What Is Agentic SEO? And How to Get Started This Week

Posted on 19 May at 8:17 am

Agentic AI feels a bit like logging onto the internet in its early day, or discovering social media around 2007. There’s that same sense that something big is shifting, even if it’s not fully clear yet.

It’s just a completely new way of working, also for SEOs.

Instead of building every step of an SEO workflow yourself—like the setups you see all over n8n or Zapier—you simply describe the outcome you want. The agent takes it from there: planning the steps, doing the work, fixing issues along the way, and only coming back when there’s a real decision to make.

Here’s what agentic SEO looks like, and how to try it this week.

Claude’s subagent feature is a good example. You give it a complex directive, it decomposes the work, runs the specialized agents concurrently, and merges the output. Same outcome, just faster and less error-prone when the job requires looking at multiple data sources at once.

A terminal window interface running "Claude Code." A command is being executed to create a new subagent named "work-supervisor" using the Opus model, complete with a system prompt detailing its role as a rigorous Quality Assurance Supervisor.

MCP servers (APIs if not available)

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is how your agent reaches the outside world. It’s the standard plug that connects an agent to data and actions.

For example: Ahrefs MCP for backlinks, keywords, SERPs, and audits, and an MCP for your CMS (like WordPress) so the agent can actually ship changes. Without MCPs, your agent is just a chatbot with opinions.

Skills

Skills are curated instructions that help an agent do a specific SEO task well. You can start without them, but good skills make a big difference.

Instead of spending an hour prompting the agent to “run an SEO audit,” you can turn that into one simple command. You can write your own skills, use ones you find online, or even turn your favorite blog posts into reusable skills.

Interface for Agent A showcasing an active chat sidebar and conversational pane. The user asks to transform how-to workflows from a specific URL into platform skills, and the agent processes the request by offering separate creation or consolidation prompt paths.

Recommendation

Agent A is the shortcut for SEOs and marketers. It’s an agent with the Ahrefs MCP already live, connectors to GA, GSC, your ad accounts, and CMS preinstalled, and a library of SEO skills curated by the Ahrefs team. Same building blocks, zero assembly.

Setting up is as easy as letting the Agent know what it can do with your data.

Once you log in, you’ll find that Agent A has pre-built SEO skills, so it knows a lot about SEO out-of-the-box.

https://github.com/mmakosiewicz/agentic-seo-prompts/blob/main/README.md. Simply copy/paste that URL to your agent chat window.

Get prompts for these use cases on GitHub.

And once it’s working, you don’t have to keep triggering things manually. Any of these workflows can run on a schedule. Just tell the agent, “run the declining content scan every Monday at 9 am and post it to #seo-alerts,” and it handles the timing, retries, and Slack posting on its own.

Recommendation

If you’re running these in a different agentic environment (Claude Code, ChatGPT Agents, OpenClaw, etc.), paste a setup prompt like this once at the start of a fresh session. The agent carries the context for the whole chat, and every workflow below gets a little more accurate because it’s run against the context of your actual situation.

I'm running agentic SEO workflows. Here's the setup:
- My site: [yoursite.com]
- My audience: [describe]
- Main competitors: [comp1.com, comp2.com]
- Connected tools: [Ahrefs MCP, GA4, GSC, CMS, Slack, etc.]
- What I'm trying to grow: [traffic, signups, brand searches]
Operating rules:
- Read-only on production tools unless I approve a write action
- Show me your plan before running anything multi-step
- If a tool fails, retry once, then surface the error instead of guessing
- For each finding, explain why in one sentence, and flag anything you're unsure about
- Stop and ask if a workflow needs more than 30 minutes or 1,000 API calls

Then trigger any of the eight workflows in the same chat. Agent A skips this step because the context, tools, skills, and guardrails are baked in. In any other environment, the kickoff prompt is what closes the gap.