Multi-lane SEO Audit

Markdown delivery contract

Read markdown-delivery-contract.md for every task. Write a substantive .md document for every material work step and register its direct destination in the work index.md. For public-site work, apply the owner-required Markdown discovery profile across the full eligible inventory; preserve native standards and immutable evidence formats.

Lane outputs: site-audit.md; markdown-coverage.md (combine small related steps with stable section links). Audit full eligible HTML-to-Markdown coverage, direct discovery, source parity and ownership alongside conventional SEO lanes. Do not declare full-site coverage from only llms.txt or an XML sample.

Purpose

Plan and synthesize a site assessment across the lanes that matter for the stated goal. This skill does not assume that every site needs every check, crawl a site without authorization, fabricate a complete inventory, or implement the findings.

Read references/audit-scope-protocol.md before starting an audit.

Scope first

Record objectives, domains/properties, representative URLs/templates, locales, environments, access/consent, data sources, time window, exclusions, and decision owners. Choose only relevant lanes: technical, page/content, structured data, media, sitemaps, hreflang, programmatic systems, competitive evidence, AEO/GEO, or measurement.

If an authorized crawler, analytics property, Search Console property, log source, or application access is unavailable, state the gap. Do not treat public snippets or third-party scores as a substitute for the inaccessible evidence.

Workflow

1. Design the evidence plan. Define what capture/report proves each expected condition and which findings need current primary documentation.
2. Run bounded lane assessments. Route work to the relevant technical, page/content, schema, media, sitemap, international, programmatic, commerce, local, video, news/Discover, agentic, architecture, authority, conventional-performance, or AI-search specialist. Preserve their artifacts and disagreements.
3. Classify findings. Mark confirmed defects, supported opportunities, experiments, and unknowns separately. Do not convert incomplete sampling into site-wide certainty.
4. Synthesize without false precision. Prioritize by user/business risk, scope, reversibility, dependency, evidence confidence, and owner readiness—not by one blended SEO number.
5. Plan delivery. Send validated findings to seo-action-plan for owner/approval/verification/rollback, then use seo-plan for cross-team sequencing. Establish a baseline before change only when comparison is requested.

Guardrails

• No universal SEO score, universal engine-mandatory llms.txt, generic crawler policy, or ranking/citation guarantee.
• Do not count pages, links, words, or tests as proof of quality.
• Do not say a crawl, bot request, report row, or tool health check proves indexation, AI retrieval, citation, referral, or conversion.
• Keep security, privacy, accessibility, and legal risks visible even when they are not search-ranking claims.

Formal evidence handoff

When this audit needs a cross-team, approval-ready plan, package evidence-bound findings as an immutable seo-findings.json bundle using the checked-out suite contract. Let <suite-root> mean ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} in Claude Code. In Codex, read .seo-suite-runtime.json beside this SKILL.md when present and use its suite_root value; otherwise use the absolute repository checkout. Keep every referenced capture/source below raw/, retain declined claims and limitations, and run python "<suite-root>/scripts/validate_seo_findings.py" validate-findings <bundle>/seo-findings.json --bundle <bundle>. Send only a passing bundle to seo-action-plan; otherwise label the handoff provisional.

Output

Produce a scoped audit charter, evidence inventory, lane findings, limitations, prioritized ownership map, and proposed next steps. Mark any implementation proposal as pending approval and link it to an action plan when a formal handoff is needed.