SEO & GEOAugust 24, 20263 min read
Deterministic SEO audits beat AI guesswork
Why a rule-based, evidence-first SEO engine is more useful than asking a generative model to review your site — transparency, versioned rules and reproducible diagnostics.
tools
SEO Engine
A deterministic, rule-based SEO audit and analysis tool — replace guesswork with transparent, reproducible findings.
// category
SEO tooling
seo-engine audit --url <site>// about
SEO Engine is a download-and-run SEO auditing tool. It crawls your site, applies a versioned repository of rules, and turns every finding into evidence, a diagnosis and a prioritized recommendation.
It is deliberately not AI-powered. The analysis is rule-based, deterministic and explainable — the same input produces the same output, every time, and every conclusion can be traced back to the evidence that produced it.
Source — coming to GitHub // public release in progress — details land here when they exist
// capabilities
- Real crawling
- Optional Playwright rendering
- 49 versioned SEO rules
- Technical / on-page / content analysis
- Internal linking & structured data
- Performance & international SEO
- Transparent scoring
- SQLite repository + history
- HTML · JSON · CSV · SQLite output
Pipeline
- Crawler → Rules Engine → Evidence → Diagnosis → Prioritization → Recommendation → Repository.
- Historical analysis across saved runs so you can watch trends, not just snapshots.
Analysis domains
- Technical SEO: crawlability, indexation signals, response integrity.
- On-page and content signals.
- Internal linking and structured data.
- Performance basics, international SEO and local SEO.
- Commerce-related checks for product-led sites.
Transparency
- Deterministic site classification — no model 'deciding' what your site is.
- A versioned rules repository: you know exactly which rules ran.
- Scoring you can audit: every point traces to evidence.
- SQLite repository keeps run history on your machine.
// how it works
SEO Engine crawls the target site for real, using your network connection — optionally rendering pages with Playwright where JavaScript matters.
Evidence is collected for every rule in the repository, a diagnosis is produced per issue, and priorities are assigned based on impact.
Results are stored in a local SQLite repository for historical comparison and exported to HTML, JSON or CSV. Change your site, re-run, and see the delta.
- Type
- Deterministic SEO audit CLI
- Engine
- Rule-based · explainable · no AI/LLM API
- Rules
- 49 versioned SEO rules
- Storage
- SQLite repository + history
- Output
- HTML · JSON · CSV · SQLite
// use cases
Baseline audits
Crawl a site for the first time and get a transparent, prioritized list of what to fix.
Change tracking
Re-run after releases and watch scores move up or down with the historical repository.
Client explanations
Evidence-backed findings make SEO work explainable to non-technical stakeholders.
Offline workflows
Download-and-run means no SaaS account, no data leaving your machine, no LLM costs.
// limitations
- Rules encode known best practice. Novel techniques or subjective quality judgments are out of scope by design.
- Optional Playwright rendering adds fidelity but also time and resource usage.
- The engine reports facts on the page and server landscape — final search rankings depend on many factors outside any audit tool.
// responsible use
- Audit sites you own or operate, or sites you have permission to crawl.
- Scoring is for your own decision-making — treat it as a diagnostic, not a truth machine.
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