How to use Claude Opus 5.5 for SEO so well it feels illegal

THIS IS THE ARTICLE IS WAS NOT GOING TO PUBLISH. It's the most in-depth course you will get on doing SEO with AI (and i'm sharing it all for free).

TLDR:

1. How to pick the keywords that pay.

1. Build pages better than the top 3.

1. Earn links, free first and paid last.

1. Get named by others so ChatGPT cites you.

1. Repeat every week, because the order matters more than any single tactic.

To get similar results for your business: Try CHATSEO.APP free for 7 days

So I took everything I've published, cut what aged, fixed what I got wrong, and put it in the order we actually run it.

Last thing, if you want me to continue doing these, I need your support.

So a like, a quote or a bookmark would help me continue 🙏

Back to the course 🔥

Before we start: what AI can and cannot do for your SEO

AI does not know your search volumes. It does not know your rankings.

Ask Claude which keyword to target and it guesses from its training. Ask it where your site ranks and it cannot know. Everything downstream of a guess is a guess.

What Claude is great at:

• Reading Search Console exports and finding the patterns you would miss
• Writing 30 pages that follow one structure without drifting
• Adding internal links to every old page you own, which no human does twice
• Writing structured data, titles and meta descriptions at scale
• Running the same check every Monday without forgetting

What it cannot know on its own:

• Search volume and keyword difficulty
• Your rankings, clicks and impressions
• What Google shows on the results page today
• Which competitor pages are taking your traffic

So the job splits in three.

• Claude is the hands. Opus 5.5 in Claude Code if you have a repo. Sonnet 5.5 in a Claude Project if you don't. It plans, writes, edits, runs the routines.
• ChatSEO is the brain. Through its MCP it brings your Search Console, keyword volumes, the live SERP, competitor pages scraped to the source code, and a process built from how a consultant actually works.
• You approve. Anything that touches a live page, or leaves under your name.

Setup takes five minutes. Create a ChatSEO account, add your site, connect Search Console. Skip that last step and half of what follows runs blind. Then in your terminal:

claude mcp add --transport http chatseo https://api.chatseo.app/mcp

Open Claude Code, type /mcp to log in once. In the Claude app, add https://api.chatseo.app/mcp as a connector instead (the MCP is on the Pro plan).

Every prompt below that says "Using ChatSEO" assumes this connection. The ones that say "skill" are files: save them as .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md in your repo and Claude Code picks them up.

One more thing before Part 1.

GEO is not a separate discipline you start after SEO. When ChatGPT doesn't know the answer, it searches Google. If you have no SEO, you have nothing for the model to find.

-> Good GEO needs great SEO first. That is why GEO is Part 4 and not Part 1.

Part 1: Pick the money before you write a word

Most SEO traffic is vanity.

"What is SEO". "CBD benefits". Your Search Console curve goes up, you feel great, and nobody buys.

Paul, my co-founder, puts it bluntly: is that traffic for your ego or for your business?

Module 1: Target the card in hand

The only keywords worth your first six months are the ones where the searcher already has the card in hand.

"SEO consultant Paris". "Coffee table". "Shopify SEO agency". "Alternative to Mangools".

You do not need a tool to read intent. Google already did the testing. Type the keyword and look at what ranks.

• Blog posts and a definition box at the top: informational. Skip for now.
• Landing pages, service pages, category pages with prices: commercial. That is your target.

Low volume is not the price of admission. "[Competitor] alternative" might do 90 searches a month. All 90 of those people are shopping for a replacement today.

Module 2: A keyword gets you a page. A pattern gets you a machine.

A pattern is a set of keywords with identical intent, where Google returns the same type of page every time. Only one word changes.

• "[Tool A] vs [Tool B]"
• "Best SEO tool for [ecommerce]"
• "SEO consultant [city]"
• "[Service] [city]"
• "[Product type] [material]"

One pattern is dozens of pages. You never pick a topic again. You pick the next row.

The free way to find them is Google Suggest. Type your seed, then add a * at the end, then at the start. Each one surfaces a different batch. Google Ads' Keyword Planner adds the volumes.

The fast way is to let Claude ask the analyst.

1---
2name: money-keywords
3description: Find the commercial keyword patterns for this site. Use when asked which keywords to target, for an SEO strategy, or "where is the money".
4---
51. Call ChatSEO list_sites and pick this site's ID.
62. Send ChatSEO (send_message, with the siteId), word for word:
7   "Give me the best SEO strategy for my site. Group the opportunities
8   by keyword pattern, and only keep the ones with commercial intent.
9   Rank the patterns by how realistic they are for a site with my
10   authority."
113. Poll get_conversation_messages until the reply is complete.
124. For each pattern, keep only keywords where the current top 3 are
13   landing, service, category or product pages. Drop anything where
14   blog posts dominate.
155. Write keywords.md: pattern, keyword, monthly volume, page type
16   Google ranks, and whether we already have a URL for it.
176. Never invent a volume. If ChatSEO did not return it, write "n/a".

Step 6 is there for a reason. Claude will happily fill a blank column with a plausible number. The analyst exists so it never has to.

Module 3: If you sell software, there are 9 page types. Write them in this order.

The order is by intent and by how hard the SERP is.

