Seo Audit Console README
The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Seo Audit Console listing page.
SEO Audit Console - the technical SEO audit MCP server for Claude
A technical SEO audit you can hold a conversation with - built from your own Search Console data and a live crawl of your site, run inside Claude.
The complete technical SEO audit, at conversation speed. SEO Audit Console is an SEO MCP server that merges your Google Search Console history, a first-party crawl of your site, and on-demand DataForSEO market data into one prioritised audit inside Claude - from crawlability, indexation, canonicalisation, structured data, Core Web Vitals and hreflang right through to keyword cannibalisation, striking-distance queries, content gaps, competitor analysis, link prospecting (with Majestic Trust Flow) and AI-search readiness. Ninety-three checks, every finding ranked by the clicks it could recover, every fix written for you: paste-ready redirects, JSON-LD, internal links and grounded content briefs. What used to be a fortnight of crawling, exporting and cross-referencing spreadsheets is twenty minutes and a prompt - and your data never leaves your machine.
Built by Houtini. We build automation for the grunt work of digital marketing - the data collection, the crawling, the merging, the checking - so your team's time goes on the thinking, the strategy and the client work that needs a human. This plugin is that idea applied to the technical SEO audit.
New to MCPs, or not sure where to start? The Getting started guide takes you from a completely fresh machine (no Node, no Git, never heard of a service account) to your first audit - every step screenshotted, including the one everyone misses. Ten minutes, honestly.
The manual
This README is the story and the quick start. The detail lives in the manual:
| Page | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Getting started | Install, the GSC service-account setup (and the step everyone misses), Claude Desktop and Claude Code config, your first audit, troubleshooting |
| Tool reference | Every tool: what it does, inputs, joins, an example prompt |
| The check registry | All 93 checks with what each catches, its D/N label, and the fix |
| Composition | The join keys, the grains, and thirteen worked recipes for asking your own questions across the data |
| Competitive analysis | The Semrush-replacement workflows, DataForSEO setup, link intersect with the Majestic Trust Flow tier, and the real costs |
| SEO Recon | Why a page is losing: the live SERP + AI-Overview citation verdict, the competitor diff, and the trackable to-do ledger |
| DataForSEO functions | Every DataForSEO-backed tool grouped by API module — Keywords, SERP, Labs, Backlinks, OnPage — each with its endpoint and cost |
| Majestic functions | The optional Trust Flow tier — what it adds and how link_intersect uses it |
| Dashboard & reports | The eight tabs, the report hub, what each chart shows, and the shareable export |
Surprisingly little has changed in twenty years
The technical audit I was writing for clients in 2006 is, structurally, the audit most agencies still sell today. A crawler runs, a template fills, a 60-page PDF lands. Everything a crawler could find, in severity order, with no idea which findings are worth money and which are cosmetic.
What has changed is what's possible. Google gives every site owner a complete record of its search reality - which queries, which pages, how many impressions, where you ranked. Your crawl tells you what your site says. Search Console tells you what Google did about it. And in my experience, the gap between those two datasets is where nearly all of the recoverable traffic hides.
So that's what I built. SEO Audit Console is a Model Context Protocol server that merges your Search Console history with a first-party crawl of your site (and, when you want it, DataForSEO) into one thing: a prioritised, evidence-backed audit you can interrogate inside Claude Desktop. It hands you paste-ready fixes. Every finding traces back to a real datapoint.
One idea underneath all of it:
Your crawl is intent. Search Console is reality. The money is where they diverge.
A flat crawler tells you a page 404s. Useful, but only just. This tells you the 404 is draining 15% of your homepage's internal PageRank, that the page used to earn 10,000 clicks a month, and it writes the 301 rule to fix it. It finds the page at position #3 on 150,000 impressions with a 0.2% click-through rate - a title rewrite probably worth thousands of clicks - and ranks that above the cosmetic findings. Severity is what crawlers sell you. Yield is what moves the numbers.
Who is this for?
