# Agentic SEO Status: draft. Owner: Andrew Flett. Last reviewed: 2026-09-14. Canonical: https://agentic.madebymany.com/positions/agentic-seo Search engine optimisation used to be bought after launch, as a piece of work to find what the build had missed. Most of it is now covered by our [agentic product lifecycle](/playbook/delivery), where twenty years of practice is built into every stage. The technical work and the structure of every page are done as the page is made, checked by the industry's own tools and gated on every pull request. What has not changed is the part that needs a person: what each page is for, the words on it, and whether anyone links to it. ## The three types of SEO SEO is three kinds of work, technical, on-page and off-page, and each falls on one side of that line or splits across it; what a machine can verify is agentic, what a person judges is human. ```lifecycle { "title": "The three kinds of SEO", "lanes": { "person": "Human", "agent": "Agentic" }, "accent": "agent", "stages": [ { "key": "technical", "label": "Technical SEO", "note": "whether an engine can reach, read and trust the site", "agent": "As part of building: robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals and real status codes; content in the server HTML; site architecture, redirects and migrations; Core Web Vitals, mobile rendering, HTTPS, structured data and hreflang. Built in as each page is made, gated on every pull request and assessed in the audits. A person promotes a URL change." }, { "key": "on-page", "label": "On-page SEO", "note": "the structure of a page, and the words on it", "person": "Which question the page answers, in the words people use, with Search Console's query data once it is live. The title and the alt text, which are voice as much as structure.", "agent": "The structure, drafted from the page: description per route, one heading hierarchy, internal links, readable slugs, addressable listings, asserted by a test on every pull request. The audit reports what needs rewriting and never fixes it." }, { "key": "off-page", "label": "Off-page SEO", "note": "links, mentions, reviews, a business profile", "person": "Usually marketing: links from sites people trust, digital PR, brand mentions, reviews, and a business profile where the business is local. No skill substitutes, and every audit report names it as the lever it did not touch." } ] } ``` ## The same work serves the answer engines [GEO and LLM attribution](/positions/geo-and-llm-attribution) reaches the same conclusion from the answer-engine side. A site that is well made in the plain sense, with its content in the HTML, every page at a stable address, one heading structure and provenance on the page, is found by search engines, cited by assistants and usable with assistive technology from one effort. There is no separate SEO workstream and no separate AI-readiness workstream. There is building it properly, and then the two human levers. ```callout Scores are not measurements Rank tracking, authority scores, keyword difficulty and readiness scores are vendor estimates presented as measurements. Nothing in the build produces them, and we decline to sell them. ``` ## What became agentic Technical SEO and the structure of each page are now a floor the skills apply as a page is made, proved by Lighthouse and a request-level test sweep on a sample of pages, with nothing of our own underneath. A gate on every pull request stops a fixed defect coming back. The engines are told where the site is, through Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and their reports are read by a person rather than by code. The piece with the best evidence behind it is the least glamorous. A rebuild that changes URLs without a redirect map loses what those URLs earned, and the loss shows in Search Console within weeks. So the map is built from the old sitemap before launch, lives in the framework's own config, and is asserted by a test that fails if an entry goes missing. The gate before production reads that test, and a person decides what a red one means. ## What stays human A page that nobody searches for ranks perfectly for nothing. Deciding which question a page is the answer to, in the words people use, is the half of keyword research the evidence supports, and it belongs to whoever owns the words, with the site's own query data in front of them once it is live. The same goes for whether the content is worth reading and citing. An agent proposes the line and reports what needs rewriting; a person decides. Links from sites people trust remain the strongest signal any engine has, and they are earned off the site, by the work being worth citing and by someone telling people about it. That is marketing, and no build skill substitutes for it. Our audit names it every time as the lever it did not touch, so a clean technical score is never read as a promise of traffic. ## What we decline to sell Rank tracking as a measure of success, since results are personalised and move daily. Authority scores, which are one vendor's model of another company's index. Keyword difficulty and volume figures, which are estimates from bought clickstream panels sold with more precision than the method allows. Readiness scores and `llms.txt` as visibility levers, for the reasons in [GEO and LLM attribution](/positions/geo-and-llm-attribution). A monthly retainer of optimisation with no hypothesis about what will change. None of this makes the field worthless. The parts with evidence are boring: redirects, indexing, real URLs, one intent per page, and links. Those are the parts the skills build in, and a client can check them in the engines' own reports. ## Related agentic skills - [mxa-discoverability](https://agentic.madebymany.com/playbook/skill/mxa-discoverability) - [mxa-audit-discoverability](https://agentic.madebymany.com/playbook/skill/mxa-audit-discoverability) - [mxa-tests](https://agentic.madebymany.com/playbook/skill/mxa-tests) - [mxa-verify-promote](https://agentic.madebymany.com/playbook/skill/mxa-verify-promote)