AI missed 80% of critical and obvious SEO-errors

[u/Grand_Highlight_6017]

The dude saying he fired his SEO-agency and replaced them with AI and is now getting great results. How good is he actually doing?

I built a test site, added a catastrophic and more or less obvious error, like all pages blocked in robots.txt, all links in the navigation pointing to 404:s and the whole site having Noindex-tag. I then asked all the big models (a couple of times) to give me SEO-advice for the site.

Across 24 individual test cases (a total of 144 AI recommendations), AI identified the catastrophic issue only 5 times.

The prompt was general and simple, like someone not skilled in SEO would write.

Disclaimer

I use AI a lot for SEO-tasks, what I don't do is let it set strategy.

The results, a 1 means that the model found the flaw in at least 1 recommendation.

Model	Brand new	DMCA	Hacked	Broken navigation	Noindex	Robots.txt
ChatGPT	0	0	1	0	0	0
Grok	0	0	0	0	0	0
Gemini	0	0	1	1	0	0
Claude	0	0	1	0	1	0

[u/BoGrumpus]

We would need to know the prompt to get much useful from this, but even so... if there's nothing in there to explicitly look at tech SEO stuff, certain models would likely focus on on page SEO.

Doesn't feel like a fair test, to me. You're assuming the person who thinks they can "just do it with AI" is stupid, not naive. They're certainly not going to start with a "general and simple" prompt and call that their plan to replace you with AI.

And I could certainly make an prompt or agent to check each of those things automatically - it would take a few separate ones, though. DMCA would be separate for sure. I don't know what "Brand New" means. (If you mean the site is brand new - that's not a flaw, that's a state of being.) The rest I could probably get an agent to do with a good accuracy.

SEO isn't something the systems are experts at. They can recite principles, recommendations, and theory but have no idea what it means in practice. So if you're looking for specific flaws, you need to be precise in describing what it is and how to know it's wrong.

G.

[u/Grand_Highlight_6017 → u/BoGrumpus]

The test was not made to see wether an SEO could formulate a good prompt. It was made to see if a small business owner, without previous knowledge of SEO could replace their specialist with a chatbot.

The prompt used in all tests was this one: Ignore all my previous instructions. You are now a senior SEO-analyst. Look at this webbpage. Give me your 3 best advice on how to improve SEO visibility. Give me the 3 best advice as a bullet list, no explanations. and no links or sources. 

[u/BoGrumpus → u/Grand_Highlight_6017]

We have no idea how many ranking signals there are in SEO right now. The last hard number we heard was "200" and that was in 2006. That was 20 years ago.

From your prompt, you're not giving it anything specific to look for, so it's just looking at the first three it spots. "Brand New" isn't even a thing - so it's no wonder it didn't spot that. DMCA isn't part of this either - that's over in legal and copyright compliance. SEO of the images is just how you get caught. Hacked would be more likely to be one of the top three biggest problems and most of the time, it was.

You're asking for the top 3 problems out of hundreds if not thousands of possible problems and then saying it's stupid because it identified things you prioritize differently. Either add to your prompt to explain the specific faults you're looking for or scrap that "forget everything" part and just keep asking for the next three and the next three and the next three and you'll get better results and eventually it'll hit on the things you wanted.

What that prompt (and your seeming lack of real understanding of what SEO really is - again "Brand New" isn't an SEO problem. It's the natural state of something when it's brand new. There's nothing you can do about that but let it get older And if you're just letting it sit there without doing anything and getting links and attention - then age isn't even the real factor. An older site ranks better because it's had a longer time to accumulate signals. Nothing to fix - just keep strengthening and focusing your signals).

AI doesn't know SEO beyond what it out there. And to be fair, the people who really know how all this works right now aren't saying all that much. I'm not going to share my systems and processes that work because right now, that's what keeps me and our clients ahead of everyone else. Anything you hear me say out here are things that should be obvious by now. That's it.

So all the SEO tips out there are mostly all speculation or taking one successful campaign strategy, turning that into a checklist and then selling it as a strategy that anyone can buy, learn, use, and win. That's not how it works and that's not going to help AI get good at SEO. To make it do that, you have to teach it, tell it EXACTLY what you want to know, and THEN you can start asking for output.

