10 ways Claude can derail your SEO if you don’t check its work

Depending on who you listen to, AI is either the end of SEO or its savior. Having done SEO professionally since I was on the team that built Walgreens.com in 2000, I think both are hyperbole. 

The truth is that AI can help SEOs do things we’ve never been able to do before — and do them quickly — while also completely derailing our SEO if it’s left unattended. I have many examples of both. But first, I want to focus on 10 times Claude went off the rails and I had to catch it before it could make things worse.

For context, I’ve been using AI professionally since ChatGPT came out, including in my work as a senior SEO at Intuit QuickBooks.

This year, I’ve been digging deeper into how Claude handles SEO, using it for a 41-site audit and guide for the Chicago Independent Venue League (CIVL), and while vibe coding my own AI stylist app, Dressed. Since I can’t share client examples, I’ll use examples from CIVL and Dressed here.

1. A crawlability problem that wasn’t there

One of the amazing things you can do with Claude that would have taken me days at Walgreens in 2000 is feed it Screaming Frog crawls. It can analyze the data and give me a fairly good assessment of the major crawl issues.

For the CIVL guide, I had Screaming Frog crawl all 41 venue sites and then give me a rundown of what it saw. But you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t check its work.

At one point, Claude told me that one of the venues had JavaScript crawlability issues as a single-page application (SPA), but when I opened it in the browser, I didn’t see JavaScript, just a one-page HTML site. Had I trusted its word, I might have suggested a fix that the site didn’t need.

2. An incorrect Google Business Profile assumption

For the CIVL guide, Claude suggested one of the venues should claim its Google Business Profile, but it didn’t click on “Claim this Listing” to see that it was already claimed. 

This probably wouldn’t have wrecked my SEO if I had told CIVL to claim a business profile that it had already claimed, but it definitely would’ve made me look like an idiot and may have wrecked my SEO career.

Dig deeper: Use Claude for SEO. Don’t let Claude do SEO.

3. Sitemap submission status it couldn’t verify

I created 41 one-sheets for the owners as part of this volunteer gig, and Claude took what it thought were the most egregious SEO issues for every site and put them on the one-sheet. This is kind of necessary if you’re auditing 41 sites at once, but it’s also necessary to question Claude when it does something that doesn’t make sense. 

One of the points it included on every sheet was “No sitemap submitted to Google Search Console.” But it had no way to know this because we didn’t have Google Search Console access. I’m not sure where it was getting its information from, but it wasn’t observable reality. 

You can find these pretty reliably by doing a site:[site.com] filetype:.xml search, looking at the robots.txt file, or just putting sitemap.xml at the root, but Claude was just making it up.

4. The bare minimum with title tags

I’ve written enough title tags in my career that I know it’s not glamorous work. But honestly, it still seems effective if you do it right.

The problem with CIVL is that I asked Claude to write titles based on keywords with high search volume that were relevant to each venue, and it gave me something completely uninspiring. 

In one case, it took an absolutely hilarious title for a comedy club that was also keyword-rich, “Chicago’s only funny comedy,” and turned it into something that was boring and not funny. 

In another case, it completely skipped nonbrand keyword research for a specific title, and in one case, it put just the brand name and “National Historic Landmark” in the title and nothing else. Claude admits it’s not doing great work when you call it out, usually, but if you’re letting it optimize unassisted, who’s calling it out?

Claude: “Today’s generic titles across v4 (‘Live Music Venue | Neighborhood, Chicago’ × 20) were filler masquerading as SEO. User called it lazy. Correct.”

Dig deeper: Claude for SEO: 5 ways to automate repetitive work

5. Duplicate URLs went unnoticed

Claude had a Screaming Frog crawl with 111 duplicate title tags that were caused, I found on closer inspection, by show names appended to default.aspx as path segments, each rendering the same page. 

Claude should know this isn’t good, as duplicate content is called out in Google’s guidelines and it’s not a secret on the web, but I still had to point out to Claude that this was happening. It recognized that it was a problem when it saw it and said this:

“Now I’ve seen it. This is much worse than a parameter-cruft issue — I want to be precise before writing it up because this is the kind of venue where a confident-but-wrong diagnosis would embarrass both of us.”

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6. A content idea gets killed on the wrong premise

One recommendation I ended up making in the CIVL guide is that, in addition to show pages, these venues should add more information on historic shows, using content from fans to create pages that fans would read and link to. 

