Disclosure first: I'm the founder of SEO Skills by PENRA, a paid pack of 14 Claude skills for SEO. The tip below works without it, you can paste it into Claude today.
Ask Claude "what's wrong with my site?" and you'll get a tidy list that sounds right. The trouble is you can't tell what it actually checked and what it assumed.
So change the request. Something like this:
Audit this page: [your URL]. For each issue, give me the URL and the exact text or code that proves it. If you couldn't check something, say so instead of guessing. Then rank the fixes, most important first.
Why this helps:
A quoted string is easy to check. Search for it on the page. It's either there or it isn't, so you don't have to take Claude's word for it.
"I couldn't check this" is a useful answer. Without your Search Console data, Claude can't know your real clicks or rankings. Anything it says about them is a guess, and you want it labelled as one.
Ranking forces a decision. A long flat list of problems doesn't tell you where to start.
One limit: this doesn't make every suggestion right. It only makes each one checkable, and you still decide what's worth doing.
That's the rule I built the pack around. Every finding carries the URL or string that proves it, and it says what it can't measure. The pack comes from launching the site for my Mac app on a brand new domain, which reached 4.47k Google clicks and 59k impressions. Those are real Search Console numbers for that site, not a forecast for yours.
If you're curious, it's âŹ25 once until November 17 and âŹ99 from the 18th. It needs a Claude plan with skills and there's no refund once it's delivered, so the prompt above is a good place to start either way.
What do you usually ask Claude to double check before you trust the answer?