RankPilot works without any of these. Add a key only if you want backlink, rank, SERP or volume data. Open Account, Integrations, Third-party data (Pro and Agency; Pro includes 2 connections, Agency 6).
Supported vendors and what each can provide:
| Vendor | Backlinks | Rank checks | SERP results | Search volume | Cost unit | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | DataForSEO | yes | yes | yes | yes | milli-dollars (0.001 USD) | | Ahrefs | yes | no | no | yes | API units | | Semrush | yes | no | no | yes | API units | | SerpApi | no | yes | yes | no | searches |
How it works:
- You paste your own key (DataForSEO also needs its login). The key is sealed before it is stored, shown again only as its last four characters, and used only for the calls you enable. It never appears in a log, an API answer or an export.
- RankPilot calls the vendor's public API. The vendor fetches search results on its side under its own terms; RankPilot never requests a Google search page.
- Every figure from a vendor is labelled as a third-party estimate with the vendor, the fetch date and a link to the vendor's terms. Difficulty scores keep the vendor's own name and scale, and are never compared across vendors.
- You set a monthly budget in the vendor's own unit. A call that would pass the budget is refused before it is sent. An identical request is answered from a cache (backlinks 7 days, rank and SERP 20 hours, volume 30 days); a forced refresh needs a confirmation that shows the estimated cost first.
- After three vendor errors in a row the connection pauses for 30 minutes and says so on the page.
- Test connection makes the vendor's free account call, so it never spends units.
Status of the adapters: all four are written against the vendor's public documentation and recorded example responses. None has been run against a live account, so each is labelled unverified against live API until that happens.