Real SEO Data for AI Agents — One Key, Per Call

The economics

The old way vs. the treg.to way

	The old way	With treg
What you pay for	Semrush $139/mo + SerpApi $75/mo + Moz $99/mo, running whether the agent does or not	One prepaid balance. A keyword lookup is a fraction of a cent
Keys	One account, one login and one API key per provider, spread across machines and `.env` files	One treg token. Every tool in the catalog answers to it
Picking a provider	You guess, or you use the one you already pay for	`catalog get` lists every provider for that job with price, measured success rate, median speed and when it last answered
Commitment	Annual plans and seat minimums to answer one research question	No subscription. Stop calling and you stop paying
The workflow	Export a CSV from the keyword tool, another from the rank tracker, join them by hand	One agent run: keywords, difficulty, live results and competitors in a single pass

Instead of$214/mo Semrush + SerpApi, at list

You paid$0.012 what our run actually cost

Try it

A real workflow

Copy this into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or opencode

1Set treg up in your agent first time only

Paste this into the same agent. It installs the CLI, signs you in and registers the tools. One line, once — already set up? Skip to step 2.

setup

set up treg — https://treg.to/llms.txt

2Run the workflow

the prompt

Research the market for [product]. Find 50 relevant keywords with real search
volume, difficulty and search intent. Identify the 10 best opportunities and
show which competitors currently rank.

What happens when you run it

The agent searches by the job, not the vendor. catalog_search "keyword search volume" returns the endpoints that do it, each with a price and whether treg.to can serve it without a key of yours.

It compares, then picks. Five providers answer this one capability, and the spread is not small:

Provider	Cost	Success rate	Median	Notes
Serpstat	$0.0005 per keyword returned	100% (77 calls)	1.2 s	up to 1,000 keywords per call
SE Ranking	$0.00179 per keyword returned	92.3% (20 calls)	1.7 s	up to 5,000 per call
DataForSEO	$0.09 flat per call	98.8% (165 calls)	3.9 s	same price for 1 keyword or 1,000 — batch it
Google Ads	free with a connected account	not yet measured	—	your own OAuth
Semrush	10 API units per row	not yet measured	—	own key only

Those numbers are what treg.to has actually observed across real calls, sample size included — a 100% over 8 calls is weaker evidence than a 99% over 121, and the catalog shows you both so you can tell.

It calls, then joins the results. Volume and difficulty for the list, live Google results for the shortlist, and authority metrics for whoever ranks (SE Ranking $0.002685, Moz $0.006667). One report, one bill.

The results endpoints are the most-used tools in the whole catalog, so their records are the longest:

Result type	Provider	Cost	Success rate	Median
Organic	DataForSEO	$0.002	100% (2,075 calls)	5.5 s
	ScrapeCreators	$0.00188	100% (343 calls)	1.6 s
	Serpstat	$0.0005	100% (77 calls)	1.2 s
	SerpApi	$0.015	—	—
Maps / local	DataForSEO	$0.002	100% (2,646 calls)	1.9 s
News	DataForSEO	$0.002	100% (690 calls)	9.0 s
Trends	DataForSEO	—	98% (462 calls)	6.7 s

What comes back

what comes back

50 keywords · US · Google · pulled [date]

KEYWORD                          VOL/MO   KD   INTENT         TOP 3 RANKING
<keyword>                         8,100    61  commercial     <domain> · <domain> · <domain>
<keyword>                         2,900    48  commercial     <domain> · <domain> · <domain>
<keyword>                         1,300    34  informational  <domain> · <domain> · <domain>
...

THE 10 OPPORTUNITIES   (volume weighted by difficulty and intent)
 1. <keyword>   1,900/mo · KD 22 · commercial · weakest ranker DA 31
 2. <keyword>     880/mo · KD 18 · commercial · nothing targets this exactly
 ...

PROVIDERS USED   serpstat (volume + difficulty) · dataforseo (results)
COST             $[from your run]

Structure is illustrative. The values are the providers' own, relayed unchanged.

The one teams actually run most

Keyword research is a job you do once. Watching results is a job you do every week, and it is what the agents on treg.to overwhelmingly spend their calls on — the organic, maps and news result endpoints together serve more traffic than every other SEO tool in the catalog combined.

the prompt

Every Monday, check where we and our top 3 competitors rank for these 20
keywords — organic, news and maps. Report only what moved since last week,
and for anything that dropped, show which page overtook us.

Twenty keywords across three result types is 60 calls, about $0.12 at DataForSEO's $0.002. Run weekly for a year and it costs roughly $6 — against a rank tracker at $65/mo. And the week you skip it, it costs nothing, which is the part a subscription can never do.

Evidence

Proof — from one real run

Run on treg.to, 17 Aug 2026. Every figure below is from the Activity log of that run.