1. Alternative pages. Alternative to X, free alternative to X, cheaper alternative to X. Highest intent on the list. No company writes a page helping you leave them, so the incumbent cannot compete. Write these first.
2. Comparison pages. X vs Y, X or Y, X vs Y vs Z. Two vendors and a pile of affiliate content is the whole field. Be honest about the rows where you lose. It is the only thing that makes the rest believable.
3. Integration pages. Your tool + Slack, + Stripe, + Shopify. You borrow the search volume of somebody else's brand and almost nobody fights you for it. Twelve integrations is twelve pages.
4. Constraint pages. Without subscription, without credit card, open source. Binary filters, not opinions. If you match the constraint, you win the page outright. If you don't, don't write it.
5. Pricing pages. People search price before product. Directories already sit on most of these, so do them once you have some authority.
6. Use case pages. Tools to generate leads, to automate prospecting. You rank for the job instead of the category. Slower to land.
7. Problem pages. The reader doesn't know your category exists yet. Weak competition, low intent, real payoff at month six.
8. Feature pages. Only for features you genuinely lead on. Otherwise you are publishing a directory listing about yourself.
9. Company size pages. For freelancers, for SMEs. I would mostly skip these. They are almost always the same page with three words swapped, and Google has a name for that pattern.

Local business? Your patterns are "[service] [city]" and "[category] [city]". Part 2 has the full local system.

Module 4: Pick the SERPs you can actually win

Most beginners burn their first months on keywords they can't rank for.

Two filters, and the first one kills most projects:

• The SERP is beatable at your current authority. We could not rank "Semrush alternative" when we started. Too competitive. Versus SERPs were thinner, and the reader was already comparing tools with a card in hand. That trade was deliberate.
• The intent is commercial. Module 1.

On a young site, go small and specific. A plumber in Austin should not start on "plumber Austin". The list underneath is where you win first: "emergency plumber Round Rock", "water heater repair Cedar Park". The suburbs pay the same rates as downtown.

The mistake that cost us the first months

Before ChatSEO, Paul and I ran a business plan generator.

The SEO opportunity was real. Thousands of programmatic queries. Low competition. Obvious buyer intent.

So we launched fast and published fast.

It never ranked. Not slowly. Never.

The pages were not the problem. A brand new domain, zero brand searches, zero backlinks, and a publishing rate that looked exactly like every site Google files under "generated at volume".

-> We were nobody, showing up loud. Google had no reason to spend crawl budget finding out whether we were the exception.

Everything in Parts 2 to 5 exists so you don't repeat that.

Part 2: Build pages that deserve to rank

The most expensive SEO mistake is writing a page you already had.

The second most expensive is writing one that adds nothing to the nine results already there.

Module 5: One keyword, one page. Decide before you write.

Here is the check Paul does by hand. Search Console, Performance, filter on the exact query, then the Pages tab.

• A page already gets clicks for it: optimise that page.
• A page gets impressions but few clicks: it is already somewhere in the top 10. Optimise it.
• Nothing: create a new page.

Get this wrong and you build cannibalisation. Two of your pages fight for the same query and Google cannot choose. Paul's example: both sit 7th and 8th, when one page would have been 3rd.

Then the part most consultants skip: secondary keywords. Take whoever ranks 1st for your keyword and list every other query that exact URL ranks top 5 for. That list is what Google already considers the same page. Target it all with one URL.

It all lands in the title.

The title is the page's identity card, the strongest on-page element you have. One word decides whether a page ranks for one query or five. "SEO Consultant Paris (Freelance)" covers two patterns at once. If pixels remain, spend them on the click.

The meta description barely moves rankings. Its job is to sell the click.

1---
2name: page-brief
3description: Build the SEO brief for one target keyword. Use when asked to rank for a keyword, optimise a page, or before creating any new page.
4---
51. Send ChatSEO (send_message, siteId), word for word:
6   "I want to rank first on <keyword>. Read the live top 10. Tell me
7   which page type wins, which secondary keywords the top 3 also rank
8   for, and whether I should optimise an existing page or create a new
9   one. Then give me the full brief."
102. Poll until complete. Extract: create or optimise and which URL,
11   primary and secondary keywords, the sections the top 3 all have,
12   the title and meta description proposed.
133. If an existing URL already gets clicks or impressions for the
14   keyword, STOP any plan to create a new page. We optimise.
154. Check the title contains the primary keyword and fits without
16   truncating in a SERP preview.
175. Save the brief to briefs/<keyword-slug>.md. Do not edit the site yet.

When Paul ran this live on his Lyon consultant page, ChatSEO flagged a canonical tag he had never noticed. He has been doing SEO since 2021. That is what the analyst is for.

Module 6: Build what the top 3 are almost building, plus one thing they don't have

Open the top 3 and put yourself in the searcher's head.

Someone typing "SEO consultant Paris" wants to know why you, what it costs, how it works, and how long until results. Answer those, in the order the SERP answers them, and you are level.

Then do it better. Paul's teardown of a competitor ranking 1st: no photo of the person you would hire, no way to self-qualify. Add the face. Add a three-question quiz.

That last part is not decoration. It is your spam defence.

In March 2024 Google added scaled content abuse to its spam policies, and the wording matters. It applies no matter whether the content came from automation, humans, or a mix of both. What it targets is large amounts of unoriginal content that gives readers little to no value.

-> Volume is not a violation. Unoriginal content is.

Google's guidance on AI content says the same from the other side. They "focus on the quality of content, rather than how content is produced".

So for every page, one question: what is here that the other nine results do not have?

• A quiz that routes the visitor to the right answer
• A calculator or a simulator
• Your own data, or a table with numbers you actually pulled
• Real photos of the job, the team, the place
• Video

One of them on every page, or do not ship the page.

