Claude Does SEO - by Alex Willen - The Automated Operator
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Claude Does SEO<br>I have always done a subpar job of SEO because I find it tedious and I am lazy. Claude finds nothing tedious and is generally less lazy than I, so seems like a good fit!
Alex Willen<br>Jul 02, 2026
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I feel compelled to start this post with two apologies. First, I did not post anything in either of the last two weeks. If you were sitting with bated breath each Thursday waiting for the latest from The Automated Operator, you were disappointed and it is entirely my fault. Sorry! Two weeks ago my toddler got sick, and while he recovered in one day, I caught his illness and spent a week hacking up a lung. Last week was more positive — I got into escrow on the largest acquisition since starting my business, which should be closed by the time this post goes live.<br>My second apology is because this post is about using AI to add slop to the internet. I do not feel good about it! But the older I get, the more I prioritize practicality over principles, and the reality here is that I am not moving the needle in the grand scheme of slop. If throwing some AI-written pages up on an e-commerce website blog drives a few extra sales (and gives me a new task on which to judge AI capabilities/write a Substack post), then that’s what I shall do. I beg your forgiveness.<br>My first foray into e-commerce was during the pandemic, when I decided to start a business making dog treats. That business is Cooper’s Treats, and it sells frozen dog treat mix — basically a powder in a jar that you mix with water and freeze. I began with a Shopify store and found customers mostly through Meta ads.
To think that I wrote this text myself, worked with a human designer on the packaging and had a human photographer take photos… it all feels so antiquated.<br>I knew that SEO was important, but it wasn’t really my area of expertise. I did the basic stuff I was aware of, which mostly involved alt tags on images, a few blog posts with some relevant search terms and a bunch of outreach to try and get links. The last effort was somewhat successful, and I even made it on some local news segments.<br>Still, customers came in from organic search at a pace for which “trickle” is perhaps too generous a description. I focused on Meta ads and email marketing, found some loyal customers and still make a little money from the business today. For the most part, though, I have entirely neglected the Shopify site (most of my sales come from Amazon now) as I’ve moved into buying other e-commerce brands.<br>Enter Claude
A month or so ago, I was in the shower (the location of most of my best thoughts) and realized that Claude could probably do SEO better than I. I don’t have the exact prompt I used, but it was something along the lines of:<br>I have a Shopify site for Cooper’s Treats. I don’t really know much about SEO. Can you do SEO stuff for it?
Never be afraid to ask dumb questions!<br>Unsurprisingly, the answer was yes. It gave me three general categories of work it could do:<br>SEO cleanup and optimization. Get rid of test pages that I published but never linked from the site, make sure all the images have alt text, set SEO titles and meta descriptions, etc.
Run through my Google Search Console results and publish a bunch of informative blog posts slop about dog-related search queries.
Reach out to other websites to inquire about having them link to mine.
I went with options one and two. Having my AI agent start emailing people is a bridge too far for me. Adding blog posts to the internet isn’t great, but at least it isn’t directly annoying people. I’m not totally devoid of principles!<br>First things first, Claude needed access to Shopify and Google Search Console. For the former, I created a Shopify app, got a list of necessary permissions from Claude, installed it to my store and then gave Claude the credentials. I have since learned that there is already a Claude connector app that I could’ve used, so if you want Claude to do anything to your Shopify site, I’d recommend that. Claude already has a Google Service Account to access my Sheets and Docs, so I added that to the GSC property.<br>From there, it spun up some subagents and ran through everything. On Shopify, you will not be shocked to hear that it found plenty of areas for improvement. The first few products I launched were in good shape — I was enthusiastic and diligent about everything back then — but most of what I added after starting the business was missing the absolutely basic stuff you’re supposed to do for SEO.
You have to make sure this looks good for every single page on your site. It’s not hard, but it’s also not hard to tell yourself you’ll do it later and then never get to it…<br>This was really a perfect task for AI. The scope and requirements are clear, the work is incredibly repetitive and tedious, and it can’t quite be done by deterministic code because you need some intelligence to...