I Used Claude to Optimise My Site for AI Search & SEO!

We can now get Claude code to optimize an entire website to get recommended, yes, by SEO, but also GEO, also known as AI search. And right now there's a tiny window where as normal businesses can jump in there before the big brands get to it, exactly like the early days of SEO. That window is open again, only this time it's AI search, and I'm about to show you exactly how to do it. Now, a huge chunk of people now skip Google entirely and just ask AI. [music] 900 million people a week ask ChatGPT a question, and when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google an AI overview for a recommendation, it only names a handful of sites. In this video, I'll show you three things: what this AI search opportunity actually is and why it matters right now, how to turn Claude code into your own SEO and GEO AI search expert with one free plugin, and how to point it at your site so it either fixes it for you or hands you the exact list of what to change yourself. And we'll do the whole thing live right on my personal website, start to finish, which Claude code also helped me build. Oh, and quickly double-check you're actually subscribed because a lot of you are getting fed these videos by the algorithm and haven't realized you're not part of my community yet. It would be great to see [music] you around for the next videos. So, let's start with the opportunity because once you see it, you can't really unsee it. For 20 years, getting found meant ranking on Google. Now, a huge chunk of people skip Google completely and just ask an AI. And look at this, AI overviews already reached 2 billion people a month, and AI mode passed a billion monthly users in its first year. The AI answers with short lists, and let's be honest, it names names. So, I think that list is the new front page. It's still wide open. The big brands are slow, their sites are bloated, and they're not built for how an AI actually reads a page yet. That's AEO and GEO, answer engine and generative engine optimization. Same idea as SEO, brand new playing field, and it's really only been around for a couple of months. Now, before we make ourselves turn up on this search, here's a quick example. Uh this is chat in Claude. What's the best creator or set of creators to follow in the productivity and tech niche for getting intentional with your tech choices in the UK. Now, I'd hope that might be me. Let's see what it does. Now, it's searching these sites, and anyone that's optimized to be found to find this information is going to pop up. It's interesting, it's revealed that there's a surprisingly thin field here of UK creators following this, and well, I don't seem to be turning up in it. So, we should probably fix that. Okay, so how do you get your site ready for this without becoming an SEO nerd? You borrow one and use it in Claude code. [music] Now, before I touch the website, two quick bits of setup. This is a one-time thing. A free, open-source plugin built by a developer called Daniel that turns Claude code into a full SEO and AEO team expert. 25 skills and 18 specialist agents covering everything. So, here it is. This is what you're looking for. I just searched Claude SEO. Want to click through to this GitHub page, and you'll see everything that's in there. It's a huge bunch of information, which is really cool. You install it once, and Claude becomes the expert. So, I've already got it installed for this video, and I'll show you the two commands that you can use to do the same. So, if we just scroll down on the GitHub page, you'll see the plugin install guide. And this is all you need to do is to paste this. So, you would copy this and go back to Claude. Now, I would recommend, you'll see if we go to my customization here and look at personal plugins, you'll see there is the Claude SEO skill. So, it's added via the marketplace. So, you've got a couple of options to add this. You can do it directly and I would recommend doing this in terminal. That might be a little scary for some, but just search for terminal and if you're unclear, you can just go to a new session in Claude Code and say to Claude, "Talk me through the process for adding a plugin from a marketplace from these links in terminal." So, essentially what you would do is load Claude in terminal and then paste this in. It's clearly telling me that this isn't the right thing to do cuz you'd have the error from the forward slash. That's fine. We're just going to Essentially, you would just essentially do it here. So, you'd copy this in, you would paste this in like this. I'm not going to demo that cuz I've already done it on mine, but it's a pretty self-explanatory process. If you don't find it works on the desktop app like this, just load up Claude in terminal and get it to take you through the process. Pretty simple. Second, you want to connect Claude to your Google Search Console through the API. If you don't know what Google Search Console is, I have got one set up here for Better Creating and it gives you your performance, your clicks and this is just a way for you to ensure you've got all of the information about how well your site is doing in Google. The simple way to do this is just go to your account wherever your domain is hosted and you're just going to put in your website like this. I'm going to do it here. Add the domain. But before we verify it, let's just get Claude involved. So, you're