OpenSEO: The Open-Source SEO Tool Built to Run Through Claude
Ben Senescu built OpenSEO to kill his own Semrush bill, wired it straight into Claude, and now watches open-source contributors fork it into CRMs and content tools he never planned to build.
Posted
5 days ago
Duration
Format
Interview
educational
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Semrush and Ahrefs charge $130 to $450 a month for search data that is now sold pay-per-use for as little as $10 a month, so an open-source tool that grounds Claude in that same data can replace the subscription and be freely customized instead of rented.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You're a solopreneur or small team paying $130+/month for Semrush or Ahrefs but only need occasional keyword and backlink lookups.
You already work inside Claude Code and want SEO recommendations grounded in real search-volume data instead of the model guessing.
You're comfortable self-hosting an open-source app (Docker, Cloudflare) and want to customize an SEO tool instead of accepting a locked feature set.
You're a freelance SEO or small agency who wants to build custom tooling, like an outreach CRM or content-optimization dashboard, on top of raw SEO data.
SKIP IF…
You manage SEO reporting across dozens of client accounts at agency scale, this is built for one site or a handful, not enterprise account management.
You have no interest in touching code or self-hosting anything, this is a GitHub repo you run yourself, not a polished SaaS dashboard.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Semrush and Ahrefs charge $130 to $450 a month for the same underlying SEO data, so software engineer Ben Senescu built OpenSEO, a free open-source tool that connects real keyword and backlink data from DataForSEO ($10/month or pay-per-use) to Claude through MCP. Instead of Claude guessing at search volume, it queries live numbers before recommending content. The tool self-hosts on Docker or Cloudflare, exposes an MCP server and Claude skills, and its open codebase has already been forked into a content-optimization tool, an outreach CRM, and a Google Analytics integration by the community. Senescu uses it himself to research keywords, audit competitors, and generate SEO comparison pages through Claude Code, and warns that chasing high-volume keywords without checking click-through intent can backfire.
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Cold open contrasts Semrush ($129+/mo) and Ahrefs ($129-$449/mo) pricing pages before introducing OpenSEO, a free open-source SEO tool built to hand to an AI agent.
00:54 – 01:21
02 · The GitHub repo
Ben opens the OpenSEO GitHub README: a free, self-hosted alternative to Semrush and Ahrefs that plugs into Claude Code and other agents.
01:21 – 02:42
03 · Where the real cost is
The software is free, but the SEO data isn't: DataForSEO supplies the keyword and backlink numbers, sold either direct at $50 pay-per-use or through OpenSEO's hosted service at $10/month.
02:42 – 04:03
04 · Grounding Claude in real data
A live keyword-research dashboard shows search volume for terms like 'AI tools for marketing' (4,400 searches/month), illustrating why content needs real search data instead of Claude's guesses.
04:03 – 05:33
05 · Studying a competitor
Using Ahrefs.com and then Matthew Berman's forwardfuture.com as examples, Ben shows how to see which keywords and pages a competitor ranks for, and spot opportunities like a tool ranking on their site.
05:33 – 06:09
06 · SEO inside Claude
All of OpenSEO's data is exposed through an MCP server with one-click install for Claude Code and Cursor, so a user with no SEO background can be coached through an SEO Coach skill instead of reading raw dashboards.
06:09 – 07:03
07 · Why backlinks matter
Ben walks through the backlinks tool: links from reputable sites act as a trust signal to Google, similar to a brand being talked about on Reddit signaling relevance to an AI model.
07:03 – 08:15
08 · Automating outreach
Claude can go further than reading backlink data: finding dead links on competitor sites, scraping contact emails, and drafting outreach, turning manual SEO grunt work into an automated flow.
08:15 – 10:21
09 · The community forks it
A contributor forked OpenSEO into a content-optimization tool with entity analysis, checking whether an article mentions the specific terms needed to rank for a target keyword.
10:21 – 12:00
10 · The outreach CRM fork
A freelance SEO named Terry built a full outreach CRM on top of OpenSEO, tracking contacts, storing scraped emails, and managing follow-ups, shared and validated in the project's Discord.
12:00 – 12:45
11 · 66 open pull requests
The GitHub repo shows dozens of open community pull requests, including a long-requested Google Analytics integration that independent contributors had already built before it shipped officially.
