If you have ever paid for an SEO audit and waited three weeks for a slide deck, you will understand why a free tool that does the same job in 15 minutes is getting attention. The Claude Code SEO skill open source project known as Claude SEO is a plugin for Claude Code that runs a full website audit with a team of specialist AI agents, then hands back a prioritised action plan instead of a pile of warnings. At the time of writing it has more than 22,000 GitHub stars, over 3,000 forks, and an MIT licence, which makes it free to use, inspect, and adapt. This guide explains what it actually does, how to install it, where it genuinely helps a business, and where a human still has to make the judgement calls. It is written for owners and marketing leads who want the benefit without the hype, and for developers who will be the ones running it.
What the Claude Code SEO skill open source project actually does
Claude SEO is not a dashboard product. It is a set of 26 sub-skills and 19 specialist agents that live inside Claude Code, Anthropic’s terminal-based coding agent. You point it at a website, it fans out up to 17 agents in parallel, and each agent checks a different part of the site: technical SEO, content quality, structured data, page speed, AI search readiness, local listings, backlinks, and more. The output is a scored, prioritised plan in Markdown, with PDF and JSON exports available, and every recommendation comes with an explanation of why it matters and how you will know the fix worked. That last point matters more than it sounds. Most audit tools hand you hundreds of warnings with no order. A prioritised plan tells a busy team what to fix on Monday and what can wait until next quarter.
The project is built by Agrici Daniel and published as AgriciDaniel/claude-seo on GitHub. Its own site, claude-seo.md, is presented as the proof case: the README reports 10,800 Search Console clicks in its first 12 weeks and a 99 mobile PageSpeed score. Treat that as the author’s own result on his own site, not a guarantee for yours. It shows the tool was used seriously on a real site, which is more than many trending repos can say, but your traffic depends on your market, your content, and your competition, not on running an audit.
What it can do, area by area
- Technical SEO: crawlability, indexing, sitemaps, robots.txt, redirects, page speed, and Core Web Vitals. This is the unglamorous work that decides whether Google can even read your pages properly, and it is where small sites most often lose rankings for fixable reasons.
- Content quality and E-E-A-T: the content agent reviews experience, expertise, authority, and trust signals, flags thin pages, and looks at topic coverage. For a business site, that usually means finding pages that say very little, pages that duplicate each other, and important questions your site never answers.
- Structured data: the schema agent finds existing Schema.org markup, validates it, and writes new markup for rich results. Schema does not create rankings by itself, but correct markup helps search engines understand prices, reviews, events, FAQs, and organisation details.
- AI search (GEO): the GEO agent estimates how likely Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are to cite your pages. This is the newest part of SEO, and also the least settled. Treat its scores as a readiness check, not a prediction.
- Local and e-commerce SEO: Google Business Profile, reviews, map pack, citations, product pages, and international sites. If you serve a local market or sell online, these checks are often worth more than another blog post.
- Agent readiness: a newer angle that checks Lighthouse Agentic Browsing signals, llms.txt, Markdown availability, and WebMCP readiness, in other words, whether AI agents as well as human visitors can use your site.
- Backlinks, drift, and Google data: backlink profile analysis, change monitoring with SQLite snapshots so you can see what moved between audits, and Google API integrations covering Search Console, PageSpeed, CrUX, Indexing, and GA4. Nine optional extensions add live data from tools such as SE Ranking, Profound, and Bing Webmaster Tools, plus multi-page Lighthouse runs.
How it works in practice
You need Claude Code 1.0.33 or newer. Inside Claude Code, the install is three commands: add the marketplace, install the plugin, and run setup. The setup step prepares an isolated Python runtime and a headless Chromium browser without touching the rest of your system, and a doctor command checks readiness at any time. If you prefer not to use the plugin route, the README also documents a manual install by cloning the repository and running its install script, which lets you inspect the code before you run it. That inspect-first option is worth using on any client machine.
Once installed, the commands follow a simple pattern. A full audit runs against a whole site, a page command goes deep on one URL, and specialist commands cover one area at a time: technical, content, schema, GEO, local, maps, backlinks, e-commerce, and more. In total the README documents 30 core and extension commands in six groups. A full audit takes 10 to 15 minutes according to the project, compared with 4 to 8 hours by hand, 1 to 3 weeks from an agency, or 10 to 45 minutes from audit software in the project’s own comparison table. Those comparison figures are the project’s illustrative market prices, not independent benchmarks, but the direction is right: the machine does the checking in minutes, and the human time moves to deciding and fixing.
What comes back is a plan, not just a report. Findings are scored and sorted, dependencies are noted, and each fix includes a way to verify it worked. Reports are saved as files you keep, which matters for agencies: a weekly audit for every client becomes feasible, and drift monitoring catches a broken sitemap or a lost redirect between quarterly reviews instead of after traffic has already fallen.
Why it is trending now
Three shifts explain the timing. First, SEO work has split in two: classic Google rankings still matter, and AI answers now matter alongside them. A tool that checks both in one run, including citation readiness for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, speaks to the question every marketing lead is asking this year, which is whether AI search will even mention their business. Second, agent skills have become a real distribution channel. Claude Code users already work in the terminal, so a plugin that turns their coding agent into an SEO team fits how they already work, with no new dashboard to learn. Third, cost pressure is real. The project’s comparison puts agency audits at 2,000 to 15,000 dollars or more per project and audit software at 99 to 999 dollars a month, against Claude SEO itself being free with a Claude Code plan. Even allowing for the cost of the Claude Code plan and the time to review results, that gap is why agencies, in-house teams, and freelance consultants are all in the README’s target audience.
