited no source on 10 of 10 answers. The ChatGPT web, Perplexity, AI Mode and Gemini routes got 3 or 4 of 4 right and cited sources on 49 of 50 calls. The ChatGPT API with web search requested searched on 6 of 10 calls; its responses reported web_search: false on the other 4. The ChatGPT interface route’s disableWebSearch option left sources on all 10 answers. AI Mode and Gemini both answered the Ahrefs API-limit question wrong while citing sources. The calls cost $0.38 on the Treg ledger. Prompted by an r/SEO question on how to tell a tracker reads live answers.
2026-09-28Run/guides/serp-apis-after-google-scraper-crackdown
The SERP half of cohort v1 ran again on 28 September through the five routes of 15 September and four more: 450 calls, 418 with a result page, 30 Serpstat queries not in its index, two errors (SerpApi, LimaData). No route returned a google.com/goto link in the URL field on either date. The routes stopped agreeing: Cloro and DataForSEO shared 0.92 of URLs on 15 September and 0.40 on 28 September, and the five routes of the first run returned one result list on 47 of 50 queries then and on none now. The routed endpoint was served by ScrapeCreators on 50 of 50 calls where DataForSEO had served it. The Treg balance fell by $1.32. Prompted by reports of rank trackers breaking during Google’s anti-scraping changes.
2026-09-17Run/guides/google-ai-overview-api
Measured on 15 September captures: Cloro’s rendered capture returned the overview text and sources on 87 of 90 requests; DataForSEO flagged it on 50 of 50 but returned content on 15 without the async-load option; SerpApi returned a token needing a second $0.015 call. Prompted by a Google People-also-ask question seen in multiple captures.
2026-09-17Run/guides/free-seo-data-apis
Free tiers, one-off grants and trials read from each provider’s own pricing page on 17 September 2026. The finding worth knowing: Google’s Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers, with existing users given until 1 January 2027 to move, so there is no official free route to Google’s organic results. Genuinely recurring free tiers: SerpApi 250 searches a month, Scrape.do 1,000 calls, Bright Data 5,000 credits. Moz blocked automated reads; its allowance is recorded as unknown.
2026-09-15Launch/benchmarks/keyword-data-coverage/benchmarks/serp-completeness/benchmarks/backlink-overlap/benchmarks/seo-api-latency/datasets/seo-api-evaluation-v1
314 calls, 284 valid, $1.99 at list prices. DataForSEO’s bulk keyword call was rate-limited on the first attempt because our own SERP calls to the same provider ran concurrently; the retry succeeded and both records are kept. Ahrefs, Majestic and Semrush were not measured (plan or credential). The cohort re-runs weekly; deltas will be logged here.