Claude SEO: SEO Skill for Claude Code

Claude SEO is an open-source SEO analysis plugin for Claude Code. It runs 25 sub-skills and 18 specialist agents in parallel across technical SEO, content quality (E-E-A-T), Schema.org markup, AI search optimization (GEO), local SEO, e-commerce, and international SEO. Every audit produces a prioritized action plan with testable recommendations grounded in primary-source guidance from Google.

Real results

Google Search Console for a site started 23 March 2026 and run on this workflow: total clicks and impressions across its first three months, through 12 June 2026.

Who this is for

• SEO agencies running 5+ client sites. Replace quarterly deep audits with weekly automated runs. Same team capacity, 4× audit cadence, every recommendation comes with a falsifiability check the client can verify.
• In-house SEO leads at SaaS / publisher / e-commerce companies. Second-pair-of-eyes before executive reviews. Catches what GSC and Lighthouse hide: schema deprecation, AI-citability gaps, expired-domain heritage risk, parasite-SEO exposure, machine-translation drift.
• Freelance SEO consultants. Anchor day-one client scope with a 15-minute audit and a real 0-100 score. Win the engagement with concrete proof of value before you spend an hour writing the proposal.

Run a full audit and watch parallel agents fan out across the site:

Watch the full demo on YouTube

Quick Start

# Start Claude Code
claude

# Full site audit: parallel sub-agents produce a prioritized action plan
/seo audit https://example.com

# Deep single-page analysis: on-page elements, content quality, schema
/seo page https://example.com/about

# Schema markup audit: detect, validate, generate
/seo schema https://example.com

# AI search optimization: passage citability + primary-source-aligned recommendations
/seo geo https://example.com

# Generate a sitemap with industry templates
/seo sitemap generate

Commands

Claude SEO sub-skill ecosystem: 25 modules grouped into 8 categories (audit, content, schema, technical, AI search, local + maps, commerce + intl, extensions) around the central orchestrator

32 user-invocable /seo commands across the orchestrator, its sub-skills, and 8 MCP extensions. Full reference in docs/COMMANDS.md.

Features

What Core Web Vitals does Claude SEO check?

Claude SEO measures the current three Core Web Vitals: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint, target under 2.5s), INP (Interaction to Next Paint, target under 200ms), and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift, target under 0.1). INP replaced FID on March 12, 2024; FID was removed from Chrome's field-data tools (CrUX API, PageSpeed Insights) on September 9, 2024 (Lighthouse is a lab tool and never reported FID), and Claude SEO never references FID. Field data comes from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) when available; lab data falls back to Lighthouse via PageSpeed Insights. LCP can be decomposed into subparts (TTFB, load delay, load duration, render delay) via the /seo google CrUX integration to localize bottlenecks. Mobile and desktop are measured separately. CrUX History (25-week trend) is included in the Tier 0 free credential set.

How does Claude SEO assess E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is evaluated against the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, last updated September 2025 with YMYL expanded to include political and social topics. Experience signals: original research, case studies, first-hand photos. Expertise: author credentials and topical depth. Authoritativeness: external citations and brand mentions. Trustworthiness, the most heavily weighted of the four: contact info, secure HTTPS, transparent corrections, date stamps. Before scoring sub-factors, Claude SEO applies Google's own Who / How / Why heuristic from the helpful-content guide. Generative AI content is fine if it meets Search Essentials; it crosses into spam when used to scale low-value pages, which seo-content humanize and seo-content verify are designed to detect.

What Schema.org types does Claude SEO support?

JSON-LD is the preferred format (Google's stated preference). Claude SEO detects, validates, and generates the active Schema.org types documented in skills/seo/references/schema-types.md, including organization, article, product, local, event, job, course, software/application, service, Q&A, and video patterns. FAQPage: Google stopped showing FAQ rich results for all sites on May 7, 2026; it has no Google rich-result benefit. Keep it only for non-Google or internal semantics if needed. Deprecated and never recommended: HowTo (rich results removed September 2023), SpecialAnnouncement (July 2025), ClaimReview, VehicleListing, EstimatedSalary, LearningVideo, CourseInfo carousel (all retired June 2025). Replacement guidance: skills/seo-schema/references/deprecated-types-2024-2026.md.

How does Claude SEO optimize for AI search?