12:45 – 14:33
12 · The overnight brief
Ben shows the exact prompt he ran overnight, telling Claude Code to use the SEO audit skill, do keyword research, and build comparison pages against Semrush, Ahrefs, and Ubersuggest.
14:33 – 16:03
13 · Building the strategy library
A documented keyword-research strategy library, built with a professional SEO advisor's content briefs turned into pages by Claude, teaches readers the reasoning behind the tool's recommendations.
16:03 – 17:06
14 · What the traffic actually did
Google Search Console shows 23.4K clicks and 378K impressions; Ben explains the growth came from positioning around the narrower category 'open source SEO' rather than competing broadly, helped by a Product Hunt launch spike.
17:06 – 19:02
15 · The impressions trap
A page ranking for 'backlink checker' pulled 200,000 impressions in a week but only about 100 clicks; renaming the page to copy competitors' exact wording made it worse, not better.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Semrush starts near $130 a month and Ahrefs runs $129 to $449 a month, but the underlying SEO data behind both tools is now sold pay-per-use for as little as $10 a month.
OpenSEO is a free, open-source SEO platform that connects real keyword and backlink data to Claude through MCP instead of asking the model to guess.
Without grounding data, Claude will still answer an SEO question when asked, but it just writes what it predicts people want to read, not what they actually search for.
A single $50 credit purchase from a pay-per-use data provider can last a low-volume site six to twelve months of typical SEO work.
OpenSEO self-hosts as a full-stack app on Docker and Cloudflare, so some users have repurposed the entire codebase as the foundation for tools unrelated to SEO.
Backlinks matter because a link from a reputable site signals trust to Google the same way people talking about a brand on Reddit signals relevance to an AI model.
One contributor forked OpenSEO into a full outreach CRM that tracks contacts, stores scraped emails, and flags who never responded, for follow-up.
OpenSEO had 66 open pull requests from community contributors at the time of filming, including a Google Analytics integration people had requested for five months before it shipped.
A backlink-checker page brought in roughly 200,000 search impressions in a week but converted only about 100 clicks, showing impressions without click-through are a vanity metric.
Renaming a page to match the exact wording of top-ranking competitors backfired, because the page had been ranking for being distinct, not for matching the pack.
Instead of mass-producing thousands of AI-written pages, the growth strategy was picking one specific, less-contested category ('open source SEO') rather than competing in the broad, saturated one.
A single 'overnight brief' prompt can direct Claude Code to run an SEO audit, do keyword research, and build competitor comparison pages against a live codebase unattended.
Takeaway
Own the data pipeline, not the subscription
OPEN SOURCE SEO
SEO software isn't actually the expensive part, the underlying search data is, and once that data is grounded through Claude instead of guessed at, the tool wrapped around it can be free and endlessly customizable.
01The expensive alternative
Semrush and Ahrefs both charge on a subscription: Semrush starts near $130/month, Ahrefs scales from about $129 to $449/month depending on the plan.
The full-featured tier of an SEO subscription is priced for agencies, not solo creators, which is why a $10-50/month pay-per-use alternative changes who can afford real SEO data.
02The GitHub repo
OpenSEO is a free, self-hosted alternative to Semrush and Ahrefs, distributed as a public GitHub repository rather than a subscription product.
Because it's open source, the same tool other people are customizing and forking is available to run yourself, unmodified, at no cost.
03Where the real cost is
The software costs nothing, but the SEO data behind it does: DataForSEO sells it either directly ($50, pay-per-use) or through OpenSEO's hosted layer ($10/month).
For most solo users, $10 a month or a single $50 credit purchase covers six to twelve months of typical SEO work.
04Grounding Claude in real data
Asked to do SEO with no data source, Claude doesn't search or fact-check, it writes what it predicts people want to read, not what they're actually searching for.
Grounding a keyword idea in real search-volume data, like 4,400 searches a month for a specific phrase, is what turns a guess into a content decision worth acting on.
05Studying a competitor
A competitor's ranked keywords and top pages show you what topics are already working for someone in your space, before you write a word.
Reading a competitor's traffic sources can surface who to reach out to or sponsor, like spotting a tool ranking on their site that's worth a partnership pitch.
06SEO inside Claude
All of OpenSEO's data is exposed through MCP, so it's queryable directly from Claude Code instead of requiring a separate dashboard login.
A built-in 'SEO Coach' skill is designed to walk a complete beginner through strategy decisions conversationally, rather than assuming SEO literacy.