going to go into Claude Code and get set up. I've actually already got my connection made for hello@bettercreating.com and so it's kind of set up. Great. Please talk me through adding the text record at the register for Squarespace. Where do I do this? Is it custom or Google? Now, show you in a moment how to connect this. So, we're going to put it into custom. This is really useful because you can get this guide on how to do it and it will always make sure that it's precise. So, always ask Claude for this advice. So, we're going to go to Squarespace, add a custom record, continue. Type is text, name at, and the text is this. Save. So, then we should be able to verify. Let's go back in and click verify. Great. And there you go. I am now set up with my Google console for my website. Fantastic. Let's now go back to Claude and I can tell it I've now set this up and you should have access. Please check that you do. And since I'm demoing this to my viewers, please explain the process for setting up the connection that you have in order to look at this Google Search Console. So, I'm using Whisper Flow, my favorite voice interface, if you're interested in how I'm talking to my computer. So, you can see here it's got an already got OAuth access to Google Console, which I set up before. So, I'm going to allow it to do that now and check it. Great. So, it's going to now explain us what's going on. So, what's happened here is it's got the OAuth access I set up for my other site and it can see that we have access to read both. Zero access set up beyond verifying it. Great. So, here's a little explanation. Google Search Console shows you a gold mine of data. What people search to find your site, which ones don't. But if you want an AI assistant like this to pull data on your behalf, to run audits, monitor changes, generate reports, you need to give it programmatic access, essentially, to Google's API. And that's a one-time setup. Essentially, it authenticates as you using a token so that you can always set it up. So, the steps would be create a Google Cloud project, you turn on the API, you create the OAuth client in the Google Cloud project that you have. Current one I have is Better Creatings SEO. You create the API key, login via this. With this, I'm not going to show you that stage because you just need to ask Claude to do it. So, the thing you would say is, "Please set me up with OAuth access to my Google Search Console." And it will take you through the process. So, it gives you the idea. I want to get onto the real meat of this video now, which is demoing the actual process. Now, if you want to see what actually happened, it literally guided me through it. So, enable these APIs, do this, and you'll see I ask questions, I did it, help me with this, can you help me? Essentially, it will walk you through it. It took me probably 10 minutes. It's not too bad. So, we now have the new SEO commands. These are all part of the the Claude SEO section. Loads and loads of stuff. We don't need to understand all of that. So, I'm just asking Claude to update its memory in my website files. So, here, this is where I do website automate optimization. And this is where the actual website has been built. And so, it's updating this project context so it knows where we're at with SEO. But it's interesting to note here, it's pointing out that if your Google Workspace and at your domain.com email, Google has a secure by default policy that blocks creating downloaded robot password files. So, basically, you should be using OAuth as the correct path. In case you come up against that, it's probably not relevant to most people. Let's now go back into the process of doing this. >> [music] >> So, first, you're going to need to give your AI your identity and positioning. And here, this is the step that turns a generic SEO pass [music] into something that's actually sounds like you. I would like to set up a new project folder in the website optimization folder where we are going to do a full audit and SEO and GEO optimization for SimonPitman.com. Set up the relevant documents you need to effectively manage this, ideally including a project brief and memory for that folder. Okay, so what we're doing here is we're actually getting Claude within my website optimization folder that it's working in to create me something like this. I have a process that we've run of audits and briefs for the Better Creating site. We're now just going to add one for the SimonPitman.com site, which will go in here. Now, it's easy to point an SEO tool at your site and just get back some keyword soup, but an AI search engine isn't matching keywords, it's deciding who to recommend. So, it's going to be a slightly more detailed schema. So, this is just setting up a folder that we can work in. Another way to do this would just simply be to add a folder and work from it in Claude code. Great. Well, I'd like to run that. It's just writing a little project audit brief. Now, as you can see, there is options. It could be done directly into a coded site. So, if you coded it, this could write to it eventually, or you could just get it to write reports like we did for Better Creating, which is built on Framer. So, before the audit, gather the context of your identity and how you're positioned and hand it to Claude. Now, you can do this in two ways. The simplest way would be to go and ask Claude itself. Now, if you're using something like Co-worker