My example was that I saw both The White Stripes and The Strokes play The Empty Bottle in the early aughts, and it would be good to put up pages with setlists, images and videos, behind-the-scenes stuff, etc. Claude heard this and asked me a question. 

Earlier, we’d nixed creating a separate page targeting “concerts in Chicago” for Salt Shed because the homepage already ranked very well for that term. It saw these historic pages and thought the same idea was at play:

Claude: This is exactly like Salt Shed. Probable kill — needs your call.

Bryson: Why would you kill either? Rosa’s homepage is not ranking for the queries we want the heritage page to rank for and the same goes for the Empty Bottle homepage and the artist hubs. Different animal.

Eventually, it understood that there was a logical difference between the recommendation we made earlier and the one it just gave, but it took a while (and me pointing it out) for it to get there.

Dig deeper: How to scale SEO content updates with Claude Code

7. An obsession with noindexing demo pages

As an enterprise SEO, I’m very familiar with the concept of a crawl budget. I also know that you don’t have to worry about crawl budget if you don’t have thousands and thousands of pages on your site.

In general, a site like mine with fewer than 50 indexed pages will be fine. Yet when I asked Claude to fix the title tags on my demo pages, it surprised me by also noindexing them!

Claude: Noindex added to demo subpages — also did this while in there… You don’t want /demo/closet/ competing with your content articles or diluting crawl budget.

Bryson: Crawl budget. I have like 20 pages. Crawl budget is not an issue. I want the demo pages indexed. Why the f*ck would you fix the titles and then put noindex on the pages?

Like the other issues, afterward, Claude agreed that this was dumb, but it didn’t realize it until after I pushed back. What I worry about is how many people who are using Claude for their SEO add noindex to perfectly good content because they don’t understand what the AI is talking about.

8. Link building takes longer

AI has definite potential for personalizing link building at scale, but in practice, it’s been frustrating.

Claude is great at finding relevant contacts and scoring and sorting them by relevance, authoritativeness, and potential to earn a link. But it also regularly fabricates outreach targets, removes contacts from spreadsheets without being asked, and suggests targets that turn out to be incompatible after a little research.

At one point, I had 78 master sheets of links, and suggested links would mysteriously disappear from session to session. Claude is also great at reading articles and drafting responses, but most of the responses were either inaccurate or too generic to warrant a response, so I stopped using them.

I was excited about how much time I could save by having Claude do the heavy lifting, but given the cleanup involved, it’s hard to tell how much time I’ve actually saved.

Dig deeper: How to build a Claude Code-powered second brain for agency work

9. Canonicals pointing every page to the homepage

Claude really doesn’t like my demo pages. Not only did it noindex them at one point, but it also added canonicals to every page in the demo pointing back to the demo homepage, so that only one demo page would be indexed. 

I corrected it, and it kept happening. Three times. The demo is supposed to be indexed, as it was created as something journalists and potential users could try without having to log in that would show them what the product does, but Claude apparently disagrees.

10. Noindexing the entire app

Sometimes Claude likes to noindex things on its own, including my entire web app. At one point in late July, Claude added noindex to all of my app pages. These aren’t great pages for search traffic, and you can’t access them if you’re not logged in, but they could still get links. Because of that, I’ve added canonicals to the public demo pages so that any links the app gets will point to the public demo page that doesn’t require a login. 

Claude knew about this from the first time it noindexed my demo pages three months prior, but noindexed the app anyway. It was explained clearly in project instructions at this point, and still Claude did it anyway.

Claude’s own admission when I explained the situation: “Noindex would have been actively harmful, not just unnecessary.” Fortunately, we caught it before it could do any damage, but if you fired your SEO team and replaced them with Claude, who would catch it for you?

AI knows SEO. It doesn’t always understand your SEO

I’m presenting all of these examples not to say that AI sucks at SEO or shouldn’t be used for SEO. On the contrary, my next column will cover how AI has transformed my SEO process, and I’m doing things today that I could never have dreamed about when I was doing SEO at Walgreens in 2000.

The point is that AI doesn’t know more about SEO than you do. It has trouble going beyond best practices and applying nuance to SEO.

LLMs might have all of the web’s published knowledge of SEO, and I’m sure they’ll get better at applying it, but ultimately, you have to be the one to put your name behind what you produce. 

If AI tells you something that doesn’t make sense, ask it to explain why it’s doing what it’s doing. As I found out the hard way, it might not really know, and your question might be the only thing saving you from an SEO disaster.