The SEO consultant who wants the collection and checking automated so the thinking time survives. The in-house marketer who's been quoted four figures for a commodity audit. And anyone newer to this who wants to learn what a good audit looks at - because every finding shows its evidence, the tool doubles as a teacher.
A note on where to run it. Claude Desktop is the easy start, but in my view Claude Code is the best home for this tool - because it closes the loop. In a chat client the audit hands you a 301 rule to paste somewhere. In Claude Code, the same session has your site's repo, a terminal and git: the audit finds the issue, writes the fix, applies it to the codebase, commits it, and re-crawls to verify. Finding to deployed fix, one conversation.
You don't need to learn an interface. You type "run an SEO audit on mysite.com" into Claude and it happens. Forget what's possible? Ask "run seo_audit_help" and you get the full menu with example prompts.
Does the approach work?
Yes. The crawl-plus-GSC merge is not a novelty; it's the method. On one property, seeding the crawl from Search Console URLs took coverage of GSC-known pages from 29% to 70% - every one of those extra pages is a page a conventional crawl silently missed, and several were earning traffic with no internal links pointing at them at all. On the same property the incremental sync turned a 33-minute data refresh into 19 seconds, which is the difference between "audit quarterly" and "audit whenever you're curious".
What the audit checks
run_audit executes 93 checks over the joined data and returns a ranked list - not a wall of everything, a priority order with the traffic at stake attached to each finding. The families, briefly:
| Family | What it catches |
|---|---|
| Crawlability & indexation | Broken links, redirect chains, orphans, index bloat, spider-traps, robots-blocked pages still earning traffic, and the reason every URL isn't indexable |
| On-page & structured data | Titles, metas, H1s, alt text - plus a local validator covering ~30 rich-result types, required fields only, so it never nags about properties Google ignores |
| Trends (GSC over time) | Pages losing clicks, rankings slipping, vanished queries, rising pages worth doubling down on, stale content decaying year-on-year |
| The merged questions | Cannibalisation, striking distance, ghost pages, traffic to dead URLs, internal authority wasted on no-click pages, titles missing the query you already rank for |
| AI-search readiness | Phrases you rank for but never say, queries your copy never answers in one passage, content that doesn't chunk cleanly for retrieval |
Every check is labelled D (deterministic - here are the bytes) or N (judgement - off by default, ask for "the judgement findings" to see them). In my view a wrong finding is worse than no finding at all, so the heuristic checks have to ask permission. The full registry, check by check, is in the manual.
And if you grew up on Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, the dashboard's Site health tab will feel like home - response codes, indexability reasons, crawl depth, the heaviest images, server errors and slow pages, all as clean stat bars. Same diagnostics, except each one is sitting next to the Search Console numbers for the same URL. The tab-by-tab tour is in dashboard.md.
The crawl, properly explained
The crawl is where audits usually go wrong, so it's worth understanding what this one does differently. I've spent enough of my career cleaning up after crawlers that fooled themselves. This one is a proper SEO crawler - it just happens to have your Search Console history sitting next to it.
It discovers pages three ways. Following links, reading your XML sitemaps, and - the important one - starting from every URL Google is already sending traffic to, straight out of your GSC data. Coverage stops depending on your sitemap being honest. It's also exactly how ghost pages get caught: if Google ranks a URL your own site structure can't reach, that URL still gets crawled, and the mismatch becomes a finding.
It records why, not just what. For every URL that isn't indexable it stores the reason - 404, noindex, X-Robots header, canonicalised elsewhere, robots-blocked, non-HTML. "This page won't rank" is a fact; "this page won't rank because a plugin set an X-Robots header nobody remembers" is a fix.
It refuses to be fooled. A redirect that leaves your site (Shopify OAuth flows, I'm looking at you) is recorded as a redirect-out, never stored as a page. It always uses GET rather than HEAD, because a HEAD request can return a different status than the real request would - but it abandons the body for images, PDFs and assets, so it records status and size without downloading the bytes.
