Hermes Agent for SEO can read your Search Console data, pick the next keyword, draft the post from your own material, check internal links, watch competitors and send you a weekly report on a schedule.
Hermes Agent is the free, open-source AI agent from Nous Research, and it runs on your own machine with whichever model you connect.
This page is the operator walkthrough, so you get nine steps with the real commands.
I need to be honest about one thing before we start.
My biggest SEO pipeline runs inside my Agent OS, where Claude does most of the writing and Hermes works alongside it.
So I'll tell you which parts I run on Hermes, which parts I run on Claude, and where each number comes from.
What Hermes Agent For SEO Actually Does
Hermes is an agent, which means it does jobs with tools and doesn't only answer questions.
For SEO, that gives you eight jobs it can take off your plate.
- It can read your Search Console data and tell you which keyword to work on next.
- It can run a content pipeline on a schedule with
hermes cron. - It can learn your style guide or SOP once with
/learnand follow it every time. - It can remember your business through a shared notes vault.
- It can watch competitor pages and trending stories in your niche.
- It can check and suggest internal links before a post goes live.
- It can keep checking whether new pages are indexed.
- It can send you a weekly report on your phone.
It should not publish hundreds of thin pages, and I'll show you Google's own policy on that further down.
What You Need Before You Start
You need a working Hermes install, a model, and a site that is verified in Google Search Console.
Search Console is free, and it is the only tool that knows what Google already thinks of your site.
If you haven't installed Hermes yet, my one-click Hermes setup walkthrough covers it.
I checked every command flag on this page against my own install, which is Hermes v0.21.4.
You should run hermes update first, because commands such as /learn book mode and /loop only exist on newer builds.
Step 1: Give Hermes Your Search Console Data
Keyword research starts with the queries Google already shows you for.
The simple route is to open the Performance report in Search Console, export the queries, and save the file in a folder Hermes can read.
The automated route is to keep a small script in ~/.hermes/scripts/ that prints your query rows, and to let a scheduled job read its output.
In my own setup, the live Search Console pull happens in the SEO tab of my Agent OS.
That tab is what produced the numbers in my Infinite Ranking Engine guide.
On 22 September 2026 it showed 78 striking-distance keywords and 23 click-through leaks across my sites.
Step 2: Ask Hermes To Score The Keywords
You want three lists out of the data.
- Striking-distance keywords sit at positions 5 to 20, where one good post can move you to page one.
- Click-through leaks are keywords where you're already on page one and almost nobody clicks.
- Content gaps are searches where you get impressions and have no page built for them.
Here is a prompt you can run as a one-shot with hermes -z.
hermes -z "Read ~/seo/gsc-queries.csv. List striking-distance keywords at positions 5 to 20, click-through leaks on page one, and content gaps. Rank each list by impressions."
One line from my own research run shows why this matters.
The keyword "hermes workspace" had about 37,000 impressions across two of my sites and only 307 clicks.
Both pages were already on page one, so the right move was to fix the title and not to write a new post.
In an earlier live run, my keyword skill scored 184 real queries in one pass and flagged a page at position 6.3 with no clicks.
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Step 3: Teach Hermes Your SEO Rules With /learn
A skill is a recipe the agent reads before it starts work.
The /learn command reads a document once and turns it into a skill Hermes can use forever.
/learn ~/Documents/seo-style-guide.pdf
You can pass it a style guide, a writing SOP, a list of banned phrases or past sessions.
It writes a lean index file, reference files, a glossary and a cheat sheet.
After that, the agent opens only the part it needs, so it doesn't re-read the whole document.
The engine's own testing on real books reports 24 to 51 times fewer tokens than pasting the book into the chat.
I tested /learn on The Art of War, and the walkthrough is in my /learn guide.
The rule at the top of my own SEO skill is that no transcript means no article.
That one rule stops the agent from inventing features, numbers and examples.
You can see which skills are installed with hermes skills list.
Step 4: Give Hermes A Memory Of Your Business
An SEO agent that forgets your business writes generic content.
I fix that with an Obsidian vault, which is a folder of plain notes every agent reads before it answers.
You make a vault, hand Hermes the full folder path, and ask it to build the folders.
You must give the real path, such as ~/SecondBrain, because I skipped that once while filming and Hermes built the folders in its own workspace.
My vault held 614 notes when I measured it for my Hermes second brain guide.
My style rules and banned words live in the Resources folder, and the agent reads them before anything gets written.
For SEO, memory means fewer duplicate articles and smarter internal links.
Step 5: Schedule The Content Pipeline With hermes cron
A scheduled job is a prompt that Hermes runs on a timetable.