The rest of on-page is mostly noise:

• One H1 with your primary keyword. The H2 and H3 tree takes care of itself.
• Structured data. One instruction to Claude at publish time. Agencies hate it because half the fields only exist once the page is live, final URL, publish date, author. Claude publishes the page, so it has all of them.
• Internal links are a threshold, not a lever. Google discovers pages by following every link from your homepage. A page nothing links to barely exists. Paul's floor is five internal links to every new page, from pages on a close topic, inside body text.

-> A link in a sentence tells Google what the next page is about. A link in a menu tells it nothing.

Module 7: Give Claude a template and a process file, not a prompt

Left alone, Claude ships black text on a white background.

Technically a page.

Step 1: Rebuild one page you already like as the template

Open a page from your own site. View source. Paste it into Claude Code:

Rebuild this page as the template for every SEO page on this site:

same design, title pattern, meta description, H1, FAQ block,

interactive element and CTA placement. Save it and use it for every

new page.

One shot the first time, two or three fixes after. Works even if the page was built in Elementor. Under the hood it's all code, and Claude reads code.

Step 2: Write the SEO process as a file

A markdown file Claude reads before every page. Two lines per rule is enough. Ours:

\\`

SEO process: read before every page

• Build on the template. Never invent a layout.
• Add at least 5 internal links to the new page, from the body of related pages. Anchors match the target keyword of the new page.
• Translate to French and link the two with hreflang.
• Add the structured data that matches what is actually on the page.
• Update the sitemap on every publish.
• Request indexing in Search Console. \\`

The internal links rule is the one that pays. Claude can open every page you own, including the old ones, and add the links itself. A human never does that consistently. I certainly did not.

The sitemap trap

The second you let Claude publish, you have left your CMS.

Paul found out the hard way. He was testing a ChatSEO feature that reads a site's sitemap, and it kept ignoring a page he had published the day before. The page was live. The sitemap had not moved since he stopped relying on his plugin.

Nothing warns you. Your site just quietly stops telling Google what exists. That is why "update the sitemap" is in the file.

The day Claude deleted the one thing that mattered

We asked Claude Code to duplicate one of our comparison pages for four new competitors.

Everything transferred. Titles, meta descriptions, structured data, table of contents, the FR and EN pair.

The quiz was gone. Both pages. No error, no warning, nothing in the output.

The quiz was the one original element. The exact thing the scaled content policy is written about.

Then it happened to Paul. Claude rewrote his city pages and dropped the "best SEO consultants" ranking tables. He found out live, recording a podcast.

An agent that can edit your site can quietly remove the one thing the page existed for. So our ship skill has a gate.

1---
2name: ship-page
3description: Write or update a page from its brief and publish it safely. Use after page-brief, when asked to build, rewrite or publish a page.
4---
51. Read briefs/<keyword-slug>.md. Write or rewrite the page on the
6   template, covering every section the top 3 share, plus one thing
7   they do not have (quiz, calculator, photos, real numbers, video).
82. One H1 with the primary keyword. Title and meta from the brief.
93. Follow the SEO process file.
104. DIFF GATE. Before publishing, list every element present in the
11   old version (or the reference page) and missing from the new one:
12   tables, rankings, forms, quizzes, embeds, images, internal links.
13   Show me that list. If it is not empty, say so in the first line.
145. Publish only after I say yes. Draft or branch first, never
15   straight live.

Step 4 is the whole lesson. The day it catches nothing is the day you stop needing it, and that day does not come.

Module 8: Duplicate the pattern, slowly

Once one page in a pattern is right, the next forty are the same page.

Consultant + Lyon has the same intent as consultant + Lille. So you build page one by hand, take the full hour, and duplicate from there.

You are about to multiply this page by twenty. Every weakness multiplies with it.

The trap: a page where only the city name changes and nothing else does. That is a template with a find-and-replace. Google's spam policy calls it doorway abuse, and its example is literally "pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page". Every variant needs something only that variant can say. City facts, prices, examples, testimonials.

The cadence is the strategy

Our blog runs on one sentence, twice a week:

Take the last article we published, and do the next keyword in the

pattern.

Claude Code checks which variants exist, picks the next one, gets the brief and the article from ChatSEO, builds it on the template, translates it, links it, updates the sitemap and asks Google to index it.

2 articles in English, 2 in French. Four pages a week. A person reads every one before it goes live.

A year ago the ChatSEO blog got close to zero visits from Google. Today it gets about 3,000 a month.

The curve was not a straight line. It climbed to about 1,500 in the spring, fell by half, then came back to 3,000. We kept publishing 2 a week through all of it.

-> A site that publishes 30 pages on Monday and nothing for a month looks like a content bomb. A site that publishes 2 every week for a year looks like an editorial team.

If I were Google and wanted to separate editorial teams from people bombing content, publishing volatility is the first thing I would look at. Pick a number. Hold it. One page a day is the ceiling on a new site.

Going multilingual

The hour is already paid. A second language costs almost nothing.

Check your domain first. On a .fr, a .de or a .co.uk you are not doing multilingual SEO, no matter how clean the implementation. Paul tested it on his .fr. The country domain is too strong a signal. Use a .com with subdirectories.

Then two checks: a language switcher that goes to the equivalent URL and not the homepage, and correct html lang plus hreflang. Get hreflang wrong and your two versions compete with each other instead of covering two markets.

Module 9: Before you publish more, fix what you have

The fastest traffic is already on your site.

On a 50-page blog I went from 1,500 to 15,000 monthly clicks in three months without publishing a single new article. Three moves, in this order.

Move 1: Cut 15 to 20% of the pages

Pages that sat there for months with no clicks, written because I thought I should be publishing. Every one diluted the signal about what the site was about.

The filter: zero clicks and negligible impressions over 90 days, excluding anything published in the last three months. New pages haven't had time to prove anything. Cutting them is impatience.

