What Is Claude SEO?
Claude SEO is a free, open-source SEO plugin for Claude Code, built by Agrici Daniel and licensed under MIT. Give it any website and it runs a full SEO audit in 10 to 15 minutes, then hands you a clear action plan sorted by what matters most. The repository had 24,684 stars and 3,284 forks when we checked on October 31, 2026, and it is built from 26 sub-skills and 19 specialist agents.
It checks everything a good SEO consultant would. Technical SEO covers crawlability, indexing, sitemaps, robots.txt, redirects, page speed and Core Web Vitals. Content quality covers E-E-A-T, which stands for experience, expertise, authority and trust, plus thin pages and topic coverage. Structured data checks find, validate and write Schema.org markup for rich results. Local and e-commerce SEO covers Google Business Profile, reviews, map pack, product pages and international sites. And AI search, called GEO, scores how likely Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini are to cite your pages.
The project's own site is the proof it points to. The site claude-seo.md was audited with Claude SEO from day one and picked up 10.8K Search Console clicks in its first 12 weeks, with a 99 mobile PageSpeed score. That is the project's own marketing, not an independent test, but it shows what the tool is built to chase: rankings in Google and citations in AI answers, not just a green score in a dashboard.
How an Audit Works
An audit runs in three steps. First, Claude SEO learns your site. It detects the type of business, SaaS, local, e-commerce, publisher or agency, and adjusts its checks to fit. Second, the team fans out. Up to 17 specialist agents audit the site in parallel, covering technical SEO, content, schema, speed, AI search and more. Third, you get a plan, not a pile of warnings. Findings are scored and sorted into a prioritized action plan, and every recommendation explains what it is based on, what it depends on, and how you will know it worked.
Reports are saved as Markdown files on your own machine, and the /seo google report command turns them into a polished PDF. The starting command is /seo audit with your URL. A single page in depth is /seo page, AI search readiness is /seo geo, structured data is /seo schema, and local SEO is /seo local. There are 30 core and extension commands in six groups, from audits and planning to technical SEO, content, schema and AI search, local and commerce, and extensions.
One design choice matters for trust. Claude SEO runs on your machine inside Claude Code, so your data stays with you. No SEO service or third party sees your data unless you connect an extension or API yourself. The pages you audit are sent to Claude, Anthropic's model, the same as anything else you work on in Claude Code, and some checks read public sources such as Wikipedia, Reddit and Common Crawl.
The 19-Agent Team
The team is the product. A technical SEO lead checks the foundations, a content editor checks E-E-A-T and quality, a structured data engineer handles schema, a sitemap architect handles sitemaps, and a performance engineer handles speed. Around them sit specialists for visual QA, AI search, agent readiness, local SEO, maps, Google data, backlinks, topic strategy, search experience design, change monitoring, e-commerce and strategy.
Five agents that need more judgment run on Opus and the rest on Sonnet, which is why a full audit uses more of your Claude plan than a single-page check. You can change any agent's model in its file under the agents folder. The split is also why the audit is fast: the agents work in parallel instead of one long checklist, so a full site audit lands in 10 to 15 minutes where doing it by hand takes 4 to 8 hours and an agency takes 1 to 3 weeks, by the project's own comparison.
Two specialist roles are worth knowing because they are newer than classic SEO. The AI search analyst scores how quotable your pages are for AI answers and checks that AI crawlers can reach them. The agent readiness analyst checks how well AI agents can use your site, covering Lighthouse Agentic Browsing, AI agent access, llms.txt, Markdown versions of pages and WebMCP. These are the checks that did not exist in SEO tools a few years ago, and they are the reason this project blew up in 2026.
AI Search Readiness
Google says optimizing for AI search is still SEO, and Claude SEO takes that literally. It starts with the basics AI answers rely on: being indexed, fast and clear. Then /seo geo scores how easy your pages are to quote, checks that AI crawlers can reach them, and looks at your brand's presence on Wikipedia, Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn.
This is where most older SEO tools fall behind. They were built for ten blue links, and AI search coverage is often months behind in their checklists. Claude SEO follows Google's own documentation, including the AI Optimization Guide, and its extension commands go further: SE Ranking tracks your share of voice across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Profound tracks when AI models cite your site over time. The Bing extension adds Bing Webmaster Tools plus instant IndexNow submission.
The honest framing is that no tool can guarantee an AI citation. What Claude SEO gives you is the checklist that makes citation possible: crawlable pages, clear facts, structured data, and a brand footprint AI models can find. If your pages are not indexed or your content is thin, no amount of AI-specific tuning will fix that, and the audit says so in that order.
Who It Is Built For
SEO agencies get weekly audits for every client instead of quarterly ones, with change monitoring to catch problems in between. The drift commands take SQLite snapshots of a site and compare them over time, so a broken redirect or a lost page shows up before a client notices. In-house SEO teams at SaaS, publishing and e-commerce companies get a second pair of eyes before every review, AI search included. Freelance SEO consultants can run an audit on the first call and show a real score and the top fixes before writing a proposal.
It is also useful for site owners who are not SEOs at all. The action plan is written so each fix says why it matters and how to verify it worked, which means you can hand it to a developer or work through it yourself without learning SEO first. And because reports are plain Markdown and JSON files you keep, you are not locked into a dashboard subscription to see your own audit history.
The cost comparison is the project's main sales pitch, and it is worth stating plainly. Doing it by hand costs billable hours, an agency costs $2k to $15k or more per project, and SEO audit software runs $99 to $999 a month. Claude SEO is free with your Claude Code plan, with no per-site pricing, no usage limits and no tracking. A few optional extensions connect to paid services where you bring your own account, but everything works without them.
How to Try It
You need Claude Code 1.0.33 or newer. Run these three commands inside it, and /seo setup prepares everything Claude SEO needs, its own Python environment and a headless browser, without touching the rest of your system. Run /seo doctor any time to check it. The commands are: /plugin marketplace add AgriciDaniel/claude-seo, then /plugin install claude-seo@agricidaniel-claude-seo, then /seo setup.
Manual install works too. Clone the repo and run the install script on macOS or Linux, or the PowerShell installer on Windows. The project deliberately recommends git clone over piping a remote script into a shell, because Claude Code's own security guardrails flag that pattern as a supply chain risk, and cloning lets you inspect the installer before running it.
Your first audit is one command: /seo audit with your site URL. Try /seo page on a single page for depth, /seo geo for AI search readiness, and /seo schema to check and generate structured data. If you want real field data instead of lab estimates, connect the free Google APIs, PageSpeed Insights, Chrome UX Report, Search Console and Google Analytics 4, with /seo google setup. Your keys stay on your machine.
What to Watch Out For
There are a few honest limits. Without Google API keys, Core Web Vitals are lab estimates and indexing is inferred from the page rather than confirmed. Pages that load key content only after scrolling or clicking can give noisy results. A full audit uses more of your Claude plan than a single-page check, because five agents run on Opus, so heavy users should expect that cost.
Claude SEO is also not a replacement for everything. Crawlers like Screaming Frog crawl faster and deeper, and big SEO suites have their own backlink databases that this tool does not. What it does instead is explain what it finds, sort it by impact, cover AI search in depth, and let you ask follow-up questions in plain English. Many people use both, and the README says so itself.
Finally, keep expectations straight about what an audit can do. It finds problems and ranks fixes, but it does not fix your site for you, and it cannot guarantee rankings or AI citations. Used that way, as a fast, free, repeatable audit with a plan attached, it is one of the most useful SEO tools available right now, and the 24,684 stars suggest a lot of people agree.