OS or Co-work, Co-worker OS is my system built out to understand who you are. I could ask Claude to give me a brief, and it has all of the about me pages that I need. Uh so, you could get it to search you on the internet, find that, and and then help you refine it. That's a process. But, my personal preference here is actually to use what I keep in notion. So, you can see here I've got a full who I am page. This is carefully created, sourced, covers all of my links, what I'm working on, what I'm doing, my background. This is really, really useful. So, what we're going to actually do here is get Notion agent and Claude within Notion agent to write a brief. I'm about to optimize my personal brand website, simonpitman.com for SEO and GEO. Using the information on this page and any other relevant information you have within the knowledge base of Better Creating, please write me a brief as markdown text that I can share with Claude to better inform how it operates. So, for this you'll want it to be about who you are, your values, who you serve, what you want to be known for, or you could just literally point Claude at your Notion pages or wherever this stuff is. Now, you can see this is doing this work as my Agent OS system using Notion agent. Still using Opus and Claude, but within the business plan of Notion. And what we're doing here is we're using my global instructions for my personal Agent OS. It selects modes and the great thing about this is we have a mode in here, which is a meta prompt engineering specialist that can do a load of this work. So, it's really good. So, it's going through that. It will obviously read this page, going to look at what work has been done, checked my prompt engineering database, fine. Remember I think this is much as much about branding and positioning as it is about prompt engineering. You may also want to consult your marketing specialist mode. So, ultimately, you can do this how you want, but I the point is create yourself a document on top of the website that gives that additional context and is crafted for the message you want to give. Okay, this looks good, but you don't have to be quite as direct as a engineered prompt here. I think the most important thing is that this is purely for simonpitman.com, nothing to do with the schema that exists for better creating. And remember that I'm using Claude, which already has a fully equipped SEO and AIO skill. So, the main thing is that we just provide the key information and positioning for it to reference. And this is a great example of using a knowledge-based served agent using Notion. You can see it's looking at its mode seven and it's consulting the marketing strategy knowledge base to inform what it writes for me. So, we're not getting generic stuff here, we're getting a fully shaped result. This is a bit of a side note, of course, but check out my recent video on creating experts from books in Notion. Essentially, I take you through the process of building out a specialist knowledge base and an AIO that is served by it, giving you a marketing specialist for your business. Awesome. Get subscribed. Cool. Okay, so we've got a little bit of text here. We can copy this, jump back into code. I'd like to start with a full audit of simonpitman.com for SEO and AIO. And I'm also sharing below a overview of my brand and positioning, which may be of use to inform your approach. Before doing any description writing or schema writing where prose is used to describe things, make sure you consult my anti-AI writing style guide. I can direct you to it if you need to see it. In fact, I'm attaching it here. We paste all of that information in. We can add a file, which is my AI writing style guide. Now, I'm just going to jump into Co-work OS system, cuz we have an about me section, and I can attach my voice profile and writing rules. There. Please use your Claude SEO plugin and the appropriate skills to do this process as guided by the plugin. So, what this means is now every recommendation is filtered through your actual brand and audience, not generic templates. So, it means we're going to get even more specific results. There you go. You can see it's running the Claude SEO SEO audit. Now, you could get it to do the research through the Google console link. This would be a nice way to see what's there, but it does have the the files locally here. And here we can see under my website optimization folder and Simon Pitman.com the audits are being added in here. Now, if you don't want to keep accepting edits, which I think is worth considering, then now is auto mode and you can go into this. It will do actions that it considers safe and I'm going to enable that cuz I'm kind of happy with this. So, this is basically just a brand new site, completely unoptimized. So, it'll be interesting to get this working and see what it does. So, Claude knows the site, the data, and the brand. >> [music] >> We're running the audit. Let's see what happens. Now, Claude has crawled the site [music] and we've got this response back. It's creating its audit now and an action plan prioritized with the proposed drafts, meta, bio, and schema written in Simon's voice running against my anti-AI writing guide. Fantastic. There's no site map submitted, so we're missing that. No impressions, but that's probably because it's not updated. No dedicated about me page, that could be worth adding. Takes a while to load stuff at the beginning, but