SEO tools are indispensable yet incomplete.
We shouldn’t promote the horse & buggy with cars available. Professionals must adapt to impending, tremendous shifts in work (especially due to AI) for the greater good. It’s self-destructive to do otherwise anyway.
However, much like in content writing, tools only save time in the hands of SEO experts. It cannot replace them in any meaningful way, at least today, and countless examples prove it.
For instance, an SEO crawler may notify you about duplicate titles, but since these are on non-indexable pages, they’re usually pointless to address. What if thin content better aligns with search intent on product category pages? What if you disavow countless links that actually helped your keyword rankings?
Tools often create the perception of issues where none exist. Without a holistic view, generalists make their sites worse or waste effort by implementing many recommendations.
Tools find patterns where something could be wrong but do horribly at revealing problems when everything looks fine on the surface. Only someone experienced in analyzing SEO qualitatively sees the real issues.
You may at least have a title tag, so that’s great, but what if it’s nonsensical or inappropriate to the page’s content? What if better targeting one keyword harms another ranking better and reduces CTR as well? What if the page with all these SEO recommendations shouldn’t exist at all?
Tools are bad at discovering growth opportunities beyond the most formulaic.
You may know about errors for structured data, but did your tool ever tell you where it’s beneficial in the first place?
I have little doubt AI will help tools get better & better at solving these complex issues and more, but in the near future, it’s hard not to see overall web quality becoming shittier as a result.
In the meantime, support your experts with the latest SEO tools… but don’t mistake them as replacements!