advertools: the Python toolkit that replaces a drawer of SEO scripts

Before advertools, doing this properly meant stitching together a crawler, a sitemap parser, a robots.txt checker and a log-file reader from separate, half-maintained libraries or writing your own from scratch each time. advertools folds all of it into one package: a crawler built on Scrapy, sitemap and robots.txt analysis, SERP and keyword tooling, and server log-file parsing, every function returning a pandas DataFrame ready to filter, pivot or export.

Why it made the cut

It is the most widely cited open-source SEO library in the Python ecosystem, and unlike a lot of tooling from the same era it is still being actively maintained into 2026. That longevity is the actual selling point: pip install advertools replaces a drawer of bespoke, half-working scripts with one dependency that someone else keeps patched against site changes and library breakage.

How to run it

1. pip install advertools in your environment or a notebook.
2. Import it and call the function you need directly: crawl() for a site crawl, sitemap_to_df() for sitemap analysis, robotstxt_to_df() for robots.txt, logs_to_df() for server logs.
3. Every function returns a pandas DataFrame, so filtering, grouping and exporting to CSV are standard pandas operations from there.
4. The project documentation covers each function with worked examples; start there rather than guessing at parameters.

Worth knowing

The crawler is Scrapy underneath, so a large crawl behaves like any Scrapy job: it needs sensible concurrency and delay settings on a live site, and it is a Python-and-terminal tool, not a point-and-click app, so it suits a technical SEO more than a marketer who wants a dashboard.