It's quick without being rude. HTTP/2 where your origin supports it, gzip and brotli negotiated, keep-alive connections reused. The speed comes from efficiency, not from hammering your server. It respects robots.txt properly (a bot-specific group replaces *, per the spec, which plenty of commercial crawlers get wrong), backs off when your host rate-limits, and skips the junk: internal search, faceted filter combinations, login flows. This is a crawler for sites you own. Being a good guest is the point.
After the crawl it computes a real link graph: internal PageRank with nav and footer links down-weighted, click depth from the homepage counting body links only, in-degree per page. That graph powers the orphan, equity-leak and underlinked-page checks - and the donor rankings when the tool suggests internal links.
The workflows, briefly
Each of these is a real procedure I use, and each is one prompt. The expanded versions, with what happens underneath, live in the manual pages linked.
- Your first audit. "Refresh sc-domain:mysite.com", then "Run an SEO audit on mysite.com". Twenty minutes on a mid-size site, and the top five findings are usually worth more than the other eighty-five combined. Then "generate the fix for #1". → getting-started.md
- Sitewide keyword optimisation. The question isn't "what keywords should I target?" - it's "where does my copy fail to say what I already rank for?" "Score the passages on mysite.com" runs a small local relevance model over every ranking page; "draft the missing content for /page" writes the fix in your site's own voice, grounded so it invents nothing. → tools.md
- Cannibalisation. "Show me the cannibalisation findings with evidence" - thresholds tuned so incidental long-tail overlap doesn't count, so the consolidate-or-differentiate call is made on numbers. → checks.md
- The content plan. "Suggest new pages for mysite.com" mines demand Google already shows you; "what topics should mysite.com cover?" maps the demand it doesn't. Together: a quarter's plan. → competitive.md
- The template play. "List the page templates" - big sites aren't 50,000 pages, they're a dozen templates repeated, and one template fix corrects the whole cluster. → tools.md
- Monitoring and migrations. "Detect changes on mysite.com" diffs your two most recent crawls by severity. During a migration this is the difference between catching a stray noindex on Tuesday and explaining a traffic graph in a board meeting three weeks later. I've been on the wrong end of that one. → tools.md
- AI-search readiness. "Check agent readiness for mysite.com" - the web is quietly growing a second audience, and almost no SEO tool checks any of it. → tools.md
- Your own questions. The four datasets share three join keys, and the most valuable analyses are the ones you compose yourself - "which pages lost clicks after being cited in AI Overviews?" is one prompt here and a feature nowhere else. → composition.md
- Reporting. "Show me the dashboard" in the chat, "serve the dashboard" for the live version in your browser, or "export the report" as one self-contained HTML file you can send a client. → dashboard.md
- The content opportunity report. If you write for a living, this is your page one: "Content opportunities for mysite.com" returns what to WRITE next (demand you already earn impressions for with no winning page), what to REFRESH (pages bleeding clicks), which SNIPPETS to rewrite (ranking well, under-clicked), and which clusters to STRENGTHEN (position 4-20, one push from the money). Every row traces to your own Search Console data - no invented keyword ideas - and "draft the brief for row 1" turns any of them into a grounded outline. → competitive.md
- Market Sizing and Prioritisation. "Size the market: mysite.com vs rival1.com and rival2.com" - the keyword universe, total monthly demand, and share of voice per topic cluster, from one cached call per domain. The engagement-opening read that used to need a Semrush subscription. → competitive.md
- Content recon - why is this page losing? "Run content recon on mysite.com" takes your worst declining pages, pulls the live Google SERP for each, and reads whether the AI Overview cites you. The verdict is the honest bit: rank but not cited is a data-accuracy or freshness problem, not a rewrite. It transcribes the ranking videos (Supadata), reads the reachable competitors (Firecrawl, plus a free browser-profile fetch that even gets Reddit), and writes the gaps into a tracked to-do board you can annotate and re-measure. → recon.md
- Link prospecting, sorted by authority that's real. "Link intersect for mysite.com vs rival1.com, rival2.com" returns the domains linking to your rivals and not to you - the outreach list, followed-first and spam-filtered. Add a Majestic key and it re-sorts on Trust Flow and shows each prospect's Topical Trust Flow, so the directories drop out and what's left is authority that's actually on your topic. → Majestic, below
What DataForSEO adds (and what it costs)
Everything above works with just your Search Console data. But GSC can only describe searches where you already appear. The moment your question is "how big is this market?" or "what do competitors rank for that I don't?", you need third-party data - and that's DataForSEO: a pay-as-you-go API for volumes, live rankings, competitor data and Lighthouse runs. No subscription; calls cost fractions of a cent to a few cents, cached for 20 days, and only ever run when you ask. My own usage runs to a few dollars a month.