Aligned with Google's AI Optimization Guide, which states that "AEO" and "GEO" are rebranded labels for SEO. AI Overviews and AI Mode are grounded in the same ranking systems as classic Search; pages must be indexed and eligible for snippet display to appear in any AI feature. Claude SEO scores passage citability (optimal 134-167 word self-contained answer blocks), question-based heading hierarchy, attribution density, structured data coverage, and entity presence across Wikipedia, Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn. The seo-geo skill includes evidence-based reframes of three popular myths: llms.txt is not currently a citation lever (primary-source evidence), content chunking is not required, and AI-specific keyword rewriting is unnecessary because synonym understanding is sufficient.

Which Google SEO APIs does Claude SEO integrate with?

A 4-tier credential system lets you start with zero keys and add data as needed. Every tier delivers real value at its level:

PDF reports are generated via WeasyPrint (A4 layout) with matplotlib charts at 200 DPI. Run /seo google setup for the credential wizard. All credentials live under ~/.config/claude-seo/ with 0o600 permissions; nothing is checked into the repo.

How does Claude SEO handle local SEO?

Three layers. Google Business Profile signals: categories, hours, photos, posts, products, attributes. NAP consistency across citations: name, address, phone matched against major directories with deviation flagging. Review intelligence: rating trends, sentiment, response coverage. For multi-location businesses, Claude SEO enforces a 30-page warning threshold and a 50-page hard stop to prevent doorway-page violations (configurable). The /seo maps workflow adds geo-grid rank tracking, GBP profile auditing, and competitor radius mapping. Local schema generation covers LocalBusiness with all required and recommended properties (geo coordinates, opening hours, areaServed). Phase F (v2) added a GBP deprecation linter that detects retired chat-field references and .business.site URLs.

Compared to manual / agency / commercial tools

Cost benchmarks: manual audit assumes a senior SEO consultant at typical agency billable rates; agency engagement based on common discovery/audit deliverable scopes; commercial-tool subscriptions reflect published mid-tier pricing across the SEO audit category (Ahrefs, Semrush, Sitebulb, Screaming Frog). Your numbers may differ.

Use cases

SEO agency lead running 10 client sites. Replaces the quarterly "deep audit" ritual with a weekly Monday-morning /seo audit run per site. Time to deliver a client health-score email drops from 4 hours to 12 minutes; coverage goes from quarterly to weekly without billing more hours. The drift baseline catches regressions between audits so the client conversation moves from "look at this snapshot" to "here is what changed this week."

In-house SEO lead at a 50-person SaaS company. Runs /seo audit 24 hours before each quarterly business review. Catches the items the platform UI buries (broken canonical chains on programmatic pages, schema deprecation after Google's June 2025 retirement wave, AI-citability gaps that erode SERP-to-AI-Overview pickup, expired-domain heritage on acquired blog assets) before the CMO asks why organic traffic is down in front of the board.

Freelance SEO consultant onboarding a new client. Runs /seo audit on the discovery call. Anchors the engagement scope with a real 0-100 score, 3 prioritized critical findings, and a falsifiability check on each recommendation, instead of a vague "I'll take a look and get back to you." Closes more retainers because the proof of value happens during the call, not after the proposal.

Sample Output

Claude SEO writes real markdown reports as its primary deliverable. Below is the first ~50 lines of a /seo schema https://rankenstein.pro/about audit verbatim. The actual structure, headers, and grading format the plugin produces follows.

# Schema Markup Report: rankenstein.pro/about

**URL:** https://rankenstein.pro/about
**Date:** 2026-02-09
**Format Detected:** JSON-LD (3 blocks) | No Microdata | No RDFa

---

## Summary

| Metric | Value |
|--------|-------|
| **JSON-LD Blocks** | 3 |
| **Schema Types** | Organization, WebSite, SoftwareApplication |
| **Critical Issues** | 2 |
| **Warnings** | 5 |
| **Passed Checks** | 18 |
| **Overall Grade** | B+ (solid foundation, actionable gaps) |

---

## Existing Schema Validation

### 1. Organization (`@id: #organization`)

| Property | Value | Status | Notes |
|----------|-------|--------|-------|
| `@context` | https://schema.org | Valid | |
| `@type` | Organization | Valid | Active type |
| `@id` | https://rankenstein.pro#organization | Good | Enables cross-referencing |
| `name` | Rankenstein | Valid | |
| `description` | Present, 200+ chars | Good | Descriptive and keyword-rich |
| `url` | https://rankenstein.pro | Valid | Absolute URL |
| `logo` | ImageObject with @id, url, width, height, caption | Excellent | Well-structured |
| `foundingDate` | "2024" | Imprecise | Year-only accepted but ISO 8601 preferred |
| `areaServed` | "Worldwide" | Text | Works but `GeoShape` is more semantic |
| `contactPoint` | email + contactType | Valid | Consider adding `telephone` |
| `founder` | 1 Person (Daniel Agrici) | Incomplete | Page describes two co-founders; second missing |
| `sameAs` | 5 social profiles | Good | GitHub, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit |
| `knowsAbout` | 6 topics | Good | Relevant topical signals |

**Critical Issue:** The `founder` property only includes Daniel Agrici. Benjamin Samar (Co-Founder & Technical Director) is displayed on the page but absent from the schema. This creates a content-schema mismatch that can confuse search engines.

