Claude SEO is a comprehensive skill designed for the Claude Code environment, providing in-depth analysis, auditing, and strategic planning capabilities for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Its core objective is to offer a holistic suite of tools to enhance website visibility and performance across various search engines, including traditional and AI-powered platforms.

The system's core methodology is based on a highly modular and extensible architecture, structured around a central orchestrator skill (~/.claude/skills/seo/) that delegates tasks to numerous specialized sub-skills (~/.claude/skills/seo-*/) and subagents (~/.claude/agents/seo-*.md). This allows for parallel processing and focused analysis across diverse SEO dimensions. The architecture integrates directly with official and community-driven Multi-Cloud Protocol (MCP) servers, enabling real-time data acquisition from external SEO platforms like Ahrefs, Semrush, Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights.

Key technical capabilities and features include:

1. Technical SEO Audit: Conducts a thorough analysis of nine technical categories, ensuring site health and crawlability.
2. On-Page and Content Quality Analysis: Assesses individual pages for optimization, including adherence to E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) guidelines, updated for September 2025 Quality Rater Guidelines. This involves evaluating author credentials, industry recognition, contact information, and security protocols.
3. Schema Markup Management: Detects, validates, and generates Schema.org markup (JSON-LD, Microdata, RDFa). It accounts for deprecations (e.g., HowTo, FAQ, SpecialAnnouncement) and supports advanced schema types such as VideoObject, BroadcastEvent, Clip, SeekToAction, and SoftwareSourceCode for rich results.
4. Core Web Vitals (CWV) Analysis: Monitors and reports on critical user experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP < 2.5s), Interaction to Next Paint (INP < 200ms), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS < 0.1). It utilizes data from Google PageSpeed Insights and Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX).
5. AI Search Optimization (GEO): Specifically targets optimization for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platforms such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT web search, and Perplexity, anticipating future search trends.
6. Google SEO API Integration: Provides direct integration with Google's proprietary data sources, utilizing a 4-tier credential system for varying levels of access:
   • Tier 0 (API Key): PageSpeed Insights (PSI), CrUX, CrUX History.
   • Tier 1 (+ OAuth/Service Account): Google Search Console (GSC) for top queries, URL inspection, sitemap status, and Indexing API for notifying Google of URL changes.
   • Tier 2 (+ GA4 config): Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for organic traffic, top landing pages, device/country breakdowns.
   • Tier 3 (+ Ads token): Google Keyword Planner.
7. Sitemap Management: Analyzes existing XML sitemaps and can generate new sitemaps conforming to industry templates.
8. Image Optimization: Analyzes image assets for performance and SEO best practices.
9. Local SEO & Maps Intelligence: Focuses on Google Business Profile (GBP) optimization, NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistency, citation and review analysis, geo-grid rank tracking, and competitor radius mapping. Includes quality gates to prevent thin content or doorway pages for location-based content.
10. Programmatic SEO: Facilitates the scalable generation of SEO pages from data sources with integrated quality safeguards. This includes analyzing existing programmatic pages for thin content and cannibalization, planning URL patterns, automating internal linking, and managing canonical strategies to prevent index bloat. Quality gates warn at 100+ pages and hard stop at 500+ without an audit.
11. Competitor Analysis: Generates structured competitor comparison pages ("X vs Y", "alternatives to X") with feature matrices, product schema markup, and conversion-optimized layouts.
12. Hreflang/i18n SEO: Audits and generates hreflang tags for multi-language sites, validating self-referencing tags, return tags, x-default, and detecting common errors (e.g., missing returns, invalid codes, HTTP/HTTPS mismatch). Supports cross-domain hreflang and validates language/region codes (ISO 639-1 + ISO 3166-1).
13. PDF Report Generation: Produces enterprise-grade A4 PDF/HTML reports with charts, leveraging WeasyPrint and matplotlib for data visualization.
14. Extensibility: Supports optional extensions via MCP, such as DataForSEO for live SERP data, keyword research, backlinks, and AI visibility checks, and Banana (AI Image Generation) for creating SEO-optimized visual assets.

The skill operates within the Claude Code CLI, requiring Python 3.10+ and optionally Playwright for screenshots and Google API credentials for enhanced data. Installation is provided via git clone or one-liner scripts for Unix/macOS/Linux and PowerShell for Windows, with security considerations for remote code execution.