Using ChatSEO, show me every page with zero clicks and under 50

impressions in the last 90 days, excluding anything published in the

last 3 months. For each one, tell me whether I should delete it,

merge it into another page, or rewrite it.

Move 2: Repoint pages at the keywords Google already gives them

This moved the most traffic, and almost nobody does it.

For each page, look at which queries it actually gets impressions for. Not the keyword you wrote it for. The keyword Google decided it was about. On most pages those were different.

So stop arguing with Google. Four changes per page:

• H1 rewritten around the new keyword
• Meta description rewritten around it
• First 100 words rewritten so it appears naturally and early
• The body checked so the page genuinely answers that query

That last one is the one people skip. Swap the H1 and leave the article answering a different question, and you've made the page worse.

One check first. High impressions and low clicks has two causes with opposite fixes:

• Position 8 to 15: striking distance. Repointing moves it.
• Position 1 to 3 and clicks still falling: an AI Overview is probably answering the query above you. Rewriting the title won't fix that.

Using ChatSEO, list the pages getting impressions for keywords they

are not optimised for. For each page: the keyword I targeted, the

keyword Google ranks it for, current position, CTR. Then give me the

new H1, meta description and first 100 words.

Move 3: Regroup into silos

Every remaining page grouped by topic, a hub page per group, and the pages inside each group linked to each other. 40 pages in a pile became four or five clear clusters.

Slower to pay off. It compounds rather than spikes.

Cut first, because there is no point optimising a page you're going to delete. Repoint second, because those pages already have proven demand. Restructure last, on a clean set.

Never let a model make the irreversible call

Daniel Agrici built Jev SEO, an open source audit skill for Claude Code. In his own evaluation file, the model suggested removing substantial posts. Twice. Not thin pages. Real articles.

The fix was not a better prompt. It was a line of code: removal is blocked for any page of 600 words or more, whatever the model says.

-> Let the model rank. Let code, or you, hold the veto on deletes.

To get similar results for your business: Try CHATSEO.APP free for 7 days

Module 10: If you're local, rank the profile, not the website

Local SEO is not regular SEO in a city.

When someone searches "plumber Houston", Google shows a map with three listings on top. Those are not websites. Those are Google Business Profiles. Fourth place is page two. Nobody scrolls the map.

Google picks those three on three factors:

• Proximity. How far the searcher is from your address. You cannot change it.
• Relevance. How sure Google is that you do this exact service. Content fills it.
• Authority. How much the web trusts you. Links fill it.

Most competitors filled in their profile once, three years ago. One category. Zero services. They ignore the only two factors they control.

Step 1: Measure before you touch anything

A rank map checks where your profile ranks from a grid of points across your city, 13 by 13 is common. Green is positions 1 to 3, yellow 4 to 10, red is Google not believing you do this service there.

Turn it into one number: your top-3%, the share of grid points where you're in positions 1 to 3. Position 4 is worth zero.

\\`

Attached is a rank-map export for my Google Business Profile on

[KEYWORD]. Columns: point, latitude, longitude, position.

1. Compute my top-3%: points in positions 1 to 3, divided by all points. Show the division.
2. Describe where the green is and which direction is weakest.
3. List every point in positions 4 to 6 separately. Those are the cheapest wins.
4. Use only the numbers in the file. \\`

Step 2: The 30-minute profile audit

The same three mistakes on almost every profile.

• One category. Google allows up to 10. Every category opens another set of searches. Aim for 2 to 4 minimum, each one true.
• Five services. You want 20 minimum, 30 to 40 in a competitive city, each sitting under the category it belongs to.
• Empty boxes. Description at the full 750 characters, 20 photos minimum, every attribute ticked, a post every week.

This is where Sonnet fails, and it fails quietly. Ask it for categories cold and a few of the ten it hands you do not exist in Google's list. Same confident tone as the real ones.

The fix: never let it choose from memory. Get the real list (the GMB Everywhere Chrome extension shows what your competitors use), paste it, then:

\\`

Here is the full list of Google Business Profile categories: [PASTE].

Here are the categories my top 3 competitors use: [PASTE].

1. Pick 1 primary and 2 to 9 secondary categories for my business. Choose ONLY from the list above, spelled exactly.
2. For each, one line on which searches it opens up.
3. Reject any category that describes a service I don't offer.
4. If nothing on the list fits, say so. Do not invent a category. \\`

Then reviews. The text of a review matters. A 5-star review that says "fixed our water heater same day in Austin" tells Google more than ten that say "great service". When you ask for a review, ask the customer to mention what you did.

Step 3: The page your profile points to

On most single-location businesses that is the homepage. Seven checks:

1. Title tag: primary category + city
2. H1: primary category + city
3. A Google Maps embed of your profile
4. Your secondary categories as H2s
5. A widget showing your Google reviews
6. The address, character for character as on the profile
7. The phone number, character for character

Most local homepages have "Home" as the title. That is free ground.

Step 4: The Core 30

Your site mirrors your profile, page for page. 3 to 4 categories and 25 to 30 services give you about 30 pages: one homepage, one page per category ("drainage service Houston"), one per service ("water heater replacement Houston").

Every level links down from inside a paragraph. Order the 30 by real search volume, pulled from ChatSEO, highest first. That is your writing order.

Step 5: Let one number pick the next page

30 days after launch, rank-map your keyword again, then rank-map the 3 or 4 businesses that dominate it. The leader's top-3% is your ceiling. Your threshold is 25 to 50% of it.