Other audit outputs follow the same shape: FULL-AUDIT-REPORT.md (umbrella audit), GEO-ANALYSIS.md (AI-search readiness), LOCAL-SEO-ANALYSIS.md (GBP and citations), and a production PDF via WeasyPrint + matplotlib (cover, TOC, executive summary, data sections, recommendations, methodology, roughly 32 A4 pages for a full site audit).

Architecture

Claude SEO audit signal flow: /seo audit enters the orchestrator, fans out to 25 sub-skills and up to 15 parallel audit agents, and converges through the scoring engine into a prioritized report

The plugin follows the Agent Skills standard with a 3-layer architecture (directive, orchestration, execution). Skills and agents are auto-discovered from skills/seo-*/ and agents/seo-*.md. The orchestrator (skills/seo/SKILL.md) handles industry detection (SaaS, local, ecommerce, publisher, agency), parallel sub-agent dispatch up to 15 simultaneously, and synthesis through the 10-principle framework before emitting the action plan. Full architecture: docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Methodology

Claude SEO 10-principle methodology: PERCEIVE, ANALYZE, VALIDATE, and ACT phases with 10 principles arranged by quadrant

Every audit walks 10 principles grouped into four phases. Each emitted recommendation carries four fields: the first-principle observation it rests on, its dependency relationship to other recommendations, a "how would we know this failed?" check, and a leading indicator to monitor.

Full methodology: skills/seo/references/thinking-framework.md.

What's New in v2

v2.0.0 is the largest release in the plugin's history. Six build phases, all shipped:

• Phase A: Headless rendering everywhere. Shared scripts/render_page.py with Playwright Chromium plus trafilatura and htmldate. Every audit subagent gets SPA-aware fetching via --render auto (auto-detected on Next.js, React, Vue, Nuxt, Astro islands). Closes the SPA limitation that capped v1.x.
• Phase B: QRG-aligned content quality gates. Filler detector and AI-pattern humanizer keyed to QRG §4.6.5 and §4.6.6, claim-verification scanner, expired-domain heritage check via WHOIS, primary-source Google updates changelog.
• Phase C: Technical and CWV depth. LCP subparts via CrUX (TTFB, load delay, load duration, render delay), Speculation Rules and bfcache detection, IndexNow submitter for Bing / Yandex / Seznam / Naver, Unlighthouse multi-page Lighthouse wrapper.
• Phase D: Schema completeness. Four explicit generators (Reservation, OrderAction, DiscussionForumPosting, ProfilePage), e-commerce schema validator (hasMerchantReturnPolicy, shippingDetails, MemberProgram, EU energyEfficiencyClass, ProductGroup variants), dual validator (Rich Results Test plus Schema Markup Validator).
• Phase E: AI search reframing and 5 new MCP extensions. Ahrefs, SE Ranking (AI Share-of-Voice), Profound (LLM citation tracker), Bing Webmaster plus IndexNow, Unlighthouse. Plus the parasite-SEO risk scanner per Google's November 2024 site reputation abuse policy.
• Phase F: Local, international, and privacy polish. Google Business Profile deprecation linter (chat field and .business.site URLs, with Q&A treated as category/region-limited), DMA consent-mode-v2 click-through diagnostic, machine-translation QA flag per January 2025 QRG.

Test coverage grew from 39 (v1.9.9) to 410 across the v2 line; the url_safety suite alone runs 91 SSRF and DNS-rebinding bypass cases, closing the obfuscated-IPv4, FQDN-trailing-dot, and redirect-rebinding bypass classes. Full migration notes and breaking changes: docs/MIGRATION-v1-to-v2.md.

