Agentic SEO: What It Is, Use Cases, and Development Tools

According to research by MIT Sloan, generative AI can boost a high-skilled professional’s performance by nearly 40%. In SEO, this gap can separate the sites that dominate the SERPs and AI responses, from the sites that get left behind. 

What is Agentic SEO?

Now, yet another new tool is emerging: Agentic SEO. By leveraging AI agents powered by LLMs such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, Agentic SEO autonomously or semi-autonomously executes SEO tasks within a human-in-the-loop model. Human SEO experts remain in control, overseeing and refining the AI’s output as needed, while dedicating their saved time and energy to high-level strategy and testing.

Use Cases

For example, the AI agent could conduct a technical audit of your site to identify broken links, duplicate content, missing alt text, or slow load times – and even suggest and implement fixes. AI agents excel at identifying technical issues that humans tend to overlook. Some AI agents can also apply structured data markup or optimize metadata directly. 

Another use case is content ideation. The AI agent acts as a powerful brainstorming partner, exploring a topic and generating a pipeline of content ideas. Then, the human SEO expert reviews and selects the best suggestions, based on their market knowledge and business goals.

A study published in the IZA Institute of Labor Economics found that "the creative ideas produced by AI chatbots are rated more creative [by humans] than those created by humans... Augmenting humans with AI improves human creativity, albeit not as much as ideas created by ChatGPT alone.”

Ethan Mollick’s diagram illustrates a benchmark of the creative process with and without AI. The figure shows the distribution of creativity scores (from 0 to 10) across 5 sources:

• ChatGPT4

• Bard (Gemini)

• HumanBaseline: the human control group (HumanBaseline)

• HumanPlusAI: human group working with AI

• HumanAgainstAI: human group working against AI

The horizontal axis represents the perceived level of creativity, while the vertical axis indicates the frequency of each score (density). The curve corresponding to HumanPlusAI is generally shifted to the right, meaning that evaluators consider this to be the most creative approach. The average scores of ChatGPT and Gemini are lower than those of HumanPlusAI. Moving towards the left, the HumanBaseline group is just below the performance of the HumanPlusAI, while the HumanAgainstAI group is the least creative. Although AI can generate impressive results on its own, the human-in-the-loop model, which combines computational power with human expertise, enables the highest level of creativity.

Development Tools

CrewAI enables the development of multi-agent systems in Python, allowing specialized agents to collaborate on tasks such as data collection, analysis, and implementation. For content ideation, Deep Research is an open-source, AI-powered research assistant that performs iterative, deep research on any topic by combining search engines, web scraping, and large language models.

There are also many no-code tools for building agentic workflows. For example, n8n is an open-source automation tool that allows you to orchestrate SEO tasks like crawling, data extraction, and reporting. Here is a YouTube tutorial on how an SEO agency implemented a 15-agent AI system to automate content creation.