• Below it: Google doesn't believe you're an expert yet. Build topical pages that answer the questions your customers ask.
• At or above it: push outward. Build pages about the places in your yellow zones, neighbourhoods and landmarks Google Maps already names.

Write each place page about the place, not about you. The housing, the problems common there, the route your team drives. A page that only swaps the name is the doorway pattern from Module 8.

Part 3: Earn the authority

A perfect page on a weak domain ranks 40th. Nothing in Part 2 fixes that.

Google does not give a new site the time of day for roughly six months. It has no reason to index every site Claude can generate in an afternoon. Authority is how you get past that.

Every score for it is an estimate. Ahrefs has DR, Semrush has Authority Score. None of them is Google. Someone once told Paul, worried, that their DR dropped from 70 to 65. His answer: look at your Search Console. More clicks? On business keywords? That is the scoreboard.

Here is ours, in Ahrefs.

To get similar results for your business: Try CHATSEO.APP free for 7 days

Domain rating under 10 a year ago, around 55 today.

There are 13 ways to get there, in five tiers, from free to paid.

Most founders start at the bottom. They open a link marketplace, pay €50, and wonder why nothing moves.

Start at the top. The cheapest links are the ones nobody can sell you.

Module 11: Claim the links you already earned

You are not asking for a favour here. You are fixing an omission.

• Unlinked mentions. Someone wrote your name and didn't link it. Roundups, newsletter archives, forum threads, podcast show notes, "tools we use" pages. Acceptance is high because the person already decided you were worth writing about.
• Links pointing at dead sites. Find sites in your niche whose domain lapsed, list every page still linking to them, and email those pages: the link is dead, here is a page that replaces it. Their page currently sends readers into a 404. You're offering to fix it.

Axel, a ninja-linking consultant we had on the podcast, found the second one by being on the receiving end of it.

We find both with one prompt:

Using ChatSEO: I would like to find free backlinks. Please tell me

what I should do.

Module 12: Ask for the links nobody sells

There is a whole class of links no marketplace can reach.

Email the sites already ranking where you want to be

Take the queries you want links from. Look at who ranks. Pull an email off the contact page. Send a version of this:

I liked your article on [topic]. We have one that complements it:

[URL]. Would you link to it?

Axel picked up links this way from photographers, local businesses, a town hall and a département website. None of those are for sale. Not at €50, not at €5,000. That is exactly why the link is worth something.

Ask to be added to the lists you're missing from

Filter before you send, or it's spam:

• The article ranks top 20 for a term you care about
• It was updated in the last 12 months
• It already includes at least one competitor

The third one matters most. The writer has already decided your category belongs.

Your list covers [what it covers] well. None of the [N] tools

[the thing yours does]. Here's a free account, no card.

Judge for yourself, and if it doesn't belong in the piece,

ignore this email.

The floor outcome is a mention without a link. Not a waste. Those roundups are what ChatGPT reads when someone asks which tool to use. Part 4 is built on that.

Steal your competitors' linkers

Anyone linking to three of your competitors already believes your category deserves a link.

Using ChatSEO: find my 3 best competitors at my level, not the

industry giants. Analyse the backlinks they have, then find the

contact emails of the people linking to them. One table: site, page

linking, competitor linked, contact email. Never invent an email.

The machine that sends all of it

1. Leads. Claude lists who ranks, who links to competitors, who mentioned you.
2. Mailboxes. A sending tool like Instantly, on a lookalike domain, never your main one, warmed up for about 20 days.
3. Sequence. One email, a follow-up a few days later, a second follow-up. That's enough.
4. Replies. Claude reads them every day, sorts them, drafts the answer. You approve.

Paul's bar: five emails a day, every day. Axel lets Claude Code send through his Gmail, capped at 10 an hour, business hours only. 500 emails go out over three days instead of one afternoon.

-> Most link deals die because the yes sat unanswered for a week.

Module 13: Trade links that make both pages better

Once you have pages that rank, you stop asking. People come to you.

Publish your own listicles. Best tools in your category, alternatives to the incumbent. Include competitors honestly.

At first they do nothing. Then a few start ranking and the dynamic flips. You have a page with traffic that other people want to be in.

Then you swap. You list them in your ranking. They list you in theirs.

The policy line: Google's link spam policy lists excessive link exchanges as spam. The test I use: would I include this business if they had nothing to offer me? If no, skip it.

A handful of swaps between businesses that belong together is an editorial decision. Fifty reciprocal links across a ring of sites is a footprint.

Module 14: Earn links with something worth citing

A homepage is not citable. A writer needs something specific to link to.

Ranked by how hard they are to copy:

• A free tool. Good, but a competitor clones it in a week.
• An infographic. Works only if the stat underneath is yours.
• Your own data. Nobody can copy your numbers. No audience yet? Publish your numbers first.

Then the places you post rather than pitch:

• Reddit, YouTube, Medium, LinkedIn articles. They rank on authority domains you don't own.
• One review platform. Trustpilot for SaaS and e-commerce, Google Business Profile for local. One strong profile beats three weak ones.
• Events. A brand runs an event, local press shows up and writes about it. Motoblouz got covered by regional papers like La Voix du Nord this way. Press links point at your homepage though. They won't push the one page you need to rank. You need both.
• Bylines. Antoine, who runs the agency SEO Monkey, wrote for Les Echos Solutions for a year. The trap: bylines depend on one person. Paul's Journal du Net links stopped the day the editor who approved them left.

We never ran a link campaign for ChatSEO. Our DR came from exactly this kind of footprint: a sponsored article on Medium, a Reddit thread, a review of the tool on an authority site.