Since v2.0.0

• v2.1.0 (May 2026): currency refresh. May 2026 core update, Google I/O 2026 (custom version of Gemini 2.5 powers AI Mode), FAQ rich results retired 2026-05-07 (QAPage remains the type for genuine Q&A pages, FAQ markup itself just no longer yields rich results).
• v2.2.0 (June 2026): security + portability. Installer credential-injection fix, SSRF authority-confusion bypass closed, Google API keys moved to the X-Goog-Api-Key header, secret-scan CI gate, Windows/macOS fixes; suite at 326.
• v2.2.1 (June 2026): Google-currency reconfirmation + full command audit. Lighthouse 13.4.0 with the new Agentic Browsing category, Google Search ignores llms.txt, an internally-reweighted E-E-A-T scorecard (Trust highest, per Google's 'trust is most important'); every /seo command and subcommand audited and COMMANDS.md brought to 100% coverage.
• v2.2.2 (July 2026): full-review maintenance. Corrected GBP Q&A handling, AI Mode model naming, image-model IDs, hook input behavior, and added a strict reference-graph consistency gate.
• v2.2.3 (July 2026): prompt-hygiene alignment. Normalized emphasis and punctuation across the prompt surface without changing behavior, routing, or output contracts.
• v2.2.4 (July 2026): community maintenance. Added the managed cross-platform runtime and safe sitemap discovery, repaired GSC pagination and totals, replaced removed Bing endpoints, fixed extension and Windows portability gaps, and reconciled every open issue and pull request.

Limitations

Two real boundaries worth being upfront about.

Heavy client-side hydration timing. Phase A's headless renderer handles most SPAs out of the box (--render auto detects empty <div id="root"> shells and switches to Playwright). Edge cases that still produce noisy findings: pages with hydration tied to scroll position past the fold, pages that fetch critical content after user interaction (modal opens, tab clicks), pages with race-condition-prone third-party widget mounts. For these, manually triggering the seo-visual subagent and comparing its Playwright snapshot to the raw-HTML subagents' findings is the recommended workflow.

Local-only without enrichment. The free tier makes no third-party API calls by default (audits still fetch the target URLs you point them at). Adding Google API credentials (Tier 0 through 3) unlocks real field data and live indexation status; without them, Core Web Vitals are lab estimates only and indexation is inferred from page-level signals. Adding MCP extensions (Ahrefs, DataForSEO, SE Ranking, Profound) similarly unlocks competitive and AI-citation data but requires their respective accounts.

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• Claude Code CLI
• Optional: Playwright Chromium — install.sh offers to install it (you can skip the prompt); needed only for SPA rendering and screenshots
• Optional: Google API credentials for enriched CWV / GSC / GA4 data (see /seo google setup)

Extensions

Optional MCP servers add live data to the audit pipeline. Claude SEO ships extensions for 8 servers; the plugin core works without any of them.

DataForSEO

Live SERP data, keyword research, backlinks, on-page analysis, content analysis, business listings, AI visibility checks, and LLM mention tracking. 23 data commands across 9 API modules.

./extensions/dataforseo/install.sh   # requires DataForSEO account
/seo dataforseo serp best coffee shops
/seo dataforseo ai-mentions your brand

Full DataForSEO docs: extensions/dataforseo/README.md.

Firecrawl

Full-site crawling and URL discovery via the Firecrawl MCP server.

./extensions/firecrawl/install.sh
/seo firecrawl crawl https://example.com

Full Firecrawl docs: extensions/firecrawl/README.md.

Banana: AI image generation

SEO image generation (OG previews, blog heroes, product photos, infographics) via the Claude Banana Creative Director pipeline.

./extensions/banana/install.sh
/seo image-gen og "Professional SaaS dashboard"

Full Banana docs: extensions/banana/README.md.

Ahrefs, SE Ranking, Profound, Bing Webmaster, Unlighthouse (new in v2)

Five extensions added in Phase E:

• Ahrefs: official @ahrefs/mcp server with backlink and organic data
• SE Ranking: AI Share-of-Voice across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode
• Profound: LLM citation tracker with time-series data
• Bing Webmaster: Bing Webmaster Tools plus IndexNow unified
• Unlighthouse: MIT-licensed multi-page Lighthouse runner

Setup walkthroughs live under extensions/<name>/docs/; integration notes: docs/MCP-INTEGRATION.md.

Ecosystem

Claude SEO is part of a family of Claude Code skills that interoperate cleanly:

Workflow example:

1. /seo audit https://example.com: identify content gaps and technical issues
2. /seo backlinks https://example.com: analyze link profile and competitor gaps
3. /seo geo https://example.com/blog/post: score AI-citation readiness
4. /blog write "target keyword": create SEO-optimized blog post (Claude Blog)
5. /seo image-gen hero "blog topic": generate hero image (Banana extension)

FAQ

What is Claude SEO?

