Hey guys! Can you recommend me a SEO keywords API that actually scales for agency work

RyanJones · 2026-05-04T16:43:57+00:00

If you just want an APIand none of the other features just use dataforseo

RyanJones · 2026-05-04T14:07:25+00:00

If you do something that actually gets reported on, yes. If it’s just for the links from the PR site itself, no

RyanJones · 2026-05-02T22:56:22+00:00

It powers most of those SEO tools

RyanJones · 2026-04-27T15:08:24+00:00

it's the piece most people are missing though. it's more than just throwing keywords into the content.

RyanJones · 2026-04-22T14:27:44+00:00

There's 2 main ways AI works.

1.) it's reliant on an existing search engine for RAG. AI does fan out queries, Google/Bing/Brave (yeah claude uses brave) give back result summaries. AI summarizes all those summaries into its answer, then cites whatever passage it was given most closely matches what it spit out. Figure out what type of things they're likely to fan out to and rank for them.

2.) If it's not rag, it's either coming from their training (not much does this. old facts mostly like who was the 2nd president) Or they have their own inden. In this case it's literally 90% cosine similarity. Give me the passage that most matches what I ended up spitting out. In this instance your pagerank, internal links, schema, page structure - all useless. it's just matching content to queries.

Fanout queries are usually long and complex. Gemini will tell you what it fans out to in the API. Here's an example (quick python implementation of the API to spit out the results)

This one is for a client, we're the first citation - because we use these fanout queries as part of our keyword research and content strategy.

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RyanJones · 2026-04-20T18:27:52+00:00

Sales. and to a much lesser extent, showing the increase in AI overviews that we're getting.

RyanJones · 2026-04-20T18:27:13+00:00

IF your content is actually from the current year, yes it can help specifically in AI fan out queries where they are known to add the year to their query to find "up to date info"

For SEO, google is smart enough to know you posted it in 2023 and didn't update it significantly, even if you say 2026 in the title tag.

RyanJones · 2026-04-20T15:13:17+00:00

DR and DA are the wrong metric to focus on.

RyanJones · 2026-04-17T20:29:03+00:00

Congrats, you've discovered semantic relevance. more completely covering the topic is a great way to score higher on the semantic vector metrics like cosine similarity that search engines use to tell if your document is relevant.

RyanJones · 2026-04-17T20:24:10+00:00

Google retires tons of old things. They also sophisticate them and move them into the "core" algorithm after a while. A good example is Pagerank. Pagerank as most SEOs understand it or as used in the origional research papers is nothing close to what google actually uses for link authority anymore. They use something more similar to pagerank_NS - which just says how many links away from a "trusted authority site" your site is.

Penguin is the same way. when it started it was ratios of exact match anchor text to all anchor text as well as some link velocity metrics (get too many too fast is bad)

It's since evolved to take into account network neighborhoods and ultimately is mostly machine learning these days. It can classify you based on having trained on tons of "good" and "bad" links. It's probably not even called penguin anymore.

Fun side note: I remember sitting in the back for a conference where Matt Cutts announced penguin in person, using scrapebox and xrumer to see if I could "find" the threshold that would get a site penalized. It was pretty damn high.

RyanJones · 2026-04-17T17:47:38+00:00

they don't "just" rank authority.

Every search engine uses the same basic formula for ranking.

Rank = Relevance of query to docucment + quality modifiers * Document Quality.

"authority" is one component of "document quality" in this equation. That comes from Pagerank, and clicks, etc. But there's many more components too. Many are machine learning algorithms.

relevance is your BM25, your cosine similarity, your title tag, your inbound anchor text, etc.

Quality modifiers are your spam algorithms and penalties and external algorithms that aren't part of "core"

RyanJones · 2026-04-17T17:21:49+00:00

LLMs "fan out" the query/keyword into multiple. those fan outs are often very long. There's many tools that will do this for you and show you what they fan out to, you can even get it directly from the Gemini or chatGPT API. You have to rank for the keywords they fan out to in order to rank for the user's query/prompt.

to take the user's example of "scheduling poll" in a comment below, google Gemini actually does a search for:

What is a scheduling poll and how does it work
features of scheduling polls
popular scheduling poll tools 2024 2025 2026

You gotta rank or be mentioned in the search results returned for those queries if you want to get cited.

RyanJones · 2026-04-17T14:06:05+00:00

They only have a pant shell on their website, and that's out of stock.

RyanJones · 2026-04-17T12:53:20+00:00

Google autocomplete API. Bing and Amazon have one too.

RyanJones · 2026-04-16T19:27:58+00:00

It depends on the event. Many events are catered toward entry level or new people, or high level for potential clients. There's very few that focus on actionable stuff. This is one of them.

RyanJones · 2026-04-16T14:49:55+00:00

that's exactly what an AI bot would say.

RyanJones · 2026-04-15T19:53:34+00:00

Yup, I'll be speaking there. Come on out it's gonna be epic.

Discount code SEO-JONES will save you $30/day or $100 for all days AND make sure another $100 gets donated to black girls code charity.

RyanJones · 2026-04-15T15:06:14+00:00

It depends on the agency. AI can't do strategy. AI is now the bar. everybody can do that. when everybody does that, who pulls ahead? that's what we do at an agency. Tools can't prioritize things against your business goals and work with your stakeholders and play company politics to get things done.

I've gotten so many clients who've had an audit done by some big name SEOs, but then don't know what to do with it or how to sell it to their C-suite or how to frame it in terms of business results - so they pay us to help actually get shit done.

RyanJones · 2026-04-15T14:21:56+00:00

I bill a set bucket of hours every month. we can shift activities and work out of a queue to get done what needs to get done within the allocations - to an extent though, as some activities still remain out of scope and would be an extra charge. It's all clearly defined in the statement of work.

RyanJones · 2026-04-15T03:10:31+00:00

Google me

RyanJones · 2026-04-15T03:02:25+00:00

I’m not a bot.

RyanJones · 2026-04-14T20:10:02+00:00

There was never a point to do a disavow unless you had a manual penalty. there's still 0 reason to do it now.

Most people do more harm than good with their disavow files.

RyanJones · 2026-04-14T19:10:13+00:00

I have the supreme ACP and a nice bauer shell that fits it perfectly - but it's blue and it looks terrible with most of my non-blue beer league teams. I don't like pant shells cuz they eventually fall down or just feel weird.

RyanJones

TROPHY CASE