And under all of it, the base. People wrote about ChatSEO because there was something to write about. An SEO agent that connects to Search Console and acts on it was a story. Another keyword tool with a chat box would have been nothing to say.

-> Every method in this part is a multiplier. If the product gives people nothing to say, you are multiplying zero.

Module 15: Buy last, and read the footprint

Read the policy first.

Google's link spam policy says links that pass ranking credit in exchange for payment violate it, on both sides. A compliant paid link carries rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", which removes exactly what you paid for.

-> Anyone selling you a "safe dofollow placement" is selling a policy violation with a reassuring name.

The usual outcome is not a penalty. It's a link that gets discounted, and you paid for nothing.

We bought some. They were the weakest thing we did, and they stopped compounding the moment we stopped paying.

If you buy anyway, buy outside the link economy. If the site could sell you a link, the link is worth less.

Five checks before you pay:

1. The traffic curve. 12 months up and to the right. Declining means you're buying right before it hits zero.
2. Real, on-topic traffic. Top pages and keywords adjacent to yours.
3. The page, not the domain. A DR 70 site with a page that gets zero visits passes almost nothing.
4. The homepage tell. "Featured article" across ten unrelated categories means it exists to sell slots.
5. The price. €50 means someone else paid €50 a hundred times.

Google is not counting your links. It reads the shape.

Pull the SERP you want. If the top three have between two and four backlinks each and you build twenty, you haven't outworked them. You've announced yourself.

The anomalies that make a profile look built, from Axel:

• 100% exact-match anchors. From outside, real people link with your brand, your URL, "here", "this tool". Exact match only from your very best links. Inside your own site, exact match is fine.
• One TLD. A bilingual site with only .com links stayed stuck in France until it got .fr and .org links.
• 100% WordPress. The default stack of link-selling sites.
• Zero nofollow. A real brand collects nofollow forum links and spam without trying.

-> A profile that's too clean is the anomaly.

The number nobody screenshots

Over our lifetime we picked up 4K backlinks across 787 referring domains. Live, at the last count, it was 1.4K and 651.

Roughly two thirds of every link we ever earned was already gone. Without anyone doing anything wrong.

Whatever you build this quarter, price it against the share of it that will still exist next year.

Part 4: Get named where Google and AI look

Ask ChatGPT who the best SEO consultants in France are.

Paul is in the answer.

The source is not his website.

Module 16: Target the query ChatGPT types, not the prompt your customer types

You will never know the prompt. You can know the search behind it.

Jacky runs Links Garden, a French link-building platform. His team types the same 1 million prompts into ChatGPT every month and had done it for five months when he came on the podcast. 5 million answers, every brand in them extracted.

What his data says:

• Two kinds of answers. With sources, ChatGPT searched the web. Without sources, it answered from training data.
• Training data lags. Roughly a year and a half between the web and the model. A brand launched this year is not in there. Search is the only way in.
• It searches Google. And what it types tracks Google's rankings closely.
• Sources rotate. One prompt draws on about 50 sources over time, 10 to 15 per answer, reshuffled every month.
• Authority is not the filter. Jacky found a site with 5 referring domains cited 200 times, and one with 200 referring domains never cited.

That last point is the hopeful one. GEO rewards being on the right page, not having the biggest site.

The fan-out

When ChatGPT decides to search, it rewrites the conversation into two to five short Google queries.

Jacky's example. Someone tells ChatGPT they hurt their back at judo a month ago, saw their doctor, rested, and still hurt when they sleep. ChatGPT doesn't search "judo doctor back pain sleep". It searches "best mattress back pain 2026".

This kills the main objection to GEO. Every prompt is different. The fan-outs converge.

The shapes they take:

• "Best + money keyword + year + country." The dominant pattern for about a year. Best because the user wants a recommendation. The year because the model wants fresh sources.
• Two languages. A French prompt gets searched in French and in English.
• "Reviews + your brand", "alternative to + your competitor". The families closest to a purchase, per Antoine.
• site: on authority domains. The newer pattern. In some niches, one to three fan-outs now go straight to government sites and Wikipedia.

So GEO starts as a keyword list, built from your money keywords from Part 1.

1---
2name: geo-queries
3description: Build the list of queries AI assistants search for this site. Use when asked about GEO, ChatGPT visibility or AI citations.
4---
51. Read keywords.md (from money-keywords).
62. For the top 10 commercial keywords, generate:
7   - "best <keyword> <current year>"
8   - "best <keyword> <current year> <country>"
9   - the same two in English if the site is not English
10   - "<brand> reviews", "<brand> alternative" for us and our top 3
11     competitors
123. Send ChatSEO, one query at a time, word for word:
13   "Who ranks top 10 on <query>? Which of those pages are rankings,
14   listicles or review pages, and does my site appear in them?"
154. Write geo-queries.md: query, ranking pages in the top 10, whether
16   we are listed, our position, the domain behind it.
175. Never invent a volume or a ranking. Blank beats plausible.

Step 4 becomes the prospect list for the rest of Part 4. Every listicle ranking on a fan-out query is a page ChatGPT is likely to read.

What not to waste a week on

Google's documentation on AI features is blunt: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." You don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup to appear there.

So if your agent proposes an llms.txt sprint, say no. The levers are the boring ones. Be cited by the pages the engines already cite. Keep the facts on your own pages current, in text, crawlable.

Module 17: Stop ranking yourself first

Putting yourself 1st in your own ranking was the cheapest GEO trick there was.

Paul did it for years. "Best SEO consultants in Paris", with Paul at number one, on his own site. ChatGPT cited the page, and cited him.

Then the source changed.

