I decided to put together a bit of a contensious post today, primarily because my social feeds are filling up with AI content, from AI slop to SEO spam that's driven by AI be it through a Claude SEO skill, Codex, OpenClaw or Hermes. As we see agentic adoption grow, we're seeing work-flows follow the same automation pipeline, which is fine, I get it, automation can be useful to save time, money and increase productivity.
But, there also needs to be a line drawn between a genuine SEO automation and one that's purely spam or programmatic content abuse. In today's post, I cover "SEO agents" within Claude, primarily because this is where I see a lot of social posts.
Today we're going to look at Claude + SEO Skills to see if it's all its cracked up to be. The reason I've opted for Claude + SEO is primarily because I'm seeing a huge amount of posts on Linkedin promoting "SEO agents" and "firing your SEO agency" - you know the "I was paying an agency $5000 a month, I replaced it with a $20 claude code subscription etc".
So, let's dive in, are these "Claude Skills / Agents" actually doing anything of value? Note, there's a few different aspects to this and thats:
1. Using Claude Agents for analysis, auditing etc.
2. Using Claude Agents for programmatic content generation, posting, spam etc
Today we're going to be looking at:
https://github.com/AgriciDaniel/claude-seo
We can see its had a few thousand downloads:
I've seen Claude SEO automation posts prominently on LinkedIn in the last month.
So, firstly what is it?
On the Git repo it says:
Universal SEO skill for Claude Code. 25 sub-skills + 18 sub-agents covering technical SEO, E-E-A-T, schema, GEO/AEO, backlinks, local SEO, maps intelligence, semantic clustering, e-commerce SEO, international SEO, Google APIs, and PDF/Excel reporting. Optional DataForSEO, Firecrawl, and Banana extensions.
So, basically, its more of an AUDITOR, it looks at various things and presumably comes up with a report, recommendations etc.
So, I installed it, it was fairly straightforward in Windows, I simply ran the install from Windows Powershell, started Claude in the CLI and off I went.
I started with a full site audit, I used our own wesbite to see what it would come up with. I kick started with the full site audit and let the process run.....
It took around 20 minutes all in all to go through around 40 pages in total.
Now what's key to note here is that we don't actually have a list of what is being audited and what the full scope of SEO checks are, I believe it's likely using a mix of pre-set checks along with AI orchestrated checks, I'd have to look into the code to see, but top level, it looks like it will just do the usual SEO checks and perhaps some "GEO" checks, but as most good SEOs will know, there's not really much that's unique to GEO from SEO.
Anyhow, a coffee later and the audit had completed:
Annnnnnnnnnnnd..............
It was pretty much what I had expected, low level "generalised" issues, many of which are NOT critical.
So, let's take a look, now, I will be the first to say, YES, at the point of running the audit some pretty basic things were missing i.e. robots.txt (primarily because we've just deployed the website via vercel and also because we literally have nothing to limit via robots.txt).
So, a quick mini-debunking of what the audit cimplained about vs reality before we look at the MD OUTPUT files.
SO, headline findings were:
SEO Health Score: 41 / 100 — poor, but the gaps are mostly foundational and quick to fix.
The headline finding: This is an SEO/PPC agency that sells LLM SEO and AI Overview optimisation, yet its own site is missing every foundational
artefact search engines and AI crawlers rely on:
- No sitemap.xml (404 on every variant)
- No robots.txt (404)
- Zero JSON-LD schema on every page tested (8 pages)
- No llms.txt
- Broken /sitemap → 308 → /sitemap/ → 404 chain (a permanent redirect to a dead noindexed page — particularly bad)
- Title template "%s | Assertive Media" doubles the brand on pages whose title already contains it ("Lenovo EMEA Case Study | Assertive Media |
Assertive Media")
HEALTH SCORES:
These are truly a waste of time and pointless, they are MEANINGLESS. You can have a perfect 100/100 score and still not rank, equally, SCORING SYSTEMS do not correlate with rank, they are a tools own pre-determined scoring based on their own checks, but they don't properly account weight wise.
NO SITEMAP
Sitemaps are NOT important for 95% + of websites, sitemaps are MORE important if websites are large and have complex architecture or are more likely to have a lot of thin/near orphan routes for content. A sitemap provides a list of URLS, but, a PROPERLY BUILT website would naturally make content easily discoverable on a crawl.
There is no harm in a sitemap, but the idea that they are needed for SEO is a myth, Google and other user agents can crawl websites, sitemaps can be a fall back sure, but will adding one make a difference to your websites SEO profile?
No, not really, not unless you have a complex website architecture or substantial sub-folder coverage and pages buried deep in the websites architecture.
ROBOTS.TXT
Yes, this should be present BUT, it's not an issue if not present if your website doesn't have anything to exclude. For best practice one should be available even if it just contains a blanket Allow: /. BUT, not having one for our website makes no difference as we have nothing to block.
Again, the tool doesn't differentiate on this, its just a checklist item, if the robots.txt is not PRESENT its marked with a high severity.
In reality, if a website doesn't have anything to block not having one isn't going to make a difference.
If your website DOES have content that needs restricting via robots.txt then yes it is important.
ZERO JSON SCHEMA
Again! just because its missing doesn't make it a critical SEO issue, some sites don't even need it. In fact, we're watching Google slowly depreciate parts of structured data usage with the most recent being the depreciation of FAQ rich results.
YES, if your pages / website warrants SCHEMA by all means add it, but, again, the claude code SEO skill doesn't make the distinction, it just treats it as it SHOULD be present.
Google and other user agents are getting better at being able to extrapolate data without needing structured data, if anything, structured data is "complimentary" for confirmation as opposed to being an absolute requirement.
NO LLMS TXT
And AGAIN! not an SEO issue, and even if it were for GEO, where is the proof that LLMS.txt is being used? and even if it were, what do people think its supposed to achieve at this point? Whilst Google recently did 2 things, they basically confirmed that they treat GEO as "SEO", they equally did recently announce that LLMS.TXT would be included as part of lighthouse auditing.
So, yes there is likely to be a need for it, but from an SEO perspective no and from a GEO perspective, well, unlikely to add any tangible benefit.
BROKEN SITEMAP
This is NO different to the missing sitemap.xml, you can have XML sitemaps and page sitemaps (in HTML), again, it's exactly the same thing again! Most websites do NOT need a sitemap, a well built, well optimised website doesn't need a sitemap.
If your website IS reliant on it and it's not a large or complex site, than it's probable that you have a poorly built website or poor website architecture or poor accessibility issues.
A broken sitemap is NOT an issue, we don't even have a sitemap, so it's classed as broken when we don't even link to a sitemap page.
TITLE TEMPLATE
Yes, but not a big issue, highlighted it, fine, I'll let this one go, but, big SEO issue? no, minimal, Google rewrites titles on a huge volume of occassions now.
