How to Run SEO from ChatGPT: Seven Workflows That Work

ChatGPT has been able to talk about SEO since launch. What changed is that it can now reach your actual data — rankings, backlinks, crawl results, Search Console — and act on what it finds.

That shifts it from a writing assistant to something closer to an analyst. This guide covers seven workflows that genuinely work, the prompts to run them, and the places where the results still are not trustworthy.

Getting connected

ChatGPT reaches external data through MCP connectors, and adding one takes about a minute:

1. Open Settings → Connectors and choose to add a custom connector.

2. Paste the server's URL and save.

3. ChatGPT opens an OAuth window — sign in to that service and approve access.

4. Start a new chat. The tools appear there; existing chats will not pick them up.

That covers any remote server. The free Google servers are the exception: they run locally rather than over a URL, and need a runtime and a service-account key file.

Worth connecting, in order of value per pound:

• Google Search Console — free, first-party, non-negotiable (community-built; Google publishes no official one)

• Google Analytics 4 — free, and here Google does ship an official server — the other half of the picture

• A competitor index — Ahrefs, Semrush, SE Ranking or DataForSEO, for anything about other people's sites (our comparison of SEO MCP servers covers how to choose)

• A server that can act — if you want the follow-through as well as the analysis

If you want the mechanics in detail — service accounts, config files, troubleshooting — see how to connect your SEO data to Claude. The setup is the same; only the settings screen differs.

One rule before any of the workflows: say which data source you want. With several connected, the assistant picks what it thinks fits, and it will happily quote an estimated volume when you wanted a measured impression count.

1. Find pages that are quietly dying

Traffic decay is the most valuable thing to catch early and the hardest to see in a dashboard, because a page losing 5% a month looks fine every single month.

Compare Search Console clicks for the last 28 days against the previous 28 days, page by page. Show me the ten pages with the largest absolute decline, and for each one tell me whether impressions fell too or whether it is a CTR problem.

The second half of that prompt is what makes it useful. Impressions down means you lost rankings. Impressions flat with clicks down means you lost the click — a title, snippet or SERP-feature problem, and a much cheaper fix.

2. Catch cannibalisation

Two pages competing for one query is common and rarely noticed.

Using Search Console, find queries where more than one of my URLs received impressions in the last 90 days. For each, show the URLs, their impressions and average positions, and tell me which one Google seems to prefer.

The pattern to look for is a query where both pages hover around positions 8–15. That is usually two mediocre pages splitting authority that would rank as one good page.

3. Turn a keyword gap into a plan

The gap report itself is easy. The judgement is the hard part, so ask for the judgement.

Pull the keyword gap between my site and my top three competitors. Ignore anything with commercial intent below what a buyer would search. Group what is left into themes, and tell me which three themes to attack first given my current authority — with your reasoning.

Asking for reasoning matters. Without it you get a ranked list you still have to evaluate. With it you get an argument you can agree or disagree with, which is faster to check.

4. Triage a site audit by impact, not severity

Audit tools sort by their own severity scale, which does not know which pages matter to you.

Summarise my latest site audit. Cross-reference the issues against which pages actually get traffic, and give me a fix list ordered by likely impact rather than by the tool's severity rating. Flag anything that affects a page in my top 20 by clicks.

A broken canonical on a page nobody visits is not urgent. A slow template on your best-converting page is. Only the cross-reference tells you which is which.

5. Find realistic link targets

Show me domains linking to at least two of my competitors but not to me. Exclude directories, and sort by domain authority. For the top ten, tell me what kind of content earned those links.

The last sentence is the useful one. Knowing a domain links to competitors is mildly interesting; knowing it links to original research, or tool comparisons, or local news tells you what you would have to make.

6. Check whether AI assistants recommend you

Increasingly your buyers ask an assistant rather than searching. Whether you appear in that answer is now a measurable thing, and it does not track your Google rankings.

One caveat before the prompt: neither Google connector can answer this, and nor can the big read-only indexes. It needs a server that actually tracks brand mentions in AI answers, which is a much narrower set — Opinly's among them.

How often do AI assistants mention my brand for the prompts I track, compared with my competitors? Which prompts am I absent from entirely, and which sources are being cited in those answers instead?

The absences are the actionable part. If a competitor is named in answers you never appear in, look at what is being cited — it is usually third-party roundups and listicles rather than the competitor's own site, which tells you where the work is.

7. Close the loop and publish

Everything above ends in a recommendation you then go and action somewhere else. If your connected server has write tools, it does not have to.

Take the top theme from the keyword gap, draft a post targeting it in our house style, tag it appropriately, and schedule it for Monday morning.

Most SEO MCP servers are read-only and cannot do this. A few can — Frase and Opinly among them — in which case the research and the publishing happen in the same conversation.

Where a server does write, each tool declares whether it reads, writes or deletes, so ChatGPT prompts before anything changes. Read those prompts rather than clicking through them. "Schedule this post" and "unpublish this post" look similar in a confirmation dialog.

What still does not work well

Being straight about the limits, because the demos rarely are:

Volume estimates get quoted as fact. Third-party search volumes are models with wide error bars. An assistant will report "2,400 searches per month" with total confidence. Treat it as directional.

Big result sets get expensive. SEO exports are enormous and every row entering the context is billed. Ask for filtered, limited results. "Top 20 by traffic" beats "the keywords."

Silent truncation. Some servers cap the rows they return, or time out a long query and hand back what they have. The assistant will happily analyse the partial set without mentioning it was partial. Ask whether results were truncated when the answer matters.

Attribution across sources. With Search Console, GA4 and a third-party index all connected, an assistant will sometimes blend measured and modelled numbers in one answer. Name your source in the prompt.

Anything needing real judgement about your business. It can tell you a theme has opportunity. It cannot tell you the theme attracts users who never convert, or that sales tried it last year. That is still you.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a paid ChatGPT plan? Connector support sits on paid tiers, and availability shifts. Check current terms.

Does this replace my SEO tools? For ad-hoc questions, largely. For scheduled reporting, visual trends and anything you show other people, no. It is a faster route to an answer, not a replacement for the product.

Can it make changes to my site? Only if you connect a server with write tools, and only with your confirmation. Most SEO MCP servers cannot write at all.

Which connectors should I start with? Search Console and GA4. Free, first-party, and between them enough to run workflows one and two properly — which is where most of the quick wins are anyway. The other five need something your own data cannot give you: competitor rankings, a crawl, a backlink index, AI-answer tracking, or write access. Start free and add paid data when your questions outgrow your own site.

How do I stop it hallucinating numbers? Ask it to state which tool it used for each figure. If it cannot name one, it did not fetch it.

The shift worth noticing

The workflows that pay off are not the ones that fetch data faster. They are the ones asking for a judgement you would otherwise have made by staring at a spreadsheet — which theme to attack, which issue matters, which page is dying and why.

Start with the two free Google connectors and run workflow one this week. Decay detection alone usually finds something worth fixing.