He was still in the answer. The page cited was now someone else's ranking.

Everyone ranks themselves first. The model has learned that, and discounts it.

Paul had Claude rewrite every ranking where he put himself first. His consultant site, its .com twin, and the ChatSEO blog, where we had ranked our own tool first. It burned through a day's worth of Claude usage in a few hours.

This is a trade-off, not a rule:

• For classic Google, a self-ranked page can still win. Paul still sees rankings like his at the very top of results.
• For GEO, it no longer gets you named.
• For your reader, it costs trust.

Paul removed his. If your rankings bring in clients from Google, test before you rewrite all of them.

1---
2name: self-rank-audit
3description: Find and fix pages where we rank ourselves first.
4---
51. List every page whose title or H1 contains "best", "top",
6   "ranking" or a year.
72. For each: who is listed 1st, whether it is us, and the page's
8   clicks over 90 days (from ChatSEO).
93. We are 1st AND the page gets clicks: do not touch. List them.
10   I decide.
114. We are 1st and the page gets no clicks: rewrite the ranking on the
12   merits. We may stay in the list, honestly placed.
135. Diff gate from ship-page. One page per run.

Step 3 protects your revenue. Never trade a page that sells for a citation you might get.

Module 18: Get ranked by others

A ranking on someone else's site is worth more than ten on yours.

A restaurant saying it is the best convinces nobody. A Paris guide naming it first does. Same for the model.

The ranking swap

Paul's rankings of agencies get him email. Agencies want in. He asks for no money. He asks for one thing back: a ranking on their own site that lists him, or ChatSEO.

Convertix is the live example. They published best SEO consultant in France, best SEO MCP. Paul published best Google Ads agency, best Meta Ads agency.

When Paul tested it live on a podcast, logged out, ChatGPT named him among the best SEO consultants in France. The source in the citations was Convertix's ranking.

Two rules make swaps compound:

• Recency. Refresh every year, with the new year in the title.
• Volume. Antoine thinks most businesses have at least 20 queries worth a swap.

Your half of the swap is a page. Run it through page-brief and ship-page like any other. We never appear in a ranking of our own category.

The ladder

Not every placement is a swap. Antoine sorts the rest into four rungs.

1. Cheap network links. Small blogs that will publish a ranking without blinking. Antoine's math: if a €7 link holds your GEO query for a month, it paid.
2. Guest posts on businesses. Sites in your niche that sell a product, not visibility.
3. Digital PR on pure players. Online-only media with authority in one niche, before any national paper.
4. Become an author. Your byline on a domain the model trusts.

The cheap citation is not worse

Read this twice before you pay for a big media mention.

Jacky sees clients pay €1,000 to €2,000 for a single citation in a big media. It gets cited for one to three months, then drops out of the rotation.

A €10 to €20 placement does about the same.

-> In the citation game, the label "PBN" scares people more than it scares the model.

The outreach machine from Module 12 sends all of this. Same leads, same sequence, same five emails a day.

Module 19: Find the Reddit threads the model is reading

Reddit is cited constantly. But check your engine before you commit a quarter to it.

Published breakdowns put Reddit at roughly 46.7% of Perplexity's top sources and about 3% on Gemini. And in Jacky's French ChatGPT data, Reddit's share fell from about 30% to 9% in July, then to about 5% in August.

-> Whatever is overused gets turned down. The model rotates.

If your buyers live where Reddit is cited, here is the method.

Step 1: Write 10 prompts, not 10 keywords

The actual sentence a buyer types at 11pm when they're annoyed. Ask ChatGPT for 50 questions your customer would ask, pick 10.

"Cheapest alternative to Ahrefs for a solo founder." "Is it worth paying for an SEO tool if I only have 20 pages."

None of them contain "SEO software". Buyers describe their problem. Marketers describe the category.

Step 2: Run them logged out

A logged-in account is personalised by your history. You want the answer a stranger gets.

Step 3: Read the sources, not the answer

Click the sources and read what the model built the answer from. Across 10 prompts you'll usually find four or five Reddit threads.

If a competitor is quoted in three of them and you're in none, that is not a content problem. That is the whole problem.

Step 4: Run the fan-out too

Ask the model to list the sub-questions it would need to answer first. Run those, check their sources. Those threads are less contested, because nobody optimises for a query they can't see.

Step 5: Comment as yourself

Say who you are in the first line. "I build one of these (ChatSEO), so discount me accordingly."

Then answer properly, including where your product is the wrong choice. For a 20-page site with no traffic yet, ChatSEO usually is. Saying that costs me nothing and it's the reason the comment survives.

One thread every two or three days. Not ten in an afternoon.

Which subreddits

Don't pick them by size. Pick the ones Google already ranks on your best keywords.

Using ChatSEO: find my 10 best traffic generating keywords. Then tell

me if a subreddit is ranking on each of these keywords. If so, give me

the URL of the subreddit.

Warm the account up before anything promotional. 10 karma, five quality comments a day for three days, rules read before every post.

Module 20: Your domain gets 2 slots. Your brand can take 6.

On the keywords that make money, your domain gets two listings at most and no amount of good SEO buys a third.

So stop trying to rank the page. Occupy it.

Type a comparison query in your category and count what's on the first screen. A video pack. A Reddit thread. A listicle from a site that doesn't sell in your category. A LinkedIn post.

-> Rank the queries by how many non-website results the SERP already shows, not by how many people type them.