07Why backlinks matter
A backlink from a reputable site tells Google your site is credible, the same signal as other people vouching for a brand on Reddit tells an AI model it's worth trusting.
Reviewing which sites already link to a competitor is a direct list of outreach targets likely to consider linking to you too.
08Automating outreach
Finding dead links, scraping the contact emails behind them, and drafting outreach used to be labor-intensive manual work that Claude can now run end-to-end.
The pitch for outreach isn't a cold 'link to me', it's 'the site you're already linking to is dead, here's a live replacement', a warmer, higher-response angle.
09The community forks it
Because the OpenSEO codebase is a full self-hostable app, contributors have repurposed it as the foundation for tools that have nothing to do with SEO.
One contributor built a content-optimization and entity-analysis feature that checks whether an article mentions the specific topics and terms needed to rank for a target keyword.
10The outreach CRM fork
A freelance SEO built an outreach CRM on top of OpenSEO that tracks who's been contacted, stores scraped emails, and flags contacts who haven't responded for follow-up.
Community-built proofs of concept, shared in the project's Discord, are how features get validated before they're folded into the official tool.
1166 open pull requests
An actively maintained open-source SEO tool had 66 open pull requests at the time of filming, evidence of a contributor base extending it faster than one team could alone.
A requested Google Analytics integration took about five months to ship officially, but independent contributors had already built their own versions in the meantime.
12The overnight brief
A single 'overnight brief' prompt can direct Claude Code to run an SEO audit, do keyword research, and build competitor comparison pages against a live codebase unattended.
Running unattended overnight work only makes sense when the prompt is specific about scope, like 'focus on pricing, not a feature-by-feature comparison', so the output doesn't sprawl.
13Building the strategy library
A working SEO strategy library was built by pairing a professional SEO advisor's content briefs with Claude turning them into a documented reference other people can learn from.
Internal linking, pointing your own pages at each other, is treated as a rankings lever worth writing into the page copy itself, not just an afterthought.
14What the traffic actually did
Positioning around a specific, smaller category ('open source SEO') rather than the broad, saturated one was the growth lever, not sheer volume of pages published.
A Product Hunt launch produced a visible, lasting step-change in search awareness of the chosen category, distinct from ongoing organic growth.
15The impressions trap
A page that gets 200,000 impressions but converts only about 100 clicks is a warning sign, not a win, impressions without click-through are a vanity metric.
Renaming a page to copy the exact phrasing of top competitors can backfire if the page was actually ranking for being distinct, not identical.
Chasing the single highest-volume keyword in your space means competing directly with the most established players for the least differentiated positioning.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
DataForSEO
The pay-per-use data provider that supplies OpenSEO's keyword volume, backlink, and competitor numbers, sold either directly or through OpenSEO's hosted service.
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
The connection method that lets an AI model like Claude query an app's live data directly, instead of relying only on what it learned during training.
Entity analysis
A technique that checks whether a page's text mentions the specific topics and terms search engines associate with a subject, used to judge whether content is dense enough to rank.
Impressions
The number of times a page appeared in search results, as distinct from clicks, which measure how many people actually visited the page.
Backlink
A link from another website pointing to yours, treated by search engines as a signal that your site is trustworthy or relevant to a topic.
“If there was no one searching for it, then why would you write content for it? Because you're not gonna get any results.”
Sharp one-line rationale for keyword-first content strategy, no setup needed→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
03:31
“It's not even using free tools. It's just writing what it thinks people want.”
Blunt description of what ungrounded AI content actually is→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
17:55
“This impression thing, it's a bit of a vanity metric that people will market. If it's not converting to customers, it doesn't really matter.”
Contrarian metrics take that punctures a common vanity number→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
18:23
“There's already a billion free backlink checkers.”
Short, quotable punchline about the danger of copying competitors exactly→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
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SEO tools get you traffic, but they cost hundreds of dollars a month. Well, someone open sourced an alternative and put it on GitHub. You can just give it to your agent and say, use this to get me traffic.
I did an interview with the creator of that open source project. He's about to show you how it works and how you can get your agent to use it. Let's get into it.
Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. Ben, what are we looking at? Because this is not your website.
Yeah. This is the SEMRush pricing page. So as you can see here, it starts at a 117 billed annually, um, and then it, you know, scales up, uh, for larger agencies and teams.
