SEO is not dead, but it has shifted, and AI is the reason. I suspected this for a while. Ask Claude, or any LLM, for keyword advice and it will answer with total confidence whether or not it actually knows what is ranking this week. Ben Senescu confirms the same thing in the video below, and he built a whole product around fixing it. In this video Andrew Warner talks with Ben Senescu, creator of OpenSEO, about building an open-source alternative to tools like Semrush and Ahrefs. Ben explains how OpenSEO grounds AI agents in real SEO data from DataForSEO instead of letting them guess, and walks through competitor research, keyword analysis, backlink research, SEO coaching through Claude, and AI-powered content creation. Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNN6dLt5dPI They also discuss how developers are extending OpenSEO into custom content optimization tools, CRMs, outreach systems, and Google Analytics integrations. Why this matters more than another SEO tool launch A single seat on the big SEO platforms runs $100 to $150 a month before you have touched a single keyword. Ben noticed something on Reddit: people on r/TechSEO were already building their own dashboards on top of a pay-as-you-go data provider called DataForSEO. He asked if they wanted an open-source starting point. They said yes. He shipped OpenSEO about a week later. The pricing tells you who it is built for. The hosted version is $10 a month. If you self-host, you skip that entirely and pay DataForSEO directly for what you use, starting with $50 which can last you even a year depending on your usage. OpenSEO itself is MIT-licensed and free. As of now it has crossed 7,000 GitHub stars and more than 500 forks, so the "open source" label is not just a marketing line. What you actually get Once it is connected to a DataForSEO key, OpenSEO covers the workflows that used to require three separate subscriptions: - Keyword research and saved keyword lists - Rank tracking and domain overviews - Competitor and backlink analysis - Site audits - AI visibility tracking, meaning whether your brand shows up when someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews a relevant question - A prompt explorer for seeing which prompts surface your content