It unlocks the Semrush-replacement layer: the organic visibility overview for any domain, any site's top pages and ranked keywords (including which keywords cite a site in AI Overviews), the content gap, topic gaps, search intent, lab Core Web Vitals and backlinks. It also drives content recon - recon_targets pulls the live Google SERP for a losing page, reads whether the AI Overview cites you, and tells you why you're behind. The full workflows and setup: competitive.md.
Two more optional keys, for content recon only. When you ask recon to fetch the competitors it finds, it routes each by source: videos to Supadata (SUPADATA_API_KEY) for transcripts, and competitor pages to Firecrawl (FIRECRAWL_API_KEY) for clean markdown, with a free browser-profile fetch behind it. Both are pay-as-you-go and entirely optional - recon still classifies the page and lists the competitors without them. Grab a Firecrawl key here: https://firecrawl.link/2d1PLD8.
One more thing DataForSEO unlocks gets a section of its own, because the link work has a second, optional service behind it.
Link intersect, and the Majestic Trust Flow tier
Link building is the one discipline where the prospect list is the strategy, so link_intersect builds it from evidence rather than a hunch. One DataForSEO domain_intersection call over your competitor set - yours excluded - returns every domain that links to them and not to you, aggregated per prospect: how many of your rivals it links to, whether the link is followed, its worst spam score, the anchor mix. Point it at a single company instead of a set and it answers the other classic, what links does company X have that we don't?
That gets you a list. It doesn't get you a priority order, and this is where link prospecting has always gone wrong. DataForSEO sorts on domain rank, which is a link-volume metric, so directories, aggregators and syndicated-press domains float straight to the top - technically authoritative, worthless to pitch. Every link builder I know has lost a week to that list.
Set MAJESTIC_API_KEY and the order changes to one you can defend. Majestic has been crawling and scoring the web's link graph since before most of today's SEO tools existed, and its two flagship metrics are exactly the ones that fix this:
- Trust Flow (0-100) - editorial authority, propagated from a seed set of trusted sites. It measures who vouches for a domain rather than how many links it has managed to accumulate. That's the directory killer: in testing, a domain DataForSEO ranked 227 came back Trust Flow 0. A volume metric simply cannot see that.
- Topical Trust Flow - what that authority is about, as ranked topics. A Trust Flow 45 domain is a brilliant link when its top topic is
Recreation/Autosand you sell car parts, and a wasted pitch when it'sHealth/Nutrition. It's the difference between a strong link and a relevant one, and it's the column that makes an outreach list survive contact with a client.
With the key set, every qualifying prospect is enriched, the table gains a Trust Flow column and each domain's leading topic, and the whole list is re-sorted by Trust Flow:
(Shape of the output, names invented.) Same three prospects, same DataForSEO data underneath - and note which one has the most backlinks. Sorted DataForSEO's way, the directory is the one you'd have emailed first.
link_intersect needs DataForSEO's Backlinks subscription, which is separate from their SERP/Keywords/Labs APIs; if it isn't activated the tool says so in plain English rather than throwing a code at you.
The tier is careful with your allowance: enrichment is batched 100 domains per call (about one unit each), capped by enrichLimit (default 100 - and when more prospects qualify than get enriched, the response says so and tells you to raise it, rather than handing you a half-scored list), requests are serialised, and every response is cached for 20 days via MAJESTIC_CACHE_DAYS. Ask the same question twice in a fortnight and the second answer costs nothing.