Um, and if you look at ARAS, it's pretty similar where it starts at a $130 and you get a limited feature set. And then if you want the full suite, you gotta pay $240
a month, then it scales up from there. Okay. Meanwhile, I see I see a GitHub page for you.
Show me that.
Yeah. So I wanted to do SEO for myself as, like, a solopreneur. Uh-huh.
And I was looking at the tools, and they were just so overwhelming and expensive for me. So I was like, maybe I should just build an open source alternative, and that's what I did.
So this version is completely free. I could download it, install it on my computer. And then as we'll see later on in the conversation, people have done it, and then they've customized it.
And the customization, I think, is maybe more exciting than the price. I would say definitely more exciting. But we also need to be open that when you use this, it's not completely free.
You still need some data that this software is analyzing to make SEO suggestions. How much is the data source costing?
Yeah. So the whole value historically of SEMrush and ARAS was that they have really good data. But in the last few years, there's new data providers coming up that are pay per usage, which is what we use.
So we use one called data for SEO. Mhmm. Um, so you can buy from data for SEO directly for $50 and then pay per usage, or you can use our hosted service and pay $10 a month.
Um, and for a lot of entrepreneurs, that $10 a month is perfectly fine for them to get started. And then if you have a really heavy month where you're really focusing on SEO, you can buy credits as you need.
But most customers are perfectly fine, like, dollars a month. Okay. We'll see your pricing page in a moment.
But if I'm using this GitHub,
uh, repo on my system, not paying you nothing, I pay them $50, and then I pay per use kinda like I do per credit. How long do you think $50 would last on a site like mine? I don't have much Probably a pretty long time.
It it could last six months, twelve months. It could last you forever if you're not doing that much SEO. Okay.
Alright. Fair enough. Let's see your pricing page, and then let's just see what comes in it because I've seen all these different SEO tools and I've promoted them, but I'm not as aware of them as other people.
So $10 a month, what are the features that come in here?
Yeah. So what you're really paying for is the data. So, um, keywords.
So you can ask Claude to do SEO for you, and it'll do SEO for you kind of, but it just essentially makes things up. Keyword data grounds the the searches. So I can just pop into the app.
And if we go to, like, AI tools for, you can see how much search volume there is for all these things.
So if we go to, let's say, you can say, how many people are searching for AI tools for marketing? It's 4,400 people a month.
If there was no one searching for it, then why would you write content for it? Because you're not gonna get any results.
Got it. And so when I do SEO with Claude without this data, Claude is just kinda guessing by using free tools that are available and also by trying to predict based on what it knows. It's not grounding it in in real data of about how many people are doing actual searches.
Yeah. It's not even using free tools. It's just making it it's just writing what it thinks people want.
But that's not as good of a strategy as writing what people actually want.
Okay. Fair enough. Okay.
So that's what I get. And then once I get all that fire hose of data from the data source or I get access to that data, what does SEMrush, Ahrefs, and now OpenSEO give me?
What are these features, and what can I do with them? And we'll see you in action. But just give me an overview.
Maybe even show me on one of your sites.
Yeah. So we can look at let's look at, like, a refs.com. Mhmm.
So you can research what your competitors like, what keywords they rank for.
So they rank for backlink checker, search operator, check backlinks, then you can see what all their top pages are.
So from here, I can kinda analyze their, uh, SEO strategy and their marketing strategy and then try to learn from it how can I then market my brand? You know what?
Let's let's take a moment and and use my
my site just for a second. There is a creator, Matthew Berman, who I interviewed who does interviews and shows very similar to mine. His website is forwardfuture.com.
So what I would do here is I would say, let's study what he's doing and understand it. This is one of the features that comes on your with your software. And so what am I learning on this?
Yeah. So you can see they rank for Open Future AI, Cody, Kiro.
So Nothing. Yeah. Essentially writing a yeah.
But, I mean, they're getting a fair amount of traffic.
But I see. Yeah. It's not super high search volume.
Let's see what that Kodi is. So now if Kodi is one of the top pages, I guess, boost your creative productivity with AI, Cody.
I see. Got it. So now I see that this tool, Cody, is is effective on his site.
Maybe I reach out to the Cody team and get them to sponsor or put them up on my site and write an article about them. Okay. That's one Absolutely.
One feature. What else? What are some of the other features?
Yeah. And then so I'll show you some of other features in the app, but the really cool thing about Open SEO, especially as compared to Aras and Semrush is Mhmm. It's really AI native.
