SEO Audit Agent Skill

The SEO Audit Agent Skill audits a site and writes a concise HTML report that anyone can understand and use, including someone who has never done SEO.

Your agent checks the site's technical health, important pages, links, and search visibility. It checks ranking assumptions against live search results and weighs the likely benefit of proposed work against the effort. The report explains the problems found, how proposed changes could affect traffic or potential customers, and whether the likely benefit warrants the effort. It separates confirmed findings from hypotheses and says when the audit has not established a substantial improvement worth making.

The skill is plain SKILL.md instructions, so it runs in Claude Code, Codex, or any agent that supports the skills format. It delivers through the SEO Report skill: the finished page is saved to your OpenSEO project and appears on the project's Reports page, where anyone on your team can open it or print it to PDF.

What this skill helps your agent do

• Crawl the site, read the prioritized issues, and map the page families the crawl missed using the sitemap.
• Check backlinks, traffic estimates, and which pages appear for relevant searches.
• Read stronger and weaker pages in each important family side by side and judge whether each answers its own searcher's question with specific, accurate information.
• Verify ranking assumptions with live search results before choosing a priority.
• Build a shortlist of opportunities across different kinds of work, then choose the few whose likely benefit warrants the effort. An easy fix or a big raw search volume does not win on its own.
• Explain each recommendation with short "Do this" and "Why" bullets, a compact evidence table, and, when useful, a labeled traffic scenario.
• Show everything else it weighed in one "What else we checked" table with a one-line decision, so material findings are never dropped.
• Explain every technical term in plain English the first time it appears.
• Save the result to your project as a single HTML page anyone on your team can open or print.

When to use it

Use this skill when the report is for someone new to SEO: a client, a founder, a friend with a podcast or a photography site. It is also a good first skill if that beginner is you, because the report explains itself.

It handles broken sites honestly. If the domain is down or half-crawled, the agent investigates why before writing, and the recommendation changes to match: an expired certificate or a dead domain with a live successor site each call for a different response.

What you get back

One report on your project's Reports page. It opens with your next SEO move, then one to three recommendations, each naming a page or small group with "Do this" and "Why" bullets and a small evidence table. A "What else we checked" table lists the other opportunities the audit weighed and why they lost. The full evidence sits in an expandable section at the end. There is no fixed length: the prose stays light, and the data stays visible. In chat you get the link, the verdict, and the leading recommendation.

How to get the best result

• Give the agent one domain.
• Say who the report is for.
• Mention anything you already know, like a site move or an old domain.
• Ask to see the verified facts if you want to check the agent's work.
• Give the agent a research budget if you need a spending limit.

Auditing a Shopify store

Shopify rate-limits crawlers it hasn't authorized, so an audit of a Shopify storefront can come back short: some pages return 429, and the crawl may stop before it reaches every URL. The report says so when this happens.

If you own the store, you can authorize OpenSEO in about a minute:

1. In Shopify admin, go to Online Store → Preferences → Crawler access and click Create signature.
2. Pick the domain you audit (for example www.your-store.com) and an expiry of up to three months.
3. Copy the Signature-Input and Signature values. Shopify also shows a Signature-Agent value; you don't need it, because OpenSEO sends it for you.

A signature works only for the exact domain you picked, so www.your-store.com and your-store.com each need their own.

Paste both values into OpenSEO, either on the warning shown at the top of the audit report or under Project settings → Integrations → Crawler access. OpenSEO checks the signature against Shopify's published key when you save it. If it was made for a different domain, or a value was cut off when you copied it, OpenSEO tells you instead of saving it. Every audit request to that domain then carries the signature, and you can re-run the audit right away. The signature is saved on that website's project, and any other project in your organization that audits the same domain uses it too.

Shopify signatures last at most three months and cannot be renewed. OpenSEO stops sending a signature once it expires, and the audit report tells you when that happened. Create a new signature and paste it in the same place to replace the old one.

OpenSEO encrypts the signature before storing it, never shows it again after you save it, and sends it only to the domain it was created for. If you self-host, set BETTER_AUTH_SECRET (at least 32 characters) before saving a signature, because that secret is the encryption key.

Use it with OpenSEO MCP

Set up OpenSEO MCP so your agent can run the audit and read backlink data, traffic estimates, and keyword ideas. The site audit is included on every plan (up to 50 pages on the free plan); backlink, domain, ranking, live-search, and keyword lookups spend credits. The skill expands research when it can change the diagnosis or priority, reuses relevant evidence, and respects explicit budgets. Cost varies with the investigation rather than a fixed lookup allowance.

Read the actual skill

The source SKILL.md lives on GitHub:

• SEO Audit skill

Related skills

• SEO Report, the shared skill that writes and saves the report.
• SEO Coach if you are not sure this is the right workflow to run first.
• Keyword Research to build the keyword plan behind a recommendation.
• Link Prospecting when the report recommends link outreach and you want to go beyond the first outreach batch.
• Competitor Analysis once the basics are handled and you want to study who outranks you.