Field	Value
Providers considered	5 for keyword volume, 5 for Google results
Providers selected	`serpstat.google.keywords.volume` · `dataforseo.google.serp.organic`
Why	Serpstat was the cheapest per keyword ($0.0005) and carried the best measured record of the five — 100% success over 77 calls, 1.2 s median. DataForSEO took the results call at $0.002
Total cost of the run	$0.012 — 2 calls
Subscription cost avoided	$214/mo at list — Semrush $139 + SerpApi $75
Time to completion	Under 15 seconds. The results call reported 10.4 s server-side
Data freshness	Google results timestamped 2026-08-17 02:06:40 UTC — live at call time. Keyword volume is the provider's monthly index

What actually came back. 20 keywords submitted, 13 returned with data; seven had none, which is a real answer and worth more than an invented number.

Keyword	Volume/mo	Difficulty	Intent
mcp server	60,500	8	informational
serp api	12,100	17	informational
agent skills	8,100	5	informational
reddit api	5,400	9.65	informational
tiktok api	2,400	9	informational
web scraping api	1,900	23	navigational
rank tracking api	1,000	6	informational
social media api	320	8	informational
backlink api	210	3	informational
keyword research api	140	3	informational
data enrichment api	110	2	informational
company data api	70	5	navigational
email finder api	40	1	informational

And the live top 7 for serp api: serpapi.com, dataforseo.com, scrapfly.io, github.com, brightdata.com, searchapi.io, you.com.

The honest read of this run: mcp server at 60,500/mo with difficulty 8 is the kind of finding the workflow exists to surface — but difficulty scores are a provider's model, not a fact. Treat the volume as data and the difficulty as an opinion you paid $0.0005 for.

Outcomes

Three things you can do the day you sign up

Price a content plan before you commit writers to it.

Hand the agent 200 candidate titles. It returns real monthly volume, difficulty and intent for each, and flags where the current top three are weaker than you are. At $0.0005 a keyword that is a few cents, not a month of Semrush.

Find out who actually earned the ranking.

For any keyword, the agent pulls the live results, then pulls authority and referring-domain data for each page that ranks. You learn whether the leader is winning on links or on the page — which decides whether you write or go get links.

Watch a competitor's index without buying a rank tracker.

Run the same keyword set weekly. The agent keeps last week's positions and reports only what moved. You pay per run, so a paused project costs nothing while it is paused.

Questions

Before you sign up

Why not just call the providers directly?

For one provider you already pay for, do — connect that key and those calls route through it, unmetered. The arithmetic changes at the second provider. This workflow touches keyword data, live results and backlinks; buying that separately is three accounts, three contracts and three API shapes to learn, for research you might run twice a month. treg.to is closer to OpenRouter for agent tools than to a data vendor: one base URL, one token, many providers behind it.

How are credentials handled?

The credential is injected on the server. Your agent makes the real upstream request through treg.to's /call/ endpoint; treg.to adds the key and relays the provider's answer back verbatim. No provider key is ever written to your machine, your repo or your agent's context. Every call is recorded and attributed to the token that made it.

Can I choose a specific provider?

Yes. Every endpoint has an id, and calling it by id calls that provider. If you want the choice made once for the whole team, treg org pin <capability> --provider <provider> refuses calls to any other provider of that capability. (Worth doing here. Keyword databases disagree, so if you have been reporting Semrush volumes to a client for a year, pin Semrush and keep the series consistent.)

Can I use my existing provider key?

Yes, and it takes precedence. Register the key once and every call to that provider routes through it — those calls are never metered against your treg.to balance. Your key always wins over treg.to's.

What happens if a provider fails?

treg.to does not silently reroute you. That is deliberate: only you know which inputs you actually hold, so treg.to relays your request rather than rewriting it. What your agent gets instead is the information to recover — it already knows the alternatives and their parameters, so on a 429, a 5xx or a timeout it can try the next provider and tell you which one it switched to. Failed calls are not billed. If a call succeeded upstream but the answer was lost coming back, an Idempotency-Key returns the stored result without paying twice.

How much does a call cost?

Fractions of a cent for most SEO endpoints — Serpstat keyword volume at $0.0005 per keyword, DataForSEO organic results at $0.002 per call, Moz URL metrics at $0.006667, at the time of writing. The exact price is shown before the call, and treg.to adds no markup to what the provider charges. New teams start with $1.00 of free credit.

Which agents does it work with?

The installer registers treg.to's MCP server into Claude Code, Cursor and opencode automatically. Any MCP client that supports the authorization spec can connect with OAuth. Anything that can run a shell command — Codex included — can use the treg CLI or plain HTTP.

Give Your Agent Real SEO Data — Without a Semrush Subscription