So all of this data is available through Claude Code. So even if you're new to SEO, you can connect via our MCP, and then Claude can just essentially coach you through it.
So we have this SEO coach skill where you can talk back and forth with it, and it can help tell you, like, what you should do and what strategy you should investigate and, uh, help you with some of the more complex parts of SEO. Um, I'll show you the backlinks tool.
So you can see all the backlinks we have, um, or maybe it'd be better for forward future, actually. Forward. Oh, they're not they're not getting that much traffic.
Yeah. So these backlinks are important because, um, it essentially tells Google that your website is reputable if other reputable websites are linking to it. So it's the same as, like, um, if people are talking about you on Reddit, then the AI knows, hey.
This person's probably pretty important. So this backlink data is also really helpful. It's kind of a lot to look at if you're new to SEO, but this is where the AI integration is really helpful Mhmm.
Where you can use it through Claude. You can ask Claude what
takeaways you should have from this. Okay. Do have any questions on this specifically?
I think this makes sense. So now what I would wanna do is if he had a lot of good backlinks, I might go out to them and ask them to link to me too and say, hey. I've got another resource.
Right? The other thing that I might do is, um, pick a couple of newsletters that are dead in the AI space and then go out to who are linking to them and say, the site that you're linking to is dead.
If you wanna link to me, here's how to do it. That's the kind of stuff that SEO people do. Right?
Yep. Absolutely. And you can really start to automate that too with Claude where Claude can go look at all the websites and look for dead links, and it can look for the emails of people and really streamline that whole process that used to be really labor intensive.
Alright. I see how this works. And the beauty that you're gonna show me later is that people then integrate this into their own software, and so then they create a CRM that keeps track of backlinks that their competitors get that maybe uses another tool to send out email asking those sites to link to to their own too, keeps track of the follow-up, and all that stuff.
This is the kind of thing that can be done, uh, with Open SEO. Yeah. Absolutely.
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And suddenly, boom, your app is so much more powerful. Go to zapier.com/sdk for that.
Show me what dashboards people are making and what tools they're building.
Yeah. Let's start with this one. So, um, this guy, Eric, he wanted to do he's like a professional SEO, and he wanted to do something called content optimization, which is kind of a more advanced feature, which is why we don't have it directly in the tool since we don't wanna overwhelm people new to SEO.
Mhmm. But he built a content optimization page straight into s e into Open SEO for himself.
He built all of this crazy stuff for his own needs. And, yeah, I've heard stories of people building, like, whole CRMs. And, essentially, since the Open SEO repo is pretty good and it's just a full stack app that you can easily self host on Docker on Cloudflare,
people are just using it as, like, the foundation for their home base for their whole business, like, unrelated to SEO. Okay. So where before I saw your domain up in the address bar, and now I see local host.
And so this is him hosting a version of your site of of your tool. And then just help me understand this because I'm not an SEO person. Mhmm.
What is what's going on here? What did he create?
Yeah. So this is called, like, entity analysis. K.
He is trying to so the the way Google shows your content is it, like, looks at all of the text on your page, and it prioritizes, like, the title and the headings, so, like, the section headings, but then also the contents of your page.
So, um, if you want it to rank for a certain keyword, like, let's say, schema or headers and then a couple other things, it helps if it's mentioned a bunch in the article. So that's what this is trying to do is it's helping him analyze articles. Is it dense enough with keywords where it'll rank for the keywords he's trying to target?
Okay. Um, this is more I wouldn't worry about this stuff if you're just getting into SEO. It's more like, are you, uh, I would pick a keyword or a question someone might ask, and then I would try to write content that answers their question.
And then over time, you can optimize, uh, that content
as you learn more. Okay. I think that makes sense.
Let's see another.
Yeah. So this is kind of getting into the CRM. So this is in our Discord.
We have a pretty active Discord where people are see, like, someone's typing right now, uh, where people are sharing what they're working on, asking questions. Um, and this guy, Terry, he he's a he's an SEO freelancer, um, and he built this outreach tool.
Um, so you can see here, he's, like, tracking contents that contacts that he wants to reach out to. Uh-huh. Um, and I think via the MCP, it can store their email in here as well.
Uh, so Claude will go reach out, look at all these web pages, find the emails, and then it stores the people to reach out to. And I think over time, it'll be like, oh, they didn't, you know, they didn't respond. Let's go follow-up with them is where he's kinda going with this.
