Which SEO tool really has Iran data? We tested them

The test an SEO tool has to pass for this market

Three things, and the order matters. It has to accept Iran as a location. It has to return a number for a Persian phrase. And it has to let you check the result. A tool that fails the first is decoration from there on.

What gets accepted and what does not

The Google Ads location list in this service holds 262,074 rows. Exactly one of them carries the country code IR:

• Code 20498, name East Azerbaijan Province, Iran, type Province, parent 2364.

There is no country-level row for Iran. The parent code 2364, which is named Iran, does not appear in the list as a usable location, and sending it directly returns 40501 Invalid Field: location_code.

So where do the numbers you have seen come from

From the only route that answers: clickstream data. It gives you the worldwide volume of a phrase plus an estimated per-country share, and you multiply the two.

A real example from this week: the Persian term for the national trust seal returned 195,217 worldwide with a 41.56 percent share for Iran, which comes out at 81,133. That is not a bad number and we use it ourselves. But it is a share estimate, not a count of Iranian searches, and anyone writing it down as "search volume in Iran" has quietly removed a layer of precision. So were we, until this week.

The part that took longest to work out

Code 20498, which everybody calls "Iran", is East Azerbaijan Province. So the result set you pull with it is localised to Tabriz, not national.

That is not a rounding error. A provincial capital of about one and a half million people is not a proxy for a country of ninety.

Google confirmed it without being asked. In the related searches for the Persian phrase meaning "online shop design", the first two suggestions named Tabriz and Urmia, both cities in that province.

Which means the rank your tool reports may differ from what your customer sees in Tehran or Shiraz. We wrote about ranking differences between cities in the piece on city-level ranking. It now turns out part of that difference lives inside the measuring instrument.

What we did about it

Our own rank tool does not target Iranian cities by location code, because no such code exists. Instead a table of 31 provincial capitals with their geographic coordinates sits in the tool's source, and targeting happens by coordinate. The reason is written in that same file: Google's geotargets database, which most providers build on, has no Iran in it. We verified that live in July 2026 and it has not changed since.

And one point that does not flatter us but needs saying: coordinate targeting does not always come back clean either. In our testing the service has sometimes returned an error on Tehran coordinates while the identical request with Istanbul coordinates succeeded. It is not a complete solution. It is the best available one.

What to ask before you buy a tool

• How do you target Iran: by location code, by coordinate, or not at all? A vague answer means "not at all".
• Where does the volume number come from, and has a country share been multiplied into it? If the seller does not know the difference, do not trust the figure.
• Can I see the raw output? A tool that shows a chart but not the data behind it cannot be verified.
• What happens on a query that only exists in Persian? Ask them to run one in front of you.

Test it yourself

You do not need our word for any of this, and you do not need a paid account either.

The simplest check needs no account at all: take a phrase that only means anything inside Iran and see whether the tool returns a number or a zero. A zero means that tool has no Iran data, and no other feature makes up for it.

The tools we serve ourselves, and where each one gets its data, are listed on the tools page. If your job is keyword work, keyword research is the better entry point, and if you only want to know where you stand in Google, a rank check is enough.

And if all this reveals that the problem was never the data but the site itself, switching tools will not help. A properly built site will.

Questions we get

So no tool has accurate Iran data?

What we tested is this: in this service, the only route returning a number for Persian is clickstream, and that is a country-share estimate. We make no claim about tools we have not tested.

Does that make your own published numbers worthless?

No, but they are limited and we write the limit down. A clickstream figure is good for comparing two phrases against each other. It is not good for predicting monthly visits.

Foreign tool or Iranian tool?

There is no general answer. The right question is where that tool gets its Iran data. An Iranian tool sitting on the same foreign service inherits the same limits.

Could this change?

Yes. Every time we re-run the test we date the result on this page. The last run was 18 August 2026.