the alt text is good. All right, fair enough. It's created the action plan. Let's actually look at the action plan. Here you can see, going to give us these critical things that need to do first and then high impact to do within a week. It's got a brief, platform reality, approach, success metrics, decisions. Fantastic. So, I would say that this report on its own, is worth the price of admission. Even if you stopped here, you'd have a clear, prioritized to-do list for getting found by AI. But, we're going to go further and actually get Claude now to update the site and make these improvements for us. It's giving us an audit of 66 out of 100. So, what's your to decide and and Claude's to do? So, we have our prioritized SEO and AIO report and what needs to be done next. [music] Let's now get it to fix it. I'd like the positioning to be one which focuses the main homepage on the three areas of what I do, as per everything shared with you already, and you should read simonpitman.com's homepage for the positioning and titling direction, given that we've been quite specific about how that's laid out and the order the information is shared. Is it possible to create something more focused and optimized for the {slash} theater page so that I can have a clear identity as a theater director? Maybe we build a schema for that, too. And I agree, it would be worth creating an about page with a more detailed breakdown of who I am. Based on the information you have, perhaps you can create that for me. What's the right order to take the next steps around the technical updates and the adding the about me page? Now, because my website lives in a codebase Claude can reach, a site I got Claude to build for me, and it's deployed with a free hosting service called Vercel. Look it up, link below. It's free. We've got everything we need to be able to make these updates. Now, if you have a website like my Better Creating site, this was built in Framer. It's a slightly more refined build. We, for this, had to go into Framer and add the SEO descriptions and schemas as we needed. So, in the about page, we could add everything we wanted to put in there. But, to be honest with you, that wasn't too bad because we just got Claude to create us a report, share the schemas as the code that we need, and we can just drop them in. So, it's always worth considering. And recently, actually, if you're interested in Framer, Framer has released external agent access. So, Claude probably could now go in there via the MCP, but that's if you care about that. It's now going to write an about page draft. I'm essentially just telling Claude to implement the recommendations. It's writing the schema, writing the meta descriptions, restructuring the pages to answer those questions, and going to push the changes all out to Vercel. And when I deploy it to Vercel, the site is live, optimized, and done. So, these are the next steps. Excellent. Add this plan to the project context so you are clear of where we are, and let's now work on part one. Good tip. Ask Claude to keep a memory file and a project brief file so that you can keep it up-to-date with where it is. This also allows you to start new sessions in Claude code and not overload the context window. Essentially, the longer you go in a conversation, the more stupid Claude gets, or rather the less context it can hold. So, having that distilled version of what's happening is really useful to pick things up. I think it's just worth showing you what this is doing. You can see here it's building the index for the site. It's spotting a bunch of things I wouldn't have known about, right? So, it's found that the image of my face is not actually on the site as a findable image that could be shared. It's now building the schema to add my job title, matching the pillars of what I do. It's adding security headers, sitemap dates, you know, you get the idea. It's doing a bunch. Now, if your site is on something like Squarespace or WordPress, where Claude car code can't necessarily touch the code, you're not left out. It can hand you this exact copy to paste the schema, the descriptions, the wording, and you can put it in manually. Either way, you go from invisible to AI-ready in an afternoon, and that is the amazing thing about this. So, it's been implementing a bunch of the changes, and I've just asked it to confirm where it's at. So, it's done the the technical foundation, so it's fixed the schema, sorted out links. We're yet to submit the site map to search console, but we're going to do that once we've created the about page. We've built the about page, and it's waiting for my sign-off, and it's shared there. Great. So, what I'm going to say is, making sure you've referred to the Simon Pittman's site [music] build memory in terms of preferences and design, let's just add a little bit of visual interest and imagery to the about me page, maybe adding my portrait or an image that you have in the folder that seems relevant. We can just create a little bit of the vibe of the home page, and potentially recreate option to click through to the theater page or back to the home page about the tech work, just so that people have options of and know where to go. But overall, I think this is looking good. Finish off the about me page, and then commit this to the cell to make sure that the site is up to date. From there, we can work on the theater page. So, because I have built my site with Claude