What replaces your old tool set

Generative AI and automation bring excitement to some SEO professionals and anxiety to others. With 87% of Americans reading AI briefings, you’re falling behind if you’re not adapting your toolset to keep up with this trend.

Moving from traditional business tools to agile, AI-driven tools positions you as a forward-thinking authority with your customers or employer.

This approach will help you guide your clients, employers, or team through that change.

Here’s what the old SEO stack looks like

SEO processes are always important because the company’s productive AI features focus on:

• Search systems are important.
• Quality systems.

Here is the traditional “SEO stack”:

Level trackers

Keyword tracking used to be the heartbeat of every campaign. Add target keywords, monitor SERP positions, and higher rankings will drive more search traffic. But the levels have changed over the past few years.

SEOs now follow:

• An overview of AI
• Area packs
• Shopping carousels
• Many more.

A third-party local packet rate may drive two or three times as much traffic as a number one AI Overview rate.

Keyword tools

What do people want? With the crystal ball, you can prepare specific questions and target specific groups. Keyword research allows you to write content that matches those questions and user intent.

You will choose keywords based on:

• Difficulty
• Search volume
• The purpose
• Other features

Many options help you find keywords for campaigns, and some competitors have more access to keyword data than others.

Loose search volume data may be hurting your campaign, but it still reflects past performance.

For example, you can target a keyword with 10,000 monthly visits. But just because it reached that volume last month doesn’t mean it will do the same this month. The dose can be doubled or reduced to a tenth of the previous month’s level.

The problem in today’s search environment is that a keyword with tens of thousands of clicks in 2022 may now appear in an AI Overview. Searching for specific clicks can steal your traffic, making other queries that were once top clicks irrelevant or not worth the same investment.

Even if the search volume is not decreasing, the opportunity is there.

Site inspection tools

Search engines are still crawling your site and interpreting its content. Getting a complete picture of how these searchers perceive your website has always been important for SEO.

Research tools help you identify:

• Broken links
• Redirect problems
• Missing metadata
• Pages are slow
• Thin content
• Some problems with your site

But don’t put these test tools on the shelf just yet. You still need them to know if your site is technically sound. Clarity testing does not guarantee that your content will appear.

Things like product mentions are important features for inclusion in LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Unfortunately, most of the site inspection tools in your legacy stack don’t have tracking functionality to speak of.

So while you can still rely on your old stack, it’s time to add new tools that cover these features and change the way you work as an SEO professional.

Here’s what the new SEO stack looks like

If you’re still only tuning in to Google, it’s time to switch gears. Between the first and second half of 2025, LLM referral traffic grew by 80%. Conversion rates have reached 18%, but LLM referrals still account for 2% or less of total traffic, according to the dataset.

Now is the time to switch to a new stack that helps you increase LLM referrals.

Add the following to your SEO tech stack to stay ahead of the competition:

LLMs

You want your site to be seen in LLMs, but these same tools can help power your SEO strategy. For example, you can use:

• ChatGPT: Connect ChatGPT and Google Search Console to automate your SEO analysis, as I show you how to do itlatest article here.
• Claude: Use Claude to write your copy, optimize metadata and check overall content.
• Gemini: Jump into Gemini to help generate a schema tag, compare your competitor’s sites, or find issues with your site.

LLMs can help with everything from data analysis to competitor research.

Use the LLM you are most comfortable with for these tasks, but keep human supervision in place. Use these tools to enhance performance, not to replace the human element.

Large data sets that once took hours, days, or weeks to review now take minutes with these tools. Continue reading LLMs and how to integrate them into your workflow.

APIs

Old dashboards with CSV export to Excel were once common. You logged into Google Search Console (GSC) and submitted the data. Although it may sound very technical, LLMs can now help you connect to APIs to:

• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics

LLMs can help you validate requests and parse JSON. With this skill, you can open the workflow

Lightweight documents

Python scripts are now available for any SEO with some skill with Claude Code, or similar options in ChatGPT or Gemini. You can easily create scripts that:

• Pull your top pages from GSC
• Compare headings with letter limits
• Flag changes for 30 days
• Create your CSV output

Rather than waiting for vendor tools to add a feature that removes the performance bottleneck, create a script that does the same thing.

A hundred-line script can handle most of the work you used to do manually, without a new license or SaaS upsell. If you give the script to someone else, they can see the exact idea behind it.

Notebooks / local workflow

Your SEO team has data in many places:

• Shared folders
• Google Sheets
• Concept documents

You may have a three-year content audit tracker in Google Sheets. A spreadsheet with monthly CSV dumps to your favorite tools leaves you with files to manually open and interpret.

Notebooks and local workflows change the way data fragmentation slows down your team.

Instead, Notebooks interprets these files and executes them. For example, a script can pull data, an API expose a signal, and LLMs make sense of the data and put the output into your Notebook.

Notebooks also offer the benefit of:

• Fixed data formats
• Shared access to data
• A written concept

SEO teams need to be agile and scalable to grow in the new era of search optimization and productive AI. Rather than starting over every time they need to pull data, teams can use local workflows to keep up with the data.

Creating hybrid workflows to mix old and new SEO stacks

Is your old SEO stack outdated? No. Are these new tools all you need? No. Hybrid workflows and search engine optimization stacks offer the best of both worlds.

Tool + custom script + AI layer

You’ll need to experiment to create a hybrid workflow that works best for your clients, projects, and teams. Considered workflows that combine the old and new well-rounded SEO stack include:

• Crawling the site with an inspection tool, such as Screaming Frog
• It uses a Python script that splits the file and merges it with the GSC data
• Articles that flag pages where you have a lot of impressions but low clicks
• Submitting flagged pages to LLM for topic evaluation against search intent
• Putting LLM output into a Notebook or spreadsheet for editors to review
• Converts commits to change logs

Projects like this used to take weeks, so teams put it on the back burner. At the business level, teams quickly feel overwhelmed by this amount of data. But if you combine old and new SEO stacks, you can complete large projects in a fraction of the time.

Replacing your current SEO stack with an older one built for today’s big data sets will make you an invaluable asset to any SEO team.