Claude SEO is an open-source SEO analysis plugin for Claude Code. It runs 25 sub-skills and 18 specialist agents in parallel across technical SEO, content quality, Schema.org markup, AI search optimization, local SEO, e-commerce, and international SEO. Audits produce a prioritized action plan where each recommendation carries the first-principle observation it rests on, its dependency relationship to other recommendations, a "how would we know this failed?" check, and a leading indicator. The plugin is MIT-licensed, ships zero proprietary tracking, and works without third-party API enrichment; audits still contact the target URLs you analyze. Aligned with Google's AI Optimization Guide and the September 2025 Quality Rater Guidelines.

How is Claude SEO different from Screaming Frog or Ahrefs Site Audit?

Different surface area, different tradeoffs. Screaming Frog crawls deeper and faster at the link-graph level; it is purpose-built as a crawler and Claude SEO does not attempt to replace it. Ahrefs Site Audit brings a proprietary backlink index and link intelligence; Claude SEO integrates with Ahrefs via its MCP extension rather than competing. Where Claude SEO leads: conversational LLM-native workflow, recommendation falsifiability (every finding carries an explicit failure-mode check), open-source MIT licensing with zero per-domain pricing, AI search optimization aligned with Google's primary-source guidance, and primary-source schema-deprecation tracking. Use Screaming Frog or Ahrefs for what they are best at; use Claude SEO when you want LLM-driven synthesis, conversational iteration, and AI-search-first audits in the same environment as your other Claude Code workflows.

Does Claude SEO work on single-page applications (Next.js, React, Vue)?

Yes. Phase A of v2 shipped a shared headless renderer (scripts/render_page.py) backed by Playwright Chromium. Audit subagents call render_page.py --mode auto, which auto-detects SPA hallmarks (empty <div id="root"> shells, single bundle script, hydration markers) and switches to a rendered fetch. The lower-level scripts/fetch_page.py wrapper supports --render auto as an opt-in wrapper mode; its default is --render never for raw HTTP. Use render_page.py --mode always or fetch_page.py --render always to force rendering. Content extraction uses trafilatura for boilerplate removal. Publication dates come from htmldate. Known nuance: pages with scroll-bound hydration or post-interaction content fetches still produce noisy findings; see the Limitations section for the recommended seo-visual cross-check workflow on those edge cases.

What Google APIs does Claude SEO use, and are they required?

None are required. Claude SEO is fully functional with zero API keys. A 4-tier credential system lets you upgrade gradually: Tier 0 (API key only) unlocks PageSpeed Insights, CrUX, and CrUX History (25-week trend data). Tier 1 (+ OAuth or service account) adds Search Console with queries, URL Inspection, sitemap status, and the Indexing API for eligible JobPosting pages or BroadcastEvent in VideoObject pages; the API does not guarantee indexing. Tier 2 (+ GA4 property config) adds organic traffic, top landing pages, and device / country breakdowns. Tier 3 (+ Ads developer token) adds Keyword Planner search volume and competition data. The credential setup wizard runs via /seo google setup. All credentials live under ~/.config/claude-seo/ with 0o600 file permissions; nothing is checked into the repo and nothing is transmitted beyond Google's own endpoints.

Is Claude SEO free?

Yes. MIT licensed, fully open source, no per-domain pricing, no telemetry, no API quotas imposed by the plugin itself. The core plugin and all 25 sub-skills work without any paid service. Some optional MCP extensions wrap paid services (DataForSEO, Ahrefs, Profound, SE Ranking) where you bring your own account credentials; their use is opt-in and the plugin works fully without them. Google APIs (PageSpeed Insights, Search Console, Indexing, GA4) are free from Google with normal account quota limits and require your own credentials. If you want commercial support or enterprise features beyond the open-source plugin, that is not part of this project.

How is Claude SEO different from regular SEO tools when it comes to AI search?

Most SEO tools treat AI search as a separate optimization discipline. Claude SEO follows Google's own position that AEO and GEO are rebranded labels for SEO. AI Overviews and AI Mode are grounded in the same ranking systems as classic Search; the eligibility floor is normal indexation. Claude SEO scores passage citability (134-167 word self-contained answer blocks), question-based heading hierarchy, attribution density, and entity presence across Wikipedia, Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn. It explicitly rejects three influencer myths: llms.txt as a citation lever, content chunking for AI, and AI-specific keyword rewriting. For commerce sites, Claude SEO audits the IPTC TrainedAlgorithmicMedia requirement on AI-generated product images per Google Merchant Center policy.

Documentation

• Installation Guide
• Commands Reference: every /seo command in depth
• Architecture: 3-layer design, auto-discovery, parallel dispatch
• Migration v1 → v2: breaking changes, six phases of work
• MCP Integration: integration notes; extension setup lives under extensions/<name>/docs/
• Troubleshooting