The layers:

• One video per keyword. YouTube ranks very well inside Google. You film once, you're indexed twice. Title shape for review queries: "{Tool} Review {Year}: Features, Pricing & Alternatives". The description is not a caption, it's the text Google indexes. 200 words minimum, the query answered in the first two lines.
• Three Shorts per video, three different queries. Then the same files to TikTok, with the caption rewritten for how people type in TikTok search. On my last consumer app, 99.3% of TikTok views came from search and 0% from the For You page.
• The listicle you want to be in, posted on LinkedIn or X. Indexed posts rank. Write the first line as the exact query.
• A comment in the thread you will never outrank. With the disclosure.

Then the rest of the footprint:

• Social: your niche picks the network. Cosmetics and food on Instagram and TikTok. Services and B2B on LinkedIn, X, Reddit. Software on X, YouTube, GitHub, Reddit. Three or four at most.
• Reviews: one platform. Trustpilot for SaaS and e-commerce, Google Business Profile for local.
• Wikipedia: don't ask. Antoine submitted a request once. Refused, with the moderator's username on the refusal. The way onto Wikipedia is to build enough presence elsewhere that someone else decides you belong.

The trap on every one of these: the video that reads as an ad. Someone who typed a competitor's name came for a verdict on that product. The video has to be the best answer to the query, including where the competitor beats you. That admission is the only reason the pitch at the end survives.

Part 5: Run it every week, and never faster

GEO is not a ranking you hold. It is a rotation you stay in.

SEO is the same, slower.

The loop, the waits and the rules

Google deliberately delays the effect of changes. You cannot reverse-engineer it in a week.

• After a change: a dip is normal. Give it up to two months. Reverting in a panic is how you teach Google you're testing it.
• Before buying links: three months on a page you know is good.
• On a new domain: six months before anything feels like it's working. Then a pivot, where new pages rank top 5 on arrival. That's when you turn the drip up.

The Monday review:

1---
2name: weekly-seo
3description: Weekly SEO review from Search Console. Use every Monday, or when asked how SEO is going.
4---
51. Send ChatSEO (siteId), word for word:
6   "Compare my last 28 days to the previous 28. Which pages gained
7   impressions, which lost clicks, and which keywords entered the
8   top 10?"
92. Pages that lost clicks: check whether the ranking dropped or the
10   CTR dropped. A lost ranking needs a better page. A lost CTR at the
11   same ranking needs a better title, or means an AI answer now sits
12   above us. Never the same fix for both.
133. Pages whose impressions jumped just entered the top 10. Queue them
14   for page-brief. Top 10 to top 3 is the cheapest win there is.
154. Pages edited in the last 60 days: flag "wait". Do not touch them.
165. Pages edited 90+ days ago, still outside the top 3, with a good
17   brief: candidates for links.
186. Write reviews/<date>.md and give me 5 actions, ranked by business
19   value, not traffic.

Paul's own site now takes him about ten minutes a week.

The first Monday of the month, the GEO check. Rerun geo-queries, compare with last month, and check every third-party ranking you're listed in is still listing you. Then test 10 of your queries by hand, logged out, and note cited yes or no.

That last step stays manual on purpose. Jacky's team scrapes ChatGPT logged out because the API returns different sources than the web app. Ten queries by hand once a month is honest data. A dashboard built on the API is not the same thing.

Put both on a routine with /schedule in Claude Code and the reports wait for you.

Last, the rules your agent runs under, written before its first task:

\\`

ALLOW

• Read Search Console, analytics and ChatSEO
• Create drafts, write to the SEO log

REQUIRE MY APPROVAL

• Publish a page, or update a live one
• Change a title on a page that gets clicks
• Add or change a redirect

BLOCK

• Delete any page
• Edit robots.txt or canonical tags
• Send any email outside the company
• Buy anything \\`

And every time you reject something, say why, and have the agent write the reason in a "SEO standards" file it reads before every draft.

-> That file becomes your editorial line, written by your own rejections. It outlives the tool.

Where I am wrong, or at least lucky

We started with an audience. Paul is one of the best known SEOs in France and has been doing it since 2021. Agencies email him to be in his rankings. Some of our links came because people already knew the name. A fresh domain with no brand starts slower than we did.

Most of the methods are not ours. Jacky, Antoine, Axel and Daniel are named where the method or the number is theirs. Jacky's numbers are French data on ChatGPT. Gemini and Claude may weigh things differently.

The local system is not our case study. ChatSEO is not a local business. Module 10 is what local agencies run for their clients, rebuilt so Claude does the writing.

We pick easy fights. Most of our patterns are low-competition queries. On a fresh domain going after commercial head terms, this exact process produces pages that rank 40th. The skills don't fix authority. They make sure you don't waste it.

It ages. The fan-out patterns already shifted once this year. Reddit's share of citations moved by a factor of six in a few months in Jacky's data. Some of Part 4 will be wrong by spring.

One company. Our blog, Paul's sites, a handful of customers. An anecdote, and I would rather say that than have it said in the replies.

The part I am confident generalises is the order. The part I am not confident generalises is the speed.

What I would do with a fresh domain tomorrow

• Connect Search Console to ChatSEO and run money-keywords before writing a single page
• Fix what already exists: cut, repoint, regroup
• Build one reference page per pattern by hand, with page-brief and ship-page
• Write the template and the process file, then publish 2 pages a week and never skip a week
• Claim every unlinked mention, then email 5 sites a day that rank where I want links
• Publish my own roundups, and trade placements once they rank
• Start geo-queries in month three, once there are pages worth citing
• Run weekly-seo every Monday and never touch a page edited in the last 60 days

In that order, because each one only works if the previous one exists.

Pick the money. Build better than the top 3. Earn the links. Get named by others. Wait. Repeat every week.

Thanks for reading!

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