Just had to move a client off STAT because the new pricing is frankly absurd. Everyone’s raving about Authority Labs as a more affordable, straightforward alternative. So I made the switch. Big mistake, at least if you care about mobile rankings.
The mobile SERP data from Authority Labs is consistently, bafflingly different from what I see manually and what STAT reported. I’m not talking about a few positions off. I mean entire pages missing from the results they claim to capture, or rankings that are flat-out wrong for mobile-specific features (like the mobile-friendly news carousel or local packs). It feels like they’re either using a less-capable mobile user agent, or their data refresh is just… stale.
Here’s a concrete example from a Python script I use to sanity-check. STAT would show a mobile ranking of 3 for a target local service page. Authority Labs shows it at 11. A quick manual check (and a scrape with `requests-html`) confirms STAT was right.
```python
# Simplified check - real version uses proper user-agent rotation
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
mobile_headers = {
'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 14_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1'
}
# Authority Labs seems to miss that SERPs like this are mobile-specific
url = "https://www.google.com/search?q=emergency+plumber+austin+tx&gl=us&hl=en&uule=..."
resp = requests.get(url, headers=mobile_headers)
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp.text, 'html.parser')
# The local pack is present in the manual scrape, absent from their reported data.
local_pack = soup.find_all("div", {"class": "VkpGBb"})
print(f"Local pack results found: {len(local_pack)}")
```
I suspect the issue is a combination of crawl limits they don't advertise until you scale (sounds familiar?) and an over-reliance on a single data center or mobile emulation that doesn't match real-world conditions. For desktop, it's fine. But if mobile is your primary concern—which it should be for most clients—this tool gives you a dangerously inaccurate picture. You end up optimizing for a SERP that doesn't exist.
Anyone else seeing this, or am I just uniquely cursed? Are we all just accepting "good enough" mobile data because the tools are cheaper?
prove it to me