Companies Using Yoast SEO

With 10+ years in web crawling and technographic data analysis, I've examined Yoast SEO's position across 2,580,820 enriched companies matched from 1.99 million active domain detections. This analysis draws on our crawl data, LinkedIn company profiles, G2 review sentiment, WordPress.org stats (27,794 reviews, 4.8/5 stars), and migration patterns as of our March 2026 crawl. Yoast was acquired by Newfold Digital in August 2021 and operates alongside Bluehost and HostGator, giving it distribution advantages that independent competitors can't match. For background on the WordPress SEO plugin market, see our WordPress SEO plugin comparison.

1. Growth trajectory

Yoast SEO reads 3,746,462 domains in August against 3,268,852 in June. That is crawl coverage — our corpus roughly doubled across the same window, and RankMath and All in One SEO Pack rose in step. Normalised, all three are close to flat.

A note on this page's history: it previously tracked the id for Yoast SEO Premium specifically, which our current detection cannot isolate. The rule matches the yoast-schema-graph block, and the free and paid editions both emit it. The figures here now describe the product as a whole, which is why the headline moved from 1,991,891 to 3,746,462 — that is a change of scope, not of adoption.

External calibration: Yoast reports 10 million+ active installs of the free edition on WordPress.org. We detect 3.9 million live domains, roughly a third, because the rule requires a crawled page to have actually rendered the schema block. That ratio is close to Formidable Forms' (98,918 detected against 300,000+ claimed), which is reassuring — both are plugin detections keyed on rendered output.

2. Customer profile

The typical Yoast SEO customer is a micro-business with 1 to 10 employees (63.71%), founded in the 2010s (41.2%), running a WordPress site for their local service business. Combined with the 11-50 employee range, 91.9% of customers have fewer than 50 employees. These are construction companies, dental practices, real estate agents, and freelance consultants who need SEO guidance without hiring a specialist.

At the other end, our detection data surfaces IBM, Starbucks, Boeing, Siemens, and JPMorgan Chase. But context matters: Starbucks uses Yoast on careers.starbucks.com, Boeing on businessjets.boeing.com, and Target on accelerators.target.com. These are departmental WordPress deployments, not company-wide SEO infrastructure. Yoast's own customer stories feature Small Business Trends, a digital publisher that credits the plugin with a tenfold increase in top-10 Google rankings since adopting it in 2013.

Sales Signal: The 63.71% micro-business concentration creates demand for done-for-you SEO packages. These companies bought the plugin but likely lack the expertise to use it fully. Agencies can target Yoast SEO users on TechnologyChecker.io and offer SEO audit services.

3. Industry and geographic concentration

Yoast SEO's industry distribution is remarkably flat. Construction leads at just 5.05%, followed by Advertising Services (3.31%), Business Consulting (3.4%), Retail (2.89%), and IT Services (3.07%). No single vertical exceeds 4.5%. This horizontal spread means Yoast doesn't depend on any one industry's health, but it also means there's no industry where Yoast has deep vertical-specific features.

Geographically, the United States leads with 658,304 companies (roughly 26% of enriched data), followed by the UK (216,024), France (157,851), and the Netherlands (141,499). Yoast's Dutch origin gives it unusual strength in continental Europe: combined, France, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and Italy account for over 260,000 companies. Brazil (94,746) represents a growing non-English market.

Sales Signal: The strong European footprint, especially in non-English markets, creates opportunities for localized SEO services. Agencies specializing in multilingual WordPress SEO can filter by country on TechnologyChecker.io and target businesses in France, Germany, or Spain specifically. See also our RankMath page for competitive context.

4. Migration patterns

This is the most interesting result in the category, and it is unusual enough to state carefully.

18,099 domains dropped Yoast SEO and now run RankMath. RankMath sits on 0.36% of the domains that kept Yoast and 7.01% of those that left — a 19.6x base-rate lift — running 3.4:1 against 5,271 moving back, with 44% still-both. It passes every gate we apply, at n=18,099, which is 362 times our reporting floor. 16,662 of the moves are inside 90 days.

Why here and nowhere else? Across 44 profiles in this refresh programme, 41 reported no migration at all. That is not because software never gets replaced; it is because most categories permit coexistence, and coexistence destroys the signal. Formidable Forms sent 1,007 domains to Contact Form 7 and still failed — Contact Form 7 is commoner among the sites that stayed, because a WordPress site happily runs several form plugins. Pendo and Appcues coexist on 99% of shared domains. Justuno and Privy coexist.

Two SEO plugins cannot coexist. Both write the title tag, the canonical URL and the schema graph; running both is a misconfiguration that produces conflicting output. The deployment slot is exclusive, the decision is forced, and that is precisely the condition under which churn data becomes a migration corridor.

The All in One SEO Pack exchange confirms the rule from the other side: 3,573 out, 4,767 in, and 27,545 domains registering both — 85% of pairs. Those are unfinished migrations, and the symmetry disqualifies the corridor.

