Drew Chapin Calls BS on Popular SEO Tools

The online reputation firm founder just released a free toolkit and says the subscription model is about to collapse

Drew Chapin does not think you need to spend hundreds of dollars a month on SEO software. He thinks the entire model is broken, and he is not being polite about it.

“It’s bullshit,” said Chapin, who founded The Discoverability Company, an online reputation and search visibility firm. “Small business owners are paying for dashboards they will never understand. The whole industry has been getting away with it because nobody built the alternative.”

So he built one. A free suite of diagnostic tools: an AI Readiness Audit that scores visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews, a keyword research tool, and a schema validator. No account, no trial, no credit card.

That is the announcement. The more interesting story is why the timing matters and what it says about a much larger shift in how small businesses interact with software.

Something broke in the subscription economy and nobody sent a memo

The average small business in the United States now pays more than $4,000 a year for SaaS subscriptions. A 2025 Zylo report put the average organization at 291 applications, nearly double where things stood in 2020. Gartner estimates a quarter of that spend is wasted on tools that are underused or forgotten entirely.

SEO is one of the worst offenders. The major platforms, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, all charge hundreds per month. The data underneath them comes from the same handful of wholesale providers. The platforms package it into dashboards, layer on alerts and reports, and charge recurring fees for access. The cost to serve a single query is negligible. The margins are enormous.

None of this is new information for people inside the industry. What is new is that the people outside the industry, the ones actually paying these bills, are starting to notice.

A solo attorney in the Tenderloin signs up for a tool because a blog post told her to “monitor her keyword rankings.” She logs in, sees a wall of charts and acronyms, and makes one of two choices: cancel immediately, or keep paying because surely all this complexity must be doing something. Most keep paying. The platforms know this. The complexity is not a bug.

The part where search itself stopped working the way everyone assumed

This would all be a minor billing complaint if the tools were at least measuring the right things. They are not.

Gartner projected that traditional search volume would drop 25 percent by 2026 as consumers shift to AI alternatives. That is not a projection anymore. People ask ChatGPT for restaurant recommendations. They use Perplexity to compare products. They ask Gemini to find a plumber. The ten blue links still matter, but they are no longer the whole picture, and the dominant SEO platforms are still built almost entirely around them.

Keyword rankings. Backlink profiles. Domain authority.

Domain authority is worth pausing on. Moz invented the metric. It is a proprietary score, not a Google ranking factor, not an industry standard. But it has been marketed so aggressively that business owners treat it like a credit score. They believe that pushing their DA from 30 to 50 will unlock a flood of customers. It will not. The platforms that charge hundreds a month to display that number have no financial incentive to explain this.

Meanwhile, the question that actually determines whether a business gets found in 2026 is one these tools cannot answer at all: when someone asks an AI to recommend a business like yours, do you show up?

That is what Chapin’s AI Readiness Audit measures. Whether a brand is likely to be cited in AI generated responses. Whether its content gets pulled into the retrieval step that powers Perplexity and ChatGPT with browsing. Whether AI models are generating incorrect information about the business, a growing problem for companies with thin or contradictory information online. Whether an AI agent could find the business’s hours, pricing, and contact details without human help.

The dentist in Daly City who is invisible and does not know it

Consider a real scenario. A dental practice in Daly City has been paying for an SEO tool for two years. Their keyword rankings look fine. They show up on page one for “dentist Daly City” in a traditional Google search.

But someone new to the neighborhood asks ChatGPT: “Can you recommend a good dentist near Daly City?” The practice does not appear. Not because they are bad at SEO in the traditional sense, but because their site has no structured data, no schema markup, no machine readable signals that help an AI system understand what they do and whether they are trustworthy. The SEO tool they have been paying for never flagged any of this because it was never built to look for it.

That gap is going to widen. AI search is not replacing traditional search overnight, but it is growing fast enough that businesses ignoring it are building on a shrinking foundation. The tools that were supposed to help them see around corners are pointed in the wrong direction.

AI collapsed the cost of building this stuff

Chapin is blunt about why the tools are free: “Our business is helping people fix what the audit finds. We do not need to charge for the diagnosis.”

But there is a structural reason it is happening now and not three years ago. Large language models and modern development frameworks have made it dramatically cheaper to build diagnostic software. The crawling infrastructure, data pipelines, and scoring algorithms that used to require large teams and months of work can now be assembled in weeks. The technical moat that justified subscription pricing is not gone, but it is eroding fast.

This is not unique to SEO. Across every software category where the core value is “show me what is wrong,” AI is compressing the cost of the diagnostic layer toward zero. The businesses built on charging monthly for that layer are going to face the same question: what exactly are you selling if the diagnosis is free?

For agencies managing dozens of clients, the big platforms still earn their price through workflow automation and data depth. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But the solo consultant, the three person law firm, the restaurant owner who just needs to know if anything is broken? That customer was always subsidizing the platform’s enterprise ambitions. And that customer now has options.

What actually happens next

The Discoverability Company plans to add a backlink diagnostic, local SEO grader, and content quality scorer to the free toolkit in the coming months.

But the bigger thing to watch is not one company’s product roadmap. It is whether the subscription SEO market can hold its pricing as free alternatives multiply. Ahrefs and SEMrush have both started adding AI features, but behind the same paywalls. They are bolting new capabilities onto a pricing model designed for a version of search that is becoming less dominant by the quarter.

The small business owner paying hundreds a month to track keyword rankings that do not capture how half of search works now is not going to keep paying forever. The question is whether the incumbents adapt their pricing before someone else makes the decision for them.

The free tools are at seodeepresearch.com.