The backlink data now comes from Majestic

cognitiveSEO made its name on backlinks: an index it crawled itself, an automatic classifier that flagged unnatural links, and a disavow workflow for sites caught by Google's Penguin filter. The suite is still on sale in October 2026, at exactly the prices it charged in January 2022. Underneath, though, the product has changed.

Since May 2026 its own Site Explorer page has said: "As of 2026, all backlink exploration from cognitiveSEO is powered directly by Majestic." The button below it reads "Explore on Majestic". That wording first appears in the Wayback Machine's snapshot of May 1, 2026 and is absent from the April 29 one. The same page still advertises "6.2 trillion crawled links" and "up to 5 years of historical link research data" - claims that read as if the index were still cognitiveSEO's own.

This matters for the bill. Majestic sells the same data directly: Lite is $49.99/month (1 million analysis units, 5,000 Site Explorer rows) and Pro is $99.99/month (20 million units, 30,000 rows), checked on Majestic's pricing page on October 10, 2026. cognitiveSEO's cheapest plan is $129.99. If raw backlink lookups are what you want, you would be paying cognitiveSEO a markup on someone else's index. Our Majestic review covers that index first-hand. One thing the evidence does not say: nothing published suggests Majestic bought cognitiveSEO. cognitiveSEO itself describes the arrangement as a data partnership.

Pricing, and what the pricing page gets wrong

There are three plans, priced in US dollars before VAT. These figures were checked on cognitiveSEO's pricing page on October 10, 2026. Wayback snapshots from January 2022, December 2023, December 2024, August 2025, January 2026 and September 2026 all show the same prices and limits, so nothing has changed in nearly five years.

Look at the Premium column twice. The yearly toggle is labelled "SAVE 30%", but Premium costs $209/month on a 12-month contract and $199 on a monthly one. As published, committing for a year costs more per month. Starter and Elite do get cheaper on the yearly plan ($89 and $349), but the page never shows the annual total, so you don't see the actual charge until checkout. Starter is also listed at $129.99 in the table and at $129 in the trial box a few lines further down.

The API has the same problem. The API page says it is "available for all Premium Subscription users and up", while the pricing table ticks it for Elite only. Neither page says how many API credits a plan includes. If the API is why you're considering Premium, get it confirmed in writing from [email protected] before you pay. The OnPage Audit row is unclear too, because its tooltip is a copy of the backlinks tooltip. The figures are presumably pages crawled, but the page never actually says.

Every plan includes competitor analysis, unnatural link detection, keyword research, Site Explorer, reports and a Google Analytics connection. Custom plans are arranged with support by email.

What is still cognitiveSEO's own

Take away the backlink index and four things remain that Majestic does not sell.

Unnatural link detection and the disavow navigator

This is the tool cognitiveSEO was known for. It sorts a site's links into natural, suspect and unnatural, and the Link Navigator walks you through them to build a disavow file. For an agency taking over a site with a history of bought links, that triage is the slow part of the job, and here it happens in one screen. The marketing still sells it as detection built for "Real Time Google Penguin 4.0". Penguin 4.0 rolled out in 2016, and Google said at the time that it devalues spammy links rather than demoting the whole site. So the real use case is narrower than the copy implies: manual actions and inherited link schemes, not routine cleanup.

Rank tracking and Signals

Rank tracking covers Google desktop, mobile and local results, daily or weekly, with side-by-side competitor comparisons. The keyword limits apply to the whole account, not to each campaign: 1,500 on Starter, 4,500 on Premium and 13,500 on Elite. Five campaigns sharing 1,500 keywords comes to 300 each, which is tight for an agency. Signals is a separate volatility monitor. It watches "over 170.000 randomly selected keywords" and emails you when Google's results shift, which helps you tell an algorithm update apart from a problem on your own site.

Content optimizer

The Content Assistant puts keyword research, SERP analysis and a content score in one editor, using NLP to compare your draft with the pages that already rank. Starter gets 150 audit credits and Elite gets 1,000. It covers the same ground as Surfer SEO, but nothing on the product page describes a feature newer than 2020. It also does not track how a brand shows up in AI answers. For that, the homepage points you to BrandMentions, a separate product from the same founders.

White-label reports

Premium and Elite produce PDF reports with your own logo. The terms forbid reselling "any part of the Services" and sharing the account with third parties, so clients can get reports but not logins.

Signs it has stopped moving

None of these proves the product is abandoned. Taken together, they point to a suite in maintenance mode. The newest entry in the public changelog is version 4.1, dated December 12, 2018 - the Site Audit launch. The timeline on the About page ends in 2016. The API page still lists "Google/Bing and Yahoo". Product screenshots on the site carry file dates from 2014 to 2020, and none of them shows the Majestic-powered Site Explorer that customers use today. The terms of service are dated May 20, 2018.

There is very little public feedback. Trustpilot lists two reviews on an unclaimed profile, both five stars, both from 2021, with nothing in the last 12 months. That is less a good rating than hardly any rating at all - and for a tool costing $129-$499 a month, that silence tells you something too.

The company behind it is GESKIMO SRL of Iasi, Romania, which has run cognitiveSEO since the product went live in December 2011. It still takes payments, still advertises 24-hour online support and 1-on-1 onboarding, and still answers [email protected]. What it has stopped doing, judging by everything public, is shipping new features.

The trial, renewal and cancelling

The free trial lasts 7 days, covers the Starter plan only, and requires you to validate a credit card or PayPal account up front "to reduce fraud and prevent multiple trials for one person". When the trial ends, you are billed $129 automatically. cognitiveSEO can also revoke trial access at any time without notice.

Cancelling is where the terms bite. Monthly and annual plans both renew for the same term unless you give written notice at least three business days before the term ends. That notice has to be an email to [email protected] sent from the registered account owner's address. Deleting the account while logged in does not cancel fees you have already run up. There is no general refund clause - the only mention of refunds covers intellectual-property disputes. Prices can also change with just three calendar days' written notice. Put the renewal date in your calendar a week early, and send the cancellation from the owner's address, not a colleague's.

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Verdict: who should still pay for it

Buy cognitiveSEO if you are an agency that cleans up link profiles for clients and wants unnatural-link classification, disavow building, rank tracking and white-label PDFs under one login. Premium at $199 a month is the plan that fits that job. Elite only makes sense if you need 13,500 tracked keywords or the API, and only after support has confirmed in writing what the API includes.

Skip it if backlink data is the point. The same Majestic index starts at $49.99 a month when you buy it from Majestic directly, $80 less than cognitiveSEO's cheapest plan. If you want a backlink index the vendor crawls itself plus keyword data, Ahrefs and Semrush are the actively developed options. For rank tracking and site audits from tools that are visibly still being updated, look at Serpstat, SEO PowerSuite or Seobility.

A yearly price that costs more than the monthly one, a changelog that stops in 2018 and a backlink index that now belongs to someone else: cognitiveSEO is a working tool being kept alive, not one being built. Pay for the link audit if you need it, and buy the data from its source.