I think that makes sense. And then he has it writing messages and doing his whole flow. Uh, so this is something I would love to bring into Open SEO eventually, but it's cool that people can experiment and build these proofs of concept for things before it makes it into the official tool.
Tool.
Okay. Give me one other one even if you don't have it handy on Discord. What else are you seeing people build?
Yeah. So this feature is actually coming out today, but lots of people have built Google Analytics Analytics integrations.
So lots of SEOs, they use Google Analytics to track, um, traffic to their website because it's a free tool. So it's the most popular one. Um, and we just added it today, but for the last five months, this has been something people have wanted.
So tons of people built independently their own integration for Google Analytics.
That's one of the nice things about being open source that you enable people to create, and then you can fold in their best ideas in here. Mhmm.
Yeah. And if you see here, there's literally, like, 66 pull requests with people adding different different features that we plan to get to eventually.
Okay. Let's see how you use it. Why don't we see some pages that Open SEO has created for you since you're using it to promote your own site?
Yeah. So I use I use it mostly through Claude. You're
not even going to your own website. You're just having Claude do it all? Yeah.
I mostly only go to my own website when customers reach out to me with fixes for the website.
It's my preference, actually, to do it all in that one chat window, I think. I don't know. Some days, yes.
Some days, no. Okay. So this is, like, a prompt to be so much faster.
We agreed that it would just be too slow to watch it work, and so what you've got here is the actual prompt. You set it in over overnight brief. Tell me what that is.
Yeah. So, basically, my I have my code base for our website, and I wanted to, let's say, make comparison pages.
So this is something that's been on my to do list. I just haven't done it yet. Um, so I said, hey.
Use the SEO audit skill to review our website, do keyword research, and build comparison pages for SEMRush, ARFs, and Ubersuggest.
Mhmm. We don't wanna do a feature by feature comparison because they have, like, just tons of features since they've been around for twenty years. Mhmm.
But let's focus on pricing and it being easier for entrepreneurs because it's AI native. Okay. Um, and then it went ahead and it made these comparison pages for us.
So this is another kind of report. This is the other cool thing about using with Claude is you can have Claude just generate these websites for you to explain it to you in the format that makes most sense. Um, so if you look at the SEMRush alternative, you know, this is the keyword research.
There's 1,300 searches a month. So this would be and this is high intent. This is people that are potential customers.
So this would be a great thing to rank for. And it made this, uh, this is local host, so this isn't deployed yet. But it made this whole page for us.
And I I gave it a read, and it's it's pretty good. There's, of course, some things I'd like to tweak, um, but this is just an amazing first draft.
Um, it made this whole website. It made this table. Um, and it helps that we've already built these tables built similar pages on our website before.
But it it did all of this research for us. It fact checked it. Um, yeah, this is just, you know, saving so much time.
And then it even added this whole comparison page to the footer all through Clogcode. So it's Clogcode building the website, but Clogcode's using Open SEO to ground the website the changes to the website in in reality instead of just being like, oh, Semrush versus Open SEO.
Okay. I'm with you. Let's see one other page.
Yeah. So here's, like, the Ubersuggest alternative. Well, I'll show you, I guess so these are all just three alternatives pages I've made, but I'll show you the strategy library.
So this is something we've been working on. I've been working on with, like, a a professional, like, SEO adviser Mhmm.
And to make sure that these are, you know, really great strategies that people can learn from. Um, and he's basically making content briefs for the strategy. So he's he's essentially giving bullets for what the strategy should be.
Um, but then
And this is a list of strategies for how people can use open SEO?
Yeah. This is a list of strategies for different ways you can use, um, you can do keyword research. So you can just ask Claude, hey.
Do key keyword research for me. But when you wanna go learn and dig a little bit deeper into what it's doing under the hood, this is where you would go. Okay.
Um, so it you know, Claude's making this page for us. You know, you're iterating on design, of course, and then it's writing all of these.
And it's doing things like internal linking. Linking. So So one of the ways that you improve the ranking of your website is you link to pages within your website to show Google, hey.
This is an important page. We're linking to it from other important pages. And, yeah, this whole page and blog was written by oops.
So you can kinda see here because we need to fix that. Um, written by, um, Claude even though it's, you know, an SEO professional making the the draft.
Okay. Final thing. Let's see your Google Analytics to see how this has all impacted your traffic.
By the way, you're going after the most competitive work group in the world. Uh-huh.
