SE Ranking — SEO research, rank tracking, audits, backlinks, AI search

SE Ranking is an SEO platform. This server exposes two families of capabilities, and choosing the right family is the most important decision you make per task.

When to use which family

• Research / "tell me about a domain or keyword on the open web" → use the data capabilities. They take a domain, url, keyword, or host directly. They do not require a project to exist. Use them for ad-hoc questions like "what does this competitor rank for", "how strong is this domain's backlink profile", "what AI Overview answers mention this brand", "what does the SERP look like in country X right now".
• "Track and operate on something the user owns or actively monitors" → use the project capabilities. They all take a project_id and read or mutate state inside a tracked SE Ranking project: tracked keywords, scheduled rank checks, site audits, backlink monitoring, competitors, marketing plan tasks, AI/LLM prompt rankings, sub-accounts. Anything that implies "schedule", "monitor over time", "configure", "share with a teammate", or "save for later" lives here.

If the user asks about a domain you don't see in their projects, do not silently create a project — first run open-web research. Only create a project when the user explicitly wants ongoing tracking.

Open-web research capabilities (no project needed)

• Keyword research: search volume by region, related keywords, similar keywords, longtail keyword expansion, keyword questions (what people ask). Volumes are per region — always pass a region/database when one is implied.
• Domain & URL intelligence: domain overview by database, worldwide overview, history over time, domain authority and history, page authority and history, top organic keywords for a domain, top pages, subdomains, domain competitors, keyword overlap between two domains, paid ads a domain runs, domains that bid on a given keyword.
• Backlink intelligence: backlinks summary, full backlinks list (use the batched fetch + export status pair for large pulls), referring domains, anchors, indexed pages, referring IPs, referring subnets, distribution of domain authority across the link profile, cumulative growth history, daily new/lost backlinks and referring domains.
• SERP capture: live SERP results for a keyword + location, SERP HTML dump for inspection, list of available SERP locations. SERP queries can be run as async tasks — submit, then poll the task results endpoint until ready (advanced results give you richer SERP feature data).
• AI Search visibility: AI Overview presence for a query, AI Search comparison & leaderboard across brands, prompts that mention a given brand, prompts targeting a given target. This is SE Ranking's coverage of generative-search visibility, distinct from classic SERP rankings — surface it when the user asks about ChatGPT/Perplexity/AI Overview presence.
• Audits as one-shot scans (data side): standard or advanced audit creation against an arbitrary URL, then list audits, get status, get the full report, get pages by issue, get audit history, recheck, delete, update title.
• Account / billing: credit balance, subscription data. Use these proactively before launching expensive bulk research (large backlink exports, full domain crawls).

Project-bound capabilities (require project_id)

• Projects & organization: list owned and shared projects, create / update / delete a project, group projects, share a project with a sub-account, manage tags, manage sub-accounts.
• Keyword rank tracking: add/list/update/delete keywords, group keywords, move keywords between groups, run an on-demand position check, set a manual position, get historical check dates, get the rankings chart, get keyword stats inside the project, get search volume in the project context, get available regions and Google languages, manage which search engines the project tracks against.
• Competitors inside the project: add/list/delete competitors, get competitor positions, top-10 and top-100 reports per competitor, aggregated metrics across all competitors, ads stats.
• Site audit (project side): create / list / recheck / delete audits, manage audit settings (and reset them), manage sitemaps and source pages, get audit status / report / history / crawled pages / issues by URL / pages by issue.
• Backlinks inside the project: list and import project backlinks, group them, recheck, delete, manage disavowed backlinks, run and check Google Search Console backlink imports, get backlink statistics, configure import settings.
• AI / LLM tracking: manage LLM engines, manage prompt groups and prompts, get prompt rankings and individual prompt answers, get LLM statistics and status, reorder prompt groups. This is project-side AI-search monitoring (vs. the open-web AI Search data tools above).
• Marketing plan: list plan items, add / update / delete plan tasks, set task status. Use this when the user wants ongoing SEO to-do tracking tied to a project.
• Project metadata: get summary, get SEO potential, get site brand and save site brand, get user profile, get Google Search Console connection data, get historical and check dates, get available search engines and regions.

Important behavioral notes

• Async patterns: SERP tasks, backlink exports, and audits are asynchronous. Submit a task / start an export / create or recheck an audit, then poll the matching status or results endpoint until the work is ready. Do not assume one call returns final data.
• Pagination and rate: large backlink and SERP queries are paginated and credit-metered. Check credit balance before pulling the full backlinks list of a large domain. Prefer the summary, count, and metrics endpoints first to size the job, then pull detail in batches.
• Region / language matters everywhere on the data side: search volume, SERP results, domain overview, and AI Search data are all region-scoped. Resolve the region before calling — use the available-regions endpoints when the user is vague about geography. Default to the user's locale only if they confirm it.
• Disambiguating the two families: if a tool name appears under both data-* and project-* (e.g. audits, crawled pages, found links, issues by URL, backlinks summary), the project version operates against a tracked project's snapshot and history, the data version operates against the live web. Don't mix them in one workflow.
• Disavowed backlinks and project backlinks are project-only: if the user wants to manage a disavow list or curate the canonical backlink list for a site, you must work inside a project.
• AI Search vs. LLM project tracking: open-web AI Search data answers "what does ChatGPT/AI Overviews say about X right now"; project LLM tracking answers "what is happening to my tracked prompts over time across the engines I configured". Pick based on whether the user wants a snapshot or a trend.
• Sub-accounts and sharing are project-side: agency workflows (assign a project to a sub-account, see shared projects) live under the project family.