From time to time, SEO ranking tools just stop working. Why? Sometimes they are blocked, sometimes they have bugs and sometimes APIs or methods of calling the results are decommissioned.
As many of you know, the Bing Search API is going paid and Microsoft is decommissioning the old free API next week on August 1st. That means that any of the ranking tools that use the free version would need to upgrade to the paid version, which is not cheap.
The prices are as low as $0 per month for less than 5,000 queries per month and goes over $5,000 per month for up to 2,500,000 queries per month.
Ranking tools might require the end user to sign up and pay their own fees or they might try to eat the costs. Some might decide not to track Bing rankings because of the change.
So if your preferred search ranking tool stops tracking Bing results next week, you know why.
As a WebmasterWorld member said, "this will be a nice test for the soft./tools companies professionalism..."
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.