Competitor keyword research without Semrush, from a terminal

You do not need a Semrush seat to run a competitor keyword research tool. If you ship a product and want to know what a rival ranks for, the job comes down to three questions: who competes with you in Google, which keywords bring them traffic, and which of those you are missing. This guide answers all three with seogeoaeo.ai from a terminal or an editor, then covers when a full suite is still the better buy.

Prices and limits were checked on the vendors' sites in October 2026.

What you need

• A seogeoaeo.ai plan. The Indie plan costs $29 a month for 2,000 credits, and every plan includes REST and MCP access.
• An API key from your workspace, stored in an environment variable, never in a repo.
• Your domain and a market code such as us, gb or de.

The whole workflow below costs 158 credits per rival.

Step 1: find who you actually compete with

Founders often guess their competitors from the product category. Google may disagree. The Competitor Finder tool (38 credits) lists sites that rank for the same keywords as yours and sorts them into close competitors and large general sites, by how much of their traffic overlaps.

curl -X POST https://seogeoaeo.ai/api/v1/tools/competitor-finder/runs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SEOGEOAEO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"input":{"url":"https://your-product.dev","market":"us"}}'

Ignore the large general sites unless you plan to outrank a big publisher. Pick one or two close competitors.

Step 2: pull a rival's keywords

Competitor Keywords (35 credits) returns up to 100 keywords for the competitor's whole domain, ordered by the visits Google sends them, with search volume, difficulty and cost per click. It sorts them into blog topics and keywords worth bidding on.

Swap the slug to competitor-keywords and the URL to the rival's domain. If the data provider has no record of the site, the run is refunded.

Step 3: list the gap

Keyword Gap (85 credits) takes your domain and the competitor's and returns up to 300 of the most searched keywords where they rank in the top 20 and you do not rank at all. The input has a url and a competitor field.

That list is your backlog. Sort by difficulty, pick the easy ones that match your product, and write pages for them.

Note what the gap leaves out: keywords where both of you rank but you sit lower. For those, compare the two keyword lists from step 2 yourself.

Doing the same thing from an agent

If you would rather ask than script, add the MCP server to Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http --scope user seogeoaeo https://seogeoaeo.ai/api/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

Then ask the agent to find your close competitors, pull keywords for the top one and list the gap. Each tool is an MCP tool named by its slug. Pass maxCredits so the agent cannot run anything above the price you expect. Cursor, Windsurf and other MCP clients work the same way.

Checking the pages you write

Once the new pages exist, the same account covers the on-page side: the on-page SEO checker (8 credits) grades a page's title, headings and body against a target query, and the indexing checker (8 credits) confirms Google can crawl and index it.

How this compares with doing it in Semrush

When to buy a suite instead

The trade-off is tracking. seogeoaeo.ai does not track rankings or keep history, and its numbers are estimates from a third-party provider, useful for comparing sites rather than exact counts. If you need to watch hundreds of keywords every day, SE Ranking Core at $129 a month tracks 2,000 daily and includes MCP, and Semrush itself makes sense when a team uses most of its modules.

For a developer who checks rivals a few times a month, the per-run credit pricing is the lighter option.