How to use the Programmatic SEO Planner agent skill

What an agent skill is and what this one makes the agent do

An agent skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file that an AI agent loads to learn a specific task. This skill covers programmatic SEO: sites where templates produce pages from structured data, such as location, product or integration pages.

Once installed, the agent assesses your data, designs page templates, suggests URL patterns and internal links, and applies quality gates. The gates include uniqueness percentages, word counts, batch sizes and human review samples, aimed at avoiding search penalties for thin or duplicate content.

• Data source assessment: row counts, duplicate records, missing values, data freshness
• Template planning: variable injection points, static versus dynamic content blocks, conditional sections
• URL pattern strategy and URL rules such as lowercase hyphenated slugs and no query parameters on primary content URLs
• Internal linking, canonical strategy, sitemap integration and index bloat prevention

Install the skill from the ZIP or the Claude apps

Download the ZIP from this page and unzip it. For Claude Code you can place the skill in your personal skills folder at ~/.claude/skills/ or in a project's .claude/skills/ folder. The download contains LICENSE.txt and SKILL.md.

If you use the Claude apps instead, upload the skill under Settings → Capabilities → Skills.

• Personal install: ~/.claude/skills/ (available across your projects)
• Project install: .claude/skills/ inside the project folder (shared with that project)
• Claude apps: Settings → Capabilities → Skills

Requirements: what you need before you start

The skill needs an AI agent that loads SKILL.md skills, such as Claude Code with the claude-seo plugin. The metadata check script is provided by the wider claude-seo plugin, so you need that plugin's scripts folder to run it.

If you want the agent to analyse your real data, you also need the data files or database or API access. The skill itself does not connect to your data sources for you.

• An agent that loads SKILL.md skills (for example Claude Code with the claude-seo plugin)
• The claude-seo plugin's scripts folder, for the metadata_template.py check
• Data files, or database or API access, if you want analysis of real data

Trigger the skill with natural requests

The skill loads when your request matches its trigger phrases. The source lists phrases such as "programmatic SEO", "pages at scale", "dynamic pages", "template pages", "generated pages" and "data-driven SEO". You can also pass an optional argument described as a URL or a plan.

Describe your data and goal in plain language, and say what you want checked. Naming the data source and page type helps the agent apply the right checks.

• "Review my programmatic SEO plan for 2,000 city and service pages built from this CSV."
• "Design a template and URL pattern for integration pages generated from our API."
• "Check whether this batch of generated product pages is safe to publish."

Understand the quality gates and the metadata check

The skill sets a table of gates. Pages without content review at 100 or more trigger a warning requiring a content audit before publishing. Pages without justification at 500 or more are a hard stop that needs explicit user approval and a thin content audit. Unique content below 40 percent is flagged as thin, and word counts below 300 are flagged for review.

The skill also recommends a stricter hard stop below 30 percent unique content. For the enhanced gates it asks for at least 30 to 40 percent unique content between any two pages, a 5 to 10 percent human review sample, and batches of 50 to 100 pages monitored for 2 to 4 weeks before expanding.

Metadata is scored separately from body copy. The skill directs you to run the metadata_template.py script over the whole set; a site_risk of high counts as a gate failure regardless of body uniqueness.

• Standalone value test: would this page be worth publishing even if no other similar pages existed?
• Avoid mad-libs pages where only a city or product name changes in identical text
• Uniqueness = words unique to the page divided by total words on the page, measured against the rest of the set; shared headers, footers and navigation are excluded

Safety notes: scripts and network

This skill runs scripts, so review them before running the skill in your environment, and keep it in folders you control. The source states that it runs scripts but does not use the network.

Verify enforcement claims yourself. The file's enforcement timeline rests partly on third-party reports, not Google announcements, so check current Google policy before making decisions based on it.

• Runs scripts: yes
• Uses network: no
• Treat the enforcement timeline as a starting point and verify it against current Google documentation