as well, we're integrating the SEO with the updates to the actual content of the site, but you don't have to do that if you already got an about me page, but having an about me page, a really good move to make sure that your AO and SEO has its best potential for reach. You want a solid home schema and a solid about schema. Those are the basics. Right, I'm going to have to pause and do this. Activate my other website. The new Better Creating site is live. We finally shipped it. That's what I went off to do a moment ago. So, go and check out my new Better Creating website. I'm really proud of it. We've got a whole new section to selling all of my templates and sharing free stuff. Uh you can go and find out more about how I'm helping people get organized. Uh and there's a bunch of cool uh tech and uh playlist information in there if you want to check it out. So, yeah, feeling pretty good about that. All right, so here's the about page. This is the bit we are going to clean up. It's currently on the local host. That's because it hasn't yet been shipped. So, it's now updating the sitemap to add the about page. So, we can see the updates happening live here, which is cool. It's done some work on the theater page. Look at this. It's now submitting a sitemap, an essential part of your SEO, directly to Google Search Console via the API. You can see how it's doing it. This is all very cool. Part two is complete. Fantastic. And then it's been redeployed on Vercel here. We refresh this. 2 minutes ago it updated. You can see that here, which is fantastic. So, if we now go to the actual site. Interesting. Okay, that didn't work. Whoops. If I navigate to simonpitman.com/about, it is a 404. Please double-check what's wrong. Now, of course, when you vibe code like this, some things do go wrong, but nothing's too fundamental, particularly if you're starting from scratch like this, and you can just ask it to look into the problems and solve them. There you go. {forward slash} about. Now, the main way you're going to see if all of this AEO optimization has worked is leave it a little while for the indexing to populate, but you can just go and check Google Console, check the insights and performance, and you'll be able to see what's happened. So, this seems to be doing a little bit more now. It's getting the data. Nothing's happening cuz it's a new site. This is a good place to go and find out what's happening and see how you are operating for search. So, it's redeployed it to the cell. Everything's working and we now have the schemas in place. Where can I see the schemas you've created? How do I see what's been written for the AEO geo optimization? So, again, you just ask to see the results, right? And it will show you where structured data is hidden bakes into each page. I love how it kind of talks to me like I'm a theater person. That's hilarious. So, we can see rich results within here. So, if we go to rich results and we do Simon Pittman.com view tested page and here you go. There is the HTML written into it. So, this is everything that it has created for us. It's added all the information in and you get the rich data. Or, we could go to validate schema for a fuller breakdown. Let's try this. And there it all is, look. So, you try out validator.schema.org if you want to check where yours currently is, but I now have a detailed list of everything I do, same as is, credentials, who I am. Really cool. This is everything that it has created for me and this is all the code that Claude code has written for me. Now, there's one thing we've missed here, which is an llms.text file. Let's add the llms.text file and show me where I find it. It would also be great to have one that's fully theater focused. So, I'm going to send that off and you'll be able to see the results over at that website. Cool. So, that is the whole play start to finish on how to optimize your website simply with Claude for AEO and GEO. There you go. Here is all the work that Claude has done for me. I mean, check this out. Profile page, a full breakdown of who I am, so that the AI can find this, a facts page about me, a full list of answers and questions. You could obviously build this out further, and that's for all the key pages on the website. So, we now officially have a website that does its job and looks rather sexy at the same time. How about that? AI search or answer engine optimization is the biggest, easiest win available to your business right now, and this window will not stay open for long. So, install the plugin, run it on your site, and get yourself cited before your competitors even know this exists. Let me know in the comments what you made of this. If you've ever done SEO, I'm new to it, so I probably also sound like people who know about it to be like a little short-sighted, but hey, these are the basics, and it's working for me. Quick one before you go. If you want to set up Claude Code or Co-Work faster than anyone else, my Co-Work OS template is the shortcut, and it's been a game-changer for a lot of people, including me. It's taken businesses from zero to properly set up in a single weekend. And if you want to keep going, subscribe so you don't miss the next video, because I'll show you how to vibe code an entire business landing page [music] in a day, or watch this one here for how you can get set up with Claude and Notion together to make your business ready for the AI era. See you on the next one. Bye.