This example runs every Monday at 7am, reads your Search Console script, follows your SEO skill and sends you the result.
hermes cron create "0 7 * * 1" "Read the Search Console data above. Pick the top striking-distance keyword. Draft one post from the newest transcript in ~/transcripts and save it as a draft for my review." --name "Weekly SEO loop" --script gsc_pull.py --skill seo-writer --deliver telegram
The --script flag injects the script's output into the prompt on every run.
The --skill flag attaches a skill, and you can repeat it to attach more than one.
The --deliver flag sends the result to a target such as Telegram, once you've connected that platform.
I've written the prompt so the job saves a draft, because a human should read every page before it goes live.
You can check your jobs with hermes cron list, and you can stop one with hermes cron pause.
There is also a /goal command, which sets a standing goal Hermes keeps working on across turns until it is achieved.
My post on running Hermes Agent in the background goes deeper on scheduled and long-running work.
🔥 Want my SEO skill file and the whole pipeline already wired? Inside the AI Profit Boardroom, you get the Agent OS with the SEO tab, the 13-step writing skill my agents follow and the Hermes automation trainings. You also get four coaching calls a week and 3,400+ members who run this same stack. → Get access here
Step 6: Watch Competitors And Trends
There are two kinds of monitoring that help SEO.
The first is watching a competitor page for changes.
hermes cron create "every 6h" "A competitor page changed. Summarise what is new and say whether I should respond with a page of my own." --name "Competitor watch" --monitor-url https://example.com/blog --deliver telegram
The --monitor-url flag fetches the page on each tick, and the agent only runs when the content has changed.
That means you don't pay for tokens when nothing is new.
A page with a clock or a rotating element on it will look changed every time, so you should pick a stable page such as a blog index or a pricing page.
The second kind is a trend radar.
Mine is one hermes -z run on a schedule at 6am, and it returns six signals with a heat score out of 100.
Only xAI models carry the live X search tool, so I pin that run with --provider xai-oauth --model grok-4.
My Hermes Oracle AI guide shows the receipts, which are 49 mornings logged, 294 trends scored and 46 pages published.
One of my sites went from 27 clicks a day to 358 clicks a day while that system was publishing.
Step 7: Check Internal Links Before You Publish
Every new article in my pipeline links to two to four older posts on the same site.
Before it writes, the skill scans every existing post, so Google sees depth on one topic and not scattered pages.
You can ask Hermes to do the same job with a plain request.
hermes -z "List every post in ~/site/posts. For the draft at ~/site/drafts/new-post.md, suggest four internal links with natural anchor text and say where each one fits."
My pipeline also goes back to three to five older related posts and adds a small "latest updates" block that links to the new page.
That gives the new page links on day one, and it refreshes the old pages.
That part runs on Claude in my Agent OS, and I describe it in my Claude AI SEO guide.
🚀 Ready to put Hermes Agent For SEO to work in your business? Inside the AI Profit Boardroom you get step-by-step video trainings, my installable Agent OS and four coaching calls a week with 3,400+ members building real automations. → Join the AI Profit Boardroom
Step 8: Get The New Pages Indexed
A page that isn't indexed can't rank.
Google's own documentation says you can request a crawl with the URL Inspection tool for a few URLs, or submit a sitemap for many.
Google also says a crawl can take from a few days to a few weeks, and that a request doesn't guarantee inclusion.
My pipeline pushes each new URL to an indexing service the moment it goes live.
Then I let Hermes watch the result with /loop.
/loop 10m check whether the new pages are indexed --until all six are indexed
If you leave out the interval, Hermes paces itself and backs off while nothing changes.
The details are in my /loop guide.
Step 9: Send Yourself A Weekly SEO Report
Reporting is the easiest SEO job to hand to Hermes.
hermes cron create "0 8 * * 1" "Compare this week's Search Console data with last week's. Report clicks, impressions, the three biggest movers and the next keyword to work on, in ten lines." --name "Monday SEO report" --script gsc_pull.py --deliver telegram
You can add --continuity so each run sees its own previous output and doesn't repeat itself.
You can also pin a cheap model to this job with --model, because a ten-line report doesn't need a frontier model.
The Nine Steps On One Screen
| Step | SEO job | Command or feature | Runs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Load Search Console data | An export or a script in ~/.hermes/scripts/ |
Weekly |
| 2 | Score the keywords | hermes -z with a scoring prompt |
Weekly |
| 3 | Teach the SEO rules | /learn |
Once |
| 4 | Add business memory | An Obsidian vault | Every session |
| 5 | Run the content pipeline | hermes cron create with --script and --skill |
Weekly |
| 6 | Watch competitors and trends | --monitor-url and a 6am radar |
Every few hours |
| 7 | Check internal links | A linking prompt or skill | Per post |
| 8 | Check indexing | /loop with --until |
Until indexed |
| 9 | Send the report | hermes cron create with --deliver |
Weekly |
What Hermes Agent Should Not Do For SEO
Hermes should not mass-produce thin pages.