Optional, genuinely optional: with no key, link_intersect still runs and still sorts followed-first by domain trust. Majestic is what turns "here are 100 domains" into "here are the 20 worth an email, and here's why". Grab a key on their plans and pricing page; the full workflow is in competitive.md.
Trust Flow and Topical Trust Flow are trademarks of Majestic (Majestic-12 Ltd). This tier calls the Majestic API with your own key, only when you run
link_intersect, and nothing else in the tool touches it.
Installation, in brief
Three steps - the full walkthrough with the gotchas is getting-started.md:
- Get it: the quick route is npx - point your MCP config at
npx -y @houtini/seo-audit-consoleand there's nothing to build. Or clone this repo,npm install,npm run buildif you want the source. Either way, Node ≥ 20. - Connect Search Console: create a Google Cloud service account, download its JSON key, and - the step everyone misses - add the service account's email as a user on your property in Search Console. Prefer a walkthrough with pictures? Setting it up from scratch covers the whole flow.
- Point your MCP client at
dist/index.jswithGOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALSset. Works in Claude Desktop and Claude Code; only the one env var is required.
Every environment variable the server reads, in one block - the first is required and everything below it is optional, so delete the lines for services you don't use:
GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS gets you the whole core audit. DataForSEO adds the market layer, MAJESTIC_API_KEY adds the Trust Flow re-sort to link_intersect, and Firecrawl and Supadata are content recon's fetchers. Line-by-line, including the two advanced ones you'll probably never need: getting-started.md.
Then: "list properties" to check it's connected, "refresh", "run an SEO audit".
The tools, at a glance
The one-line version - full descriptions, inputs and example prompts for every tool are in the tool reference.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
refresh_property | Sync GSC + crawl + inspect + rank history, one job |
sync_gsc · start_crawl · inspect_urls · track_ranks | Run a single part on its own |
check_sync_status · check_crawl_status | Watch a long job's progress |
run_audit · query_audit · list_checks | The scored audit · one check with evidence · the catalogue |
query_data | Read-only queries over the raw tables - aggregates in the database, answers not rows |
fix_finding | Paste-ready remediation (JSON-LD / 301 / internal links) |
detect_changes | What changed between the two most recent crawls |
check_agent_readiness | 0-100 AI-agent readiness score with copy-paste fixes |
list_templates · suggest_pages | Template clusters · new-page ideas from real demand |
score_passages · draft_content | Local relevance scoring · grounded writing briefs |
resolve_entities | Wikidata entities and the link gaps between them |
keyword_volume · related_terms · search_intent | DataForSEO keyword data |
youtube_discovery · news_discovery · topic_trend | Content research: the videos ranking for a topic (pair with a transcript tool) · recent news coverage / freshness · Google Trends interest-over-time (rising / falling / seasonal) |
competitors_domain · page_intersection · topic_gaps | Competitors · content gap · topic gaps |
domain_visibility · top_pages · ranked_keywords | The Semrush-style views, any domain (+ aioOnly for AI Overview citations) |
page_lighthouse · pull_backlinks | Lab CWV · backlink profile with live status |
link_intersect | The links your competitors have that you don't - a prioritised outreach list (followed-first, sorted by domain trust; optional Majestic Trust Flow re-sort kills directory noise) |
market_sizing · serp_features | Share of voice vs named competitors · AI-Overview / snippet / video exposure by volume |
keyword_list · content_opportunities | Cluster a keyword list (own / weak / absent) · the content marketer's report |
recon_targets · save_recon_todo · recon_todos | Content recon: why a page is losing (live SERP + AI Overview) → a tracked, annotatable to-do board |
get_dashboard · serve_dashboard · export_report | In-chat dashboard · the same in a local browser tab · shareable HTML |
composition_cookbook | The data-surface map and recipes for bespoke analyses |
data_storage | Per-property disk usage and row counts, with confirm-gated pruning |
normalize_url · data_location · list_properties · seo_audit_help | Utilities and the help menu |
How it works under the hood
- The join key (
url_key). GSCpageand crawlurlboth normalise down to the same key - force HTTPS, unify www and apex, strip tracking params, and so on. Everything joins on that. It's the whole trick, really. - One SQLite database per property (WAL, prepared statements). Your data stays on your machine.
