Can Claude Code do SEO? Skills, plugins and MCP servers compared

The short answer

Claude Code can already do most of the hands-on work: it reads your repo, runs curl against your live site from its terminal and edits the files. What it doesn’t bring is a list of what to check, data that lives outside your repo, or a way to know when a job is finished. Each add-on fills a different gap:

• a skill gives it instructions and scripts for an audit;
• a plugin packages several skills, and sometimes servers, behind one install;
• an MCP server gives it new tools: either SEO data (keywords, backlinks, Search Console) or a workflow (audit, fix prompts, measurement).

The options side by side

Facts read on each project’s own page on 15 October 2026. Katman is ours, so it goes last.

Sources: geo-seo-claude README, aaron-he-zhu skills, DataForSEO pricing, Ahrefs help center, “Getting started with Ahrefs MCP”, mcp-gsc, all read 15 Oct 2026. More servers are compared on SEO MCP servers, and skills against servers on GEO skills vs an MCP server.

What Claude Code does well without any add-on

Give it a command and it runs it: fetch your home page as OAI-SearchBot, count the words a bot sees, report the status of every sitemap URL. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot aren’t shown in ChatGPT search answers (OpenAI, “Overview of OpenAI crawlers”, read 15 Oct 2026), so that one request already answers a real question.

Four things it can’t do alone:

• Remember. Every session starts from zero unless your rules sit in CLAUDE.md.
• See outside the repo. A Cloudflare setting that returns 403 to AI bots isn’t in your code; only a live request shows it.
• Know when it’s done. “Optimize SEO” gets a meta tag and a “done”. We wrote up why on Cursor SEO prompt did nothing; the same holds for Claude Code.
• Measure assistants. It doesn’t know what ChatGPT said about you last month unless something asked and kept the answer.

How to set it up

1. Write the rules. In CLAUDE.md: read research.md first, add no unsourced number or claim, touch public pages only, list every changed file.
2. Add a skill if you want a ready-made audit. Project skills live in .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md, personal ones in ~/.claude/skills/, and you call them with /name (Claude Code docs, “Skills”, read 15 Oct 2026). Read the SKILL.md and its scripts first: they run on your machine.
3. Add an MCP server with claude mcp add. Options go before --, the server command after it, and --scope user keeps keys out of the repo. Check it loaded with claude mcp list or /mcp (Claude Code docs, “MCP”, read 15 Oct 2026).
4. Give every job an acceptance check, and run the check yourself.

Adding Katman, from Getting started:

claude mcp add katman --scope user -e KATMAN_KEY=km_live_... -- npx -y katman-mcp

Example: one job with a finish line

A prompt for Claude Code, written so that “done” can be checked:

Read research.md first. Job: every public page must show its H1 and first
paragraph in the raw HTML, for OAI-SearchBot as well as for a browser.
Change only the public routes; leave the app screens alone. When done, run
this and paste the output:
curl -s -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0)" https://DOMAIN/ \
  | sed 's/<[^>]*>/ /g' | tr -s ' ' | head -c 600
Accept when: the output shows the H1 and the first paragraph.

The full set of jobs and checks is in the Katman method.

Where Katman fits, and what it doesn’t do

Katman MCP is a local server that runs inside Claude Code (and Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI). katman_scan_code reads the repo and says whether your pages render on the server or only in the browser. katman_audit_site requests the live pages the way AI crawlers do, through your CDN. katman_prompt returns fix prompts with acceptance checks, katman_page_brief writes briefs for the pages you’re missing, and katman_visibility_run asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok whether they name you, on your own OpenRouter key (about $2.40 a run on the default panel). Katman Pro is $99 a month for up to 3 sites, with fix prompts and page briefs uncapped. Or have us do it: Growth writes 30 pages a month for you. Details on the Katman page.

What it can’t do: it doesn’t edit your site by itself (Claude Code does), doesn’t publish to WordPress, doesn’t track daily rankings or give search volumes, and full audits are counted per month. If you need backlinks or keyword volumes, add a data server next to it.

Written by the Katman team, Rnify Limited. Claude Code docs, the GitHub repositories, DataForSEO, Ahrefs and OpenAI pages read 15 October 2026.