Google's spam policies name this directly as scaled content abuse.
The policy describes it as generating many pages mainly to manipulate rankings and not to help users, and it applies "no matter how it's created".
Google's examples include using generative AI tools to produce many pages without adding value for users.
So the limit isn't the tool, and the limit is what you feed it.
That is why my rule is no transcript, no article.
Every post my agents write starts from a recording of real work I did on screen.
Hermes also can't earn real backlinks for you.
In my Hermes SEO post on aiprofitboardroom.com I compared two sites in the same niche with the same content setup.
The one with active link building grew, and the one without barely moved.
Hermes can plan a link strategy, build a prospect list and draft outreach emails, but people still build the relationships.
Which Model To Run Hermes Agent On For SEO
Hermes doesn't come with a model, so you choose one in hermes setup.
I split the work by job.
- Writing needs a strong model, and my biggest pipeline writes with Claude through the Agent OS.
- The trend radar needs an xAI model, because that is where live X search lives.
- Reports, link checks and competitor summaries run fine on a cheap or free model.
You can pin a model to one scheduled job with --model and --provider, so the cheap jobs stay cheap.
Nous Research has a free stealth model called MissingNo on its portal at the moment.
In my tests /learn worked well and fast on it, although a coding task was slower and not frontier level.
My post on Hermes MissingNo covers how to switch it on, and my best Hermes Agent model ranking covers the rest.
💡 Want help wiring your first SEO loop? The AI Profit Boardroom has a Hermes section with video tutorials for automations, skills and memory, plus coaching calls where you can share your screen and get unstuck. → Join the AI Profit Boardroom
Operator Tips And Limits
- A scheduled job that calls a model uses tokens on every run, so
--no-agentis the better choice when a plain script can do the job. - The
hermes cron runscommand shows past runs, which is the first place I look when a job goes quiet. - A draft step keeps you safe, because a job that publishes without review will eventually publish a mistake.
- One loop a week is enough to start, and I'd add a second job only after the first has run for a few weeks.
- New sites often need months before traffic moves, even though my fastest page reached page one in 14 hours.
- Search Console data is private, so keep the export out of any folder you share.
Related Reading
- My AI SEO training page teaches the seven modules behind this workflow.
- The best Hermes Agent use cases ranks SEO against ten other jobs.
- The Julian Goldie SEO page explains who I am and how I got here.
- The best Hermes Agent skills covers what to add after your SEO skill.
Also On Our Network
- 🌐 How a business or agency uses Hermes Agent for SEO
- 🌐 Hermes Agent for SEO scored job by job, with my verdict
- 🌐 Where Hermes sits in my Agent OS SEO loop
- 🌐 Which benchmarked models to give Hermes for SEO work
FAQ: Hermes Agent For SEO
Can Hermes Agent do SEO?
Yes, it can.
Hermes can read Search Console data, choose keywords, draft posts from your own material, check internal links, watch competitor pages and send scheduled reports.
It shouldn't mass-produce thin pages, and it can't earn real backlinks for you.
How do I schedule SEO tasks in Hermes Agent?
You use hermes cron create with a schedule and a prompt.
The --script flag feeds data into the prompt, the --skill flag attaches your SEO rules, and the --deliver flag sends the result to a target such as Telegram.
Can Hermes Agent read Google Search Console?
Hermes can read a Search Console export that you save to a folder, or the output of a script that prints your query data.
My own live Search Console pull runs through the SEO tab of my Agent OS.
Which model should I run Hermes Agent on for SEO?
You should use a strong model for writing and a cheap or free model for scheduled checks and reports.
I write with Claude, I pin my trend radar to an xAI model, and I use free models for light jobs.
Will Google penalise content written with Hermes Agent?
Google says it focuses on the quality of content and not on how it was produced.
Its spam policies do penalise scaled content abuse, which means many pages made to manipulate rankings without helping users.
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About Julian
I'm Julian Goldie, an SEO entrepreneur, author and founder of the AI Profit Boardroom, which has 3,400+ members.
I help business owners scale with AI agents, automation and SEO.
- I founded Goldie Agency, a 7-figure SEO and link-building agency based in Bangkok.
- I've grown a YouTube channel to 400,000+ subscribers.
- I wrote "Link Building Mastery", a book on link building strategies.
- I run GoldieBench and agentos.guide, where I publish my AI model tests and free Agent OS guides.
→ Get my best AI training inside the AI Profit Boardroom
Run one loop this week, read every draft before it goes live, and you'll see what Hermes Agent for SEO can really do.