- Scored once, sorted by yield.
(expected clicks × yield × certainty) / effort. Covering-indexed, so the audit stays fast even when the GSC table runs to millions of rows. - Careful with your history. Crawls and syncs never destroy the previous snapshot until new data has started arriving - a site outage mid-crawl doesn't cost you your data.
- Owned-site only, dry-run fixes. It crawls sites you control, and the generators return artifacts. They never write to your site. That's a line I won't cross.
Privacy and data
Your Search Console data and the crawl live in local SQLite files under SAC_DATA_DIR. The passage-scoring model runs locally too. Nothing leaves your machine except the API calls you trigger - Google (your own GSC) and, if you've set them up, DataForSEO, Majestic (link_intersect sends prospect domain names, nothing else), and Firecrawl/Supadata (content recon sends the competitor URLs it found). Every one of those is keyed by you, called on demand, and cached locally so it isn't called twice. No telemetry. None.
What's coming
A few things I'm building next, in rough order:
- Structured-data opportunities, by template. Not "you have no schema" (most modern stores have plenty), but "this template could earn review stars or an FAQ rich result and doesn't."
- A per-page content scorecard. A dedicated table of every ranking phrase your copy misses, not just the top query.
- More agent readiness. A WebMCP advisory (which tool actions your site could expose to agents) and the agent-commerce protocols.
- A printable report. A proper A4 document you can hand a client, not a slide deck.
- Source-level parser checks. The audit spec is written - ~94 checks covering the layer most tools never touch: elements that silently break
<head>parsing, directives hoisted into the body and ignored, raw-vs-rendered divergence.
Got a weird edge case you wish a tool caught? Tell me - that's exactly how the merged GSC×crawl checks got built.
About Houtini
Houtini exists for one reason: the hours your team loses to grunt work. Pulling Search Console exports, running crawls, cross-referencing spreadsheets, re-checking what changed since last month - none of it needs a person, and all of it eats the time your people should be spending on strategy, on clients, on the work that moves numbers. So we automate exactly that layer. SEO Audit Console is one of a family of tools built on the same principle - if a machine can collect it, merge it and check it, a machine should.
Questions, licensing, or something you'd like automated: hello@houtini.com
Credits
SEO Audit Console stands on a few third-party services - all optional except your own Search Console access, and each called only with a key you provide:
- Google Search Console - your own search-performance history (the one required credential).
- DataForSEO - SERP, keyword, Labs and backlink data: keyword volumes, competitor footprints, rank history, and the
link_intersectdomain intersection. Pay-as-you-go, optional. - Majestic - Trust Flow and Topical Trust Flow for the
link_intersectenrichment tier, which re-sorts link prospects by real editorial authority. Trust Flow and Topical Trust Flow are trademarks of Majestic (Majestic-12 Ltd). Optional; get a key on their plans page. - Firecrawl and Supadata - competitor-page and ranking-video fetching for content recon. Optional.
Built with better-sqlite3, cheerio, Apache ECharts, and a local ms-marco cross-encoder (via Transformers.js) for on-device passage scoring - no data leaves your machine for that.
Contributing
Issues and PRs welcome. The check registry (src/audit/checks.ts) is built to be extended - each check is a pure read over the joined data that returns findings with evidence, so adding one is fairly self-contained. There's an end-to-end smoke test (npm run smoke) and per-feature probes (npm run probe:*) to keep you honest. By submitting a PR you agree your contribution is licensed under the project's LICENSE (Apache-2.0).
License
Apache License 2.0. Free to use, modify, and redistribute, including commercially — full terms in LICENSE.