Absolutely. Yeah. So that's that's why, um, I haven't just made a ton of pages like you may see online of people making thousands and thousands of pages.
Um, in my opinion, that's, like, not a great long term strategy because I think Google will eventually detect those all as spam. So I was thinking, like, what's the, you know, angle that I can position open SEO in? And for me, that was open source SEO, right, where there wasn't any open source SEO, uh, tools.
So I was like, okay. Well, I can win the open source SEO market. And it was a smaller market when I started, but through our marketing efforts over time, the traffic to open source SEO has grown.
So you can see here we launched on Product Hunt, and there's a big spike in people being aware of open source SEO. Uh, and now we're getting, you know, tons of clicks and traffic from Google, and it's by far our biggest channel.
I see that it's gone down there at the end. What's going on?
Yeah. So this was this was me being fairly so I I I'm a software engineer, and I kind of found this SEO market in February.
So I'm learning from my customers as we go, But this is a bit of a mistake I made. So I started to rank for backlink checker, which you can see here has a ton of traffic.
So I was getting I got 200,000 impressions in, like, a week,
but it only converted to a 100 clicks. By impressions, you mean page view where people come from Google to your site. They see the pay the impression is on the landing page, and then clicking from there into the actual order or download is a 105.
No. So it's actually so it's a 100,000 people, like, landed on the backlink checker Google result page Okay. I see.
And saw, you know, our our link, but they didn't click through it. So only a 100 people click through I see. To our page.
So this this impression thing, it's a bit of a vanity metric that people will market. But Yeah. If it's not converting to customers, like, it it doesn't really matter.
So I tried to change the content of our website to increase the click through rate. So I looked at the Google page, and I saw that every page here was a free backlink checker.
So I was like, okay. I'll make a free backlink checker, and it'll increase my click through rate. But it turns out I was probably ranking because my page wasn't a free backlink checker.
So when I changed it to a free backlink checker, it just said, okay. Well, there's already a billion free backlink checkers. So I haven't been able to get it to recover yet, but I'm sure we'll be back.
Okay.
Alright. It is available right now. We'll have links to the GitHub repo.
We'll have links to your site for people who want it. Can we also give them that report with all the, uh, prompts that you just showed? Absolutely.
And we'll give them that in the comments. And now that you're at the end of this one, I've got another video for you for how to use, uh, Claude and other tools to market, and there's a link to you for link to it right there. See you there.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Semrush and Ahrefs charge hundreds of dollars a month for search data that's now sold pay-per-use for a fraction of the price. Andrew Warner sits down with the solopreneur who got tired of the bill and built the open-source alternative himself, then wired it straight into Claude.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
12:45concept
Overnight brief workflow
Run the SEO audit skill
Do keyword research
Build comparison pages against named competitors
Scope the ask narrowly (pricing angle, not feature-by-feature)
Review the finished draft the next morning
A single detailed prompt points Claude Code at a live codebase, an SEO audit skill, and keyword data, then runs unattended overnight to produce competitor comparison pages ready for review.
Steal forany content or growth workflow where a well-scoped prompt can run unattended against real data instead of requiring a live session
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
07:48product
“If you're creating software and you want your users to connect an app to your software, Zapier SDK will make that possible... Go to zapier.com/sdk for that.”
Mid-roll sponsor read from Zapier, woven into the outreach-automation topic and delivered by the host as a natural aside rather than a hard cut to an ad break.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
Add to Preferred SourcesOpens your Google source preferences with us pre-loaded. Tick the box and you're done.
Two hosts count down the week's ten hottest GitHub repos, from a security-scanned Claude plugin index to a self-hosted finance tracker wired to 2,500 banks.
Andrew Warner sits down with Matt Pocock to unpack the Claude Code skill library that passed 200,000 GitHub stars, and the small habits of alignment, pruning, and teaching baked into it.
Andrew Warner spends a day cramming on "agent loops," then brings Matthew Berman on screen-share to react to five other creators' examples before showing off — and fixing — his own.
Andrew Warner and Adam run down this week's most-starred GitHub repos — three AI design tools, a parallel-agent "tokenmaxxing" rig, a video-comprehension skill — and pull the geophysicist who built the #1 trending AI job-search framework on camera to explain how it got him hired.
Two hosts react to seven creators' first hands-on tests of OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol against Claude Fable 5 — and land on a manager/worker split, not a winner.
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