There is also a credibility signal that helps: the repository carries 1,077 passing tests according to its badge, a CI workflow, and active maintenance, with updates landing in late October 2026. Trending repos often spike and stall. A maintained test suite and recent commits do not prove quality, but they are a better sign than stars alone, and they are worth checking on any repo before you build a workflow around it. If you want a contrasting Claude-based SEO tool, see our earlier Open SEO MCP Skills review, which covers a free SEO MCP server rather than a full audit plugin.
From our experience: where it helps, and where it does not
We build and maintain business websites, and we have learned to be careful about the difference between finding problems and fixing them. Claude SEO is strong at the first job and should not be mistaken for the second. An agent can correctly flag a slow page, a missing sitemap entry, or thin content, and still propose a fix that does not fit your business. Schema for a product page is a good example: generating the markup is easy, but deciding which products, prices, and availability states are true and current is a business decision, and wrong schema is worse than no schema.
Use it as a second pair of eyes before a launch or a quarterly review, and as a weekly monitor for client sites. Do not let it rewrite content unsupervised. Content recommendations need a human who knows the business, the claims you can legally make, and the customers you actually serve. An agent that optimises for keywords can flatten exactly the expertise and tone that make a business site trustworthy, which is the opposite of E-E-A-T. Budget honestly too. The plugin is free, but it is not costless. You need a Claude Code plan, time to run and review audits, and developer time to implement fixes. A 15-minute audit can easily produce a week of fixes, and that is normal. Prioritise by the plan’s own scoring, fix crawl and speed blockers first, then schema and content gaps, and leave cosmetic warnings for later.
When not to use it: if you do not have anyone who can judge its output, a long report will only create anxiety. Start with a single-page audit on your most important page, fix the top three items, and measure. If you run an agency, do not send a raw agent report to a client as a deliverable. Edit it into a short plan with owners and dates, or the client will read 200 warnings as 200 failures. For the wider tool landscape, our AI Tools Directory collects the tools we have reviewed for business teams.
Responsible use, in one paragraph
Only audit sites you own or have permission to audit, and be careful with competitor analysis features. Checking a competitor’s public pages is normal research, but hammering their site with automated requests, copying their content, or scraping data you have no right to use is not. Keep the audit’s own data handling in mind too: reports stay on your machine in the default setup, which is a genuine privacy advantage over uploading a site to a cloud auditor, but any optional extension that calls a third-party API will send data to that provider under its own terms. Read those terms before enabling live-data extensions on a client site.
Getting started in five steps
- Install Claude Code 1.0.33 or newer, and confirm it runs on your machine.
- Inside Claude Code, add the marketplace, install the plugin, and run setup, then run the doctor command to confirm the Python runtime and browser are ready.
- Run a single-page audit on your homepage or your most important service page first, not a full site audit. Read the whole plan before changing anything.
- Fix the top three prioritised items, verify each fix with the method the report suggests, and re-run the page audit to confirm the findings clear.
- Only then run a full site audit, save the report as your baseline, and set up drift monitoring so the next audit shows what actually changed.
Frequently asked questions
Is Claude SEO really free?
Yes, the public version is MIT licensed and free. You still need a Claude Code plan, because the plugin runs inside Claude Code, and optional third-party extensions may have their own costs. A separate private version is offered to members of the author’s community with early access to new features, but the public plugin is the one reviewed here.
Do I need to be a developer to use it?
You need to be comfortable in a terminal and inside Claude Code. A non-technical owner can read the reports, but running audits, judging fixes, and applying schema or template changes is developer or SEO-specialist work. For most businesses, the sensible setup is a developer running it and an owner reviewing the prioritised plan.
Will it improve my Google rankings?
It can find the problems that hold rankings back, but it cannot fix them by itself, and no audit tool can promise rankings. Crawl fixes, speed improvements, and correct schema help search engines understand and trust a site. Rankings still depend on content quality, competition, links, and time.
How is it different from a normal SEO audit tool?
The difference is where it runs and how it works. Normal tools run in a browser dashboard and return a list of issues. Claude SEO runs inside your coding agent, uses specialist agents in parallel, and returns a prioritised, verifiable plan as files you keep. The checks overlap heavily with good audit software; the workflow is what is new.
Should it replace my SEO agency or consultant?
No. It replaces the repetitive checking part of an audit, not the strategy, judgement, or implementation. An agency or consultant earns their fee by deciding what matters for your market, writing content that is actually true, and fixing templates and infrastructure. Use Claude SEO to make that work faster and more consistent, not to replace it.
Claude SEO earns its stars by doing one unglamorous job well: turning a website audit from a weeks-long project into a 15-minute check with a plan a team can actually follow. If you already use Claude Code, it is worth installing and running on your own site this week, starting with a single page. If you do not use Claude Code, it is not a reason to adopt a whole new toolchain on its own, but it is a useful signal of where SEO tooling is going: agents that check, humans that decide. If you want help turning an audit into fixes that hold, MTD Technologies builds AI integrations and automation with exactly that workflow in mind, and you can reach us through our contact page to talk through your site.