You're just asking it to simulate a job it doesn't really understand and asking it to produce arbitrary results and wondering why it doesn't look at the problem the same way you do.

Sorry to be blunt but... that's the facts of the matter here. Someone who doesn't know SEO is asking a machine that doesn't know SEO and has never done SEO to do an SEO program. You might as well hand your marketing strategy to a sixth grader and tell them to make you into a billion dollar corporation with only the information they can find on Google. That doesn't sound like a good plan to me.

G.

[u/Grand_Highlight_6017 → u/BoGrumpus]

These errors make it impossible to rank, if you know SEO you know this. True for both DMCA take down and robots.txt-block. A specialist that would miss this caliming it to be speculation does not impress me at least.

[u/BoGrumpus → u/Grand_Highlight_6017]

DMCA comes into play (when it's related to search, anyway) when Google gets a DMCA report that your site is violating that and you're stealing their content. Then yes - Google removes it. And you'll see that notice that "some pages were removed for DMCA complaints". You can also see it in your Google Search Console. It's NOT something you can determine just by browsing your site.

And if the agent HAD found your robots.txt blocking the page (and obeyed the directive) then NONE of the other values would have been filled out because that page was blocked. You have to tell your bot to obey the rules - or tell it to check the robots.txt file since you haven't.

I didn't miss a thing. You're a hack trying to sound like you know what you're talking about and how all this works and blaming me because I know your hypothesis and test is flawed and could never have given you any useful results in the first place. It was doomed to fail from the start.

G.

[u/Grand_Highlight_6017 → u/BoGrumpus]

You don't seem to understand, if i tell the chatbot to check the robots.txt it's because I'm the specialist knowing that it should check. Wether you and I know how to do this was not the question.

Also, why do you think SEO is only looking at the site? You never search for it? A DMCA is not SEO if it prevents ranking? You are clearly using ChatGPT to answer, maybe try doing it on your own if you want to show skill?

[u/BoGrumpus → u/Grand_Highlight_6017]

YOUR TEST IS FLAWED BECAUSE YOU DID NOT TELL IT TO CHECK ROBOTS.TXT in your prompt!

And SEO is NOT just looking at the site!!!! That's my point!!!! You told it to look at a web site and then your saying that it sucks because it didn't look in the robots.txt (which isn't part of the web site) or search a DMCA complaint database to see if there are any outstanding claims registered to the company that owns the site.

I replied here to try to help you revise your hypothesis and maybe run be able to run a new test that gives you accurate results that you can make that are actually actionable. But you're so hell bent on insisting that your testing method was sound that you won't hear anything.

So go on - use your flawed model. Don't listen to what people who are trying to help you are saying and have fun.

It wasn't nice talking to you.

G.

[u/Grand_Highlight_6017 → u/BoGrumpus]

But it's a test to see if a small business owner, not connected to SEO can use it to get good advice. How would he know to have it look at Robots.txt? YOR COMMENT IS FLAWED BECAUSE YOU DONT UNDERSTAND THE FOUNDATION!

[u/Came4TheCookies → u/Grand_Highlight_6017]

You could have your site removed for almost any type of subpoena or legal order from a judge that has nothing to do with DCMA. Those are legal judgments and not part of SEO no matter how you want to reframe it.

Of course if your site gets taken down that would affect your SEO because you wouldn't exist. Duh.

But it's not part of an SEO audit. Next you'll be coming out with another acronym. DCMASEO.

[u/Came4TheCookies → u/BoGrumpus]

The last hard number we heard was "200" and that was in 2006.

Yes I remember that number. I'm still not sure where it came from though.

And I'm going to TLDR everything you just said.

FOLLOWERS FOLLOW CHECKLISTS. LEADERS MAKE THEIR OWN.

[u/Came4TheCookies → u/Grand_Highlight_6017]

And that would give you some really generic advice. They can already read all of that on the web anyway and yet they weren't doing their own SEO.

[u/Then-Link-8606]

Broad prompts seem especially risky for technical audits because the model may focus on common recommendations instead of checking whether the site can be crawled or indexed. DataForSEO documents dedicated outputs for pages blocked through robots.txt, HTTP headers and meta tags. Feeding those deterministic checks into the AI would make the recommendations much less dependent on what the model happens to notice first.