The Claude SEO audit skill is a reusable instruction file you load into Claude that turns a crawl export or a URL into a prioritised technical SEO audit. It flags redirect chains, duplicate titles, indexation problems, orphan pages and cannibalisation, ranks them by severity, and gives a one-line fix for each. It runs the same way every time, so you get an agency-grade first-pass audit in minutes instead of hours, without re-prompting from scratch.
I run Claude audits across client work at StudioHawk, and the honest version is this: the skill does not replace a senior technical SEO. It replaces the three hours that senior spends triaging a crawl before the real thinking starts. That is the job it is built for, and it is very good at it.
This is one skill in the free Claude SEO skills library. Here is exactly what it contains, a real walkthrough, and when you should not bother.
What the Claude SEO audit skill actually does
A skill is a markdown file with a name, a description, and a set of instructions Claude follows every time you trigger it. The audit skill tells Claude to act as a technical SEO auditor: read the data you give it, find what is stopping the site from being read and ranked, and rank every issue by severity.
You run it one of two ways. Paste a crawl export (Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, the free tier is fine) and Claude audits it directly, which is the best mode. Or give it a URL and, if Claude has web access, it fetches robots.txt, the sitemap, and a few representative pages for a lighter audit. Here is what it looks at.
| What it audits | What it checks |
|---|---|
| Indexation | Pages blocked, noindexed, canonicalised away, or missing from the sitemap |
| Redirects | Chains, loops, and 302s that should be 301s |
| Titles and meta | Duplicates, missing, truncated, and templated titles across the set |
| Cannibalisation | Two or more pages competing for the same query |
| Orphan pages | Pages with no internal links pointing at them |
| Crawl and render | Content that only appears after JavaScript, which most bots never see |
| AI citation-readiness | Whether each page is answer-first, extractable, and entity-clear enough to be cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews |
That last row is the one paid crawlers do not give you, and it is the reason this skill matters in 2026. More on it below.
A real walkthrough, start to finish
Say you want to audit a mid-size ecommerce store. The flow takes about five minutes.
- Load the skill. Drop the audit skill into your Claude Desktop skills folder, or paste it as a Claude Project system prompt.
- Give it the data. Run a free Screaming Frog crawl (up to 500 URLs), export the Internal tab to CSV, and paste it in. No crawl handy? Paste the URL and let Claude fetch what it can.
- Read the output. Claude returns a severity-ranked table, worst first, with a one-line fix per issue. You triage from the top.
The output looks like this, ranked so you fix what actually blocks rankings before you touch the nice-to-haves.
| Severity | Issue | One-line fix |
|---|---|---|
| FAIL | Primary category page is noindexed | Remove the noindex tag and request indexing |
| FAIL | Redirect chain: 4 hops to the live URL | Collapse to a single 301 to the final URL |
| WARN | Nine product pages share one title tag | Templatise unique titles from product attributes |
| WARN | Buying guide only renders in JavaScript | Server-render the content so bots and AI can read it |
| PASS | Schema valid, canonical clean, answer-first intro | No action, this is the pattern to copy |
The value is not that Claude finds issues a crawler cannot. It is that it reads the messy export, decides what matters, and hands you a prioritised worklist in plain English. That is the part that usually eats an afternoon.
The part most audits miss: AI search citation-readiness
Every competitor audit skill checks the Google fundamentals. Almost none check whether your content can be cited by AI search, and that is now half the game. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews do not rank pages, they lift passages. A page can be technically perfect for Google and still be invisible to AI because it buries the answer, hides content behind JavaScript, or gives the model nothing clean to extract.
The audit skill checks for that: does each section lead with a self-contained answer, are claims extractable, is the entity and schema clear enough for a model to trust and quote. If you want the full picture on that, see the AI search engines cheatsheet and my guide to technical SEO for AI search.
When to use it, and when to skip it
I would rather you use this well than everywhere. Use it for a fast first-pass audit, for triaging a crawl, for auditing content-level and AI-readiness issues, and for giving a junior a repeatable standard. Skip it, or pair it with a human, when you need a full enterprise technical audit, when the site is a JavaScript-heavy single-page app that needs a real rendering crawler first, or when the answer depends on log-file analysis Claude cannot see. The skill is a scalpel for triage, not a replacement for the surgeon.
Claude audit skill vs paid audit tools
The skill is free and, because Claude reads a large context at once, it is strong on content-level and citation analysis that per-URL tools handle poorly. Paid crawlers still win on scheduled crawls, scale, and JavaScript rendering. Most teams should run both: the crawler gathers the data, the skill turns it into decisions. If you want to run audits at scale on a schedule, that is a job for Claude Code for SEO rather than the desktop app, and for the wider case on saved skills over copy-paste prompts, see Claude SEO skills vs prompts and the Claude SEO skills workflows guide.
How to get the Claude SEO audit skill
It is free and open source. Grab it from the Claude SEO skills repo on GitHub and drop it into Claude Desktop or Claude Code. You can browse the whole library, with worked examples, on the Claude SEO skills hub and on Hawk Academy.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Claude SEO audit skill?
It is a free, reusable instruction file you load into Claude that turns a crawl export or URL into a prioritised technical SEO audit: redirect chains, duplicate titles, indexation problems, orphan pages, cannibalisation and AI citation-readiness, each ranked by severity with a one-line fix.
Is it free?
Yes. It is open source in the Claude SEO skills repo on GitHub. You only need Claude Desktop or Claude Code to run it.
Can Claude actually do an SEO audit?
For triage and content-level analysis, yes, and well. Paste a Screaming Frog or Sitebulb export and Claude will find and rank the issues that matter. It does not replace a rendering crawler for large JavaScript sites or log-file analysis, so treat it as the first pass, not the whole job.
How is it different from Screaming Frog?
Screaming Frog gathers the raw crawl data. The Claude audit skill reads that data, decides what matters, and hands you a prioritised, plain-English fix list, plus an AI citation-readiness check that a crawler does not provide. Use them together.
Does it audit for AI search, not just Google?
Yes. It checks whether each page is answer-first, extractable and entity-clear enough to be cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, which is the dimension most audit tools ignore.
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Chief of Staff at StudioHawk, Australia's largest dedicated SEO agency. Specialising in AI search visibility, technical SEO, and organic growth strategy. Leading a team of 120+ across Melbourne, Sydney, London, and the US. Book a free consultation →