Sales Signal: this is the rare category where displacement messaging is supported by evidence rather than assumed. But keep the scale honest — 18,099 against an installed base of 3.75 million is about half a percent. Yoast is losing a measurable flow, not the market.

5. Technology ecosystem

The tech stack data confirms what the industry distribution suggests: Yoast SEO users are WordPress-first small businesses with standard marketing tools. Google Analytics appears on 59.11% of Yoast sites, Google Tag Manager on 57.85%, and MonsterInsights (a GA-WordPress connector) on 10.5%. These three together paint a clear picture of business owners who track traffic but don't invest in advanced analytics platforms.

Marketing automation adoption is low: HubSpot (4.5%), Klaviyo (3.1%), and MailerLite (2.0%). E-commerce presence is even lower: Cart Functionality at 4.5% and Microdata for Google Shopping at 1.2%. The typical Yoast SEO user runs a content or services site, not a store.

One differentiator worth noting: Yoast SEO now includes a Bot Blocker for AI crawlers (GPTBot, CCBot, Google-Extended), LLMs.txt management for guiding how large language models interact with site content, and IndexNow integration for instant search engine notification when content changes. These AI-era features, announced through 2023-2025 (per yoast.com/features/bot-blocker), don't show up in our tech stack data but represent a growing competitive moat. The Yoast SEO Academy has also trained 300,000+ people in SEO skills (per yoast.com/about-us), creating a sticky educational ecosystem around the product.

Sales Signal: The 89.5% of Yoast users without MonsterInsights represent an upsell opportunity for GA dashboard tools. The low marketing automation adoption (under 5% for any platform) means most Yoast users haven't invested in email marketing or lead capture, creating cross-sell opportunities for tools like Mailchimp or ConvertKit.

6. G2 review signals

G2 review data for Yoast shows 20 categorized mentions across 10 sentiment categories. The top positive signal is ease of SEO optimization (7 mentions), which aligns with Yoast's core value proposition. User-friendly interface (4 mentions) and SEO improvement (4 mentions) round out the positives.

On the negative side, limited features (5 mentions) is the top complaint, with users wanting more capabilities in the premium tier. Pricing concerns follow (3 mentions). Our migration data corroborates this: the 4.8:1 loss ratio to RankMath aligns with G2 complaints about pricing, since Rank Math Pro costs $5.99 to $8.99/month (roughly $72 to $108/year at rankmath.com/pricing) for unlimited personal sites, versus Yoast's $118.80/year per site.

Sales Signal: The feature limitation complaints create demand for complementary SEO tools that fill gaps Yoast doesn't cover (backlink analysis, keyword research, rank tracking). Agencies can bundle these tools with Yoast consulting services to increase perceived value.

7. Key takeaways

1. Market leader with declining momentum: 1.99M domains, but recent decline from 1.94M peak and a 4.8:1 loss ratio to RankMath signal competitive pressure.
2. Micro-business dominated: 63.71% of customers have 1-10 employees. Enterprise detections (IBM, Boeing) are departmental, not company-wide.
3. Genuinely horizontal: No industry exceeds 4.5%. Construction, advertising, and consulting lead, but Yoast serves everyone.
4. European strength: The Netherlands (4th), France (3rd), and combined continental European adoption distinguish Yoast from US-centric competitors.
5. AIOSEO battle won, RankMath battle in progress: 42:1 gain ratio vs AIOSEO, 4.8:1 loss ratio vs RankMath. Pricing is the key differentiator.
6. Simple tech stacks: 59.11% use Google Analytics. Under 5% use any marketing automation. These users need basic tools, not enterprise platforms.
7. Newfold Digital distribution moat: Acquired in August 2021, Yoast now ships pre-installed or promoted via Bluehost and HostGator, giving it an acquisition channel Rank Math and AIOSEO can't replicate.
8. AI-era positioning: Bot Blocker, LLMs.txt management, AI Optimize, and AI Summarize features position Yoast for AI search, though Rank Math's Content AI offers similar capabilities at lower per-site cost.

8. Sales applications

Prospecting template: "Hi [Name], I noticed your WordPress site at [domain] is running Yoast SEO. Our data shows that [industry] companies using Yoast typically optimize only 30-40% of the plugin's capabilities. We've helped similar [size] businesses increase organic traffic by auditing their Yoast configuration and implementing structured data, internal linking, and redirect strategies. Would 15 minutes this week work to discuss?"

Targeting strategy: On TechnologyChecker.io, filter for Yoast SEO + Construction industry + United States + 1-10 employees. This surfaces the highest-concentration segment: local service businesses likely running Yoast without expert guidance. Alternatively, filter for companies that show both Yoast SEO and RankMath detected (indicating active evaluation or partial migration) for competitive displacement opportunities.

Competitive angle: Target the 18,099 domains that switched from Yoast SEO to RankMath, 5,676 of them in the last 30 days. They may be experiencing transition pain (broken redirects, lost internal linking data) and could benefit from migration cleanup services or be open to returning to Yoast with proper setup.

Explore the full dataset of 3,746,462 Yoast SEO domains with enriched company profiles, industry breakdowns, and competitor overlap at TechnologyChecker.io.