How SEO agencies actually use Claude?
And what they still can't do with it. Based on a survey of 30 agencies.
I bet you saw many posts on LinkedIn and X about how SEOs and in-house marketers automated something with Claude.
Some shared real Claude Skills, ready-to-use Claude Code setups, or just a list of prompts. The loudest people said they fired their team, consultant, or agency, because Claude can do everything now.
The reality is usually more complex, so I decided to run a survey among agency owners and SEO leads about how they use Claude, what their biggest wins and challenges.
I asked primarily Sitechecker customers, my friends, and my network on LinkedIn. Wanted 50-100 responses, but collected only 30 responses. I could achieve 100, but in this case, I should extend the data collection period by another 4-6 weeks.
Anyway, there are some visible interesting patterns. This is the first-ever benchmark report on this topic, and I plan to run this data study every year.
You can see and download the full PDF report here >
Here are my top insights and thoughts born from reading the data.
1. Most SEO agencies have been using Claude for less than 1 year
So, this is an experimental activity, where few people know both about all the possibilities of automation and all the limitations.
Moreover, these experiments are superimposed on constant updates of Claude, both in how models work and pricing changes.
2. GSC and GA4 are the most popular data sources that are connected.
This is expected. Next are clickstream data sources Ahrefs and Dataforseo, and the most interesting thing is that they have the same share of votes.
This surprised me. I thought it might be a small sample (30 agencies). But when I looked at the financial data for their Estonian company, I realized it’s close to reality.
The Dataforseo team invests more and more in marketing, but AI chats have become the tailwind that fills their sails to the fullest. And I believe, this is also a reason why Ahrefs focused all resources on growing a new product, Agent A.
Because Ahrefs doesn’t want to become the same data provider as Dataforseo, just more expensive. If your data is your main moat, the only way to defend this moat is to make your data irreplaceable or at least increase the cost of switching x10.
Interestingly, the CRM data is connected so little to Claude. I see 2 reasons for this:
confidentiality (few clients are willing to share call records with the agency to improve keyword research and content creation);
few agencies even ask for such data and use it in their work.
I predict that in a year, this percentage of CRM connections will be much higher, because it is beneficial for both the client and the agency.
3. 73% of agencies use Claude every day
And more interestingly, it’s not a solo activity of the founder or of the SEO lead. It’s adopted by entire teams.
Although Claude generally looks like an experimental activity, the data shows that it has entered to the toolset for a long time, and will radically change the entire SEO delivery in agencies.
4. Only 10% radically reduced their interaction with the SEO tools that they used before.
This is the most surprising. So far, for most, Claude is an auxiliary tool, not a replacement for existing ones.
5. The most popular unresolved problems of working with Claude
training the team how to work with it
too many hallucinations
too small context window for small data sets
difficult to predict API costs
I bet that in just 3-6 months, many agencies will face two problems:
Some of the automated work does not correspond to the quality that actually creates value for customers. The last 1% is much harder than the first 99% in the fight for quality, but it is also the most important.
There are too many changes happening now for existing automations to be rewritten into SOPs and easily trained on them.
6. Tasks that are not convenient to solve in Claude, and where agencies prefer native tools.
Agencies prefer to use native SEO tools for:
working with graphs and dashboards
working with large tables
setting up alerts
sharing reports with clients and the team
Also, at the end of the survey, I added an open question about what agencies would automate with Claude, if it were possible. Customer reporting was a leader among requests.
I assume that customer reporting is so difficult to automate because there are too many contexts involved. It’s just not enough to set up basic reports like winning and losing pages/keywords, overall traffic, and keywords changed, and so on.
Based on my talks with agencies, I hear that many continue doing it in Google Slides, adding screenshots and explaining what they do and what impact it has on results.
I see a huge gap here, and that’s why we are building a reporting tool at Sitechecker now. If it’s your bottleneck too, I’ll be happy to discuss it in chat or on a demo call.
7. Most agencies plan to continue to configure Claude for new processes and improve old ones.
Despite all the pitfalls and challenges, there is no way back.
These are just some of my insights. I highly recommend reading the full report. Share what you agree with or disagree with.
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