Monitor SEO drift and catch ranking regressions before traffic drops

SEO Drift Monitoring captures a known-good SEO baseline and compares later snapshots against it so regressions become visible. The skill combines search-performance data with live on-page checks to surface ranking drops, deindexation, overwritten metadata, directive changes, and missing schema before they quietly cost traffic.

Use this skill when you need to baseline or monitor a site's SEO over time, check whether a migration, redesign, CMS change, or redeploy damaged SEO, compare current search performance and page metadata with a prior snapshot, investigate titles, descriptions, canonicals, robots directives, or schema that changed unexpectedly, or identify rankings or indexed pages that disappeared.

When NOT to use: For a one-time comprehensive SEO audit with no historical comparison, use a general SEO audit skill instead.

Inputs: The site property and key URLs in scope (prefer top organic landing pages, commercial pages, and URLs affected by recent releases), baseline or compare mode selection, snapshot storage location, and optionally a connected Google Search Console source for query, page, position, impression, click, and indexation signals.

Outputs: A dated snapshot containing search performance (clicks, impressions, CTR, average position), indexation status, metadata (title, meta description, H1), directives (canonical URL, robots header, meta-robots), structured data (schema types), and content shape (word count, content fingerprint). In compare mode, you receive a diff report grouped into five categories: rankings (queries that dropped or disappeared), indexation (pages that lost indexed status), metadata (titles, descriptions, H1s that changed or became blank), directives (canonicals that changed, newly introduced noindex), and schema (structured-data types that disappeared). Each change includes before/after values, comparison dates, severity level (Critical, Warning, Info), and likely cause labeled as an inference.

Google Search Console for query and page clicks, impressions, click-through rate, average position, and indexed status or coverage evidence. Browser or web-fetch capability for current on-page values including metadata, directives, schema types, and content shape.

SEO managers and web developers who need to protect organic traffic during site changes. Technical SEO specialists monitoring post-migration health. Product teams validating that CMS updates or redesigns haven't introduced silent regressions. Anyone responsible for maintaining search visibility across deployments.

User: Baseline SEO for https://example.com before Friday's redesign. Track /, /pricing, and /docs.

Agent: I will capture a dated baseline for those three URLs, using Search Console for
query/page performance and live fetches for metadata, directives, schema, and content
shape. I will save it under the confirmed reports directory and use the same URL set and
Search Console window for the post-redesign comparison.

The skill ranks severity with directive and indexation failures first because they can suppress the entire page regardless of content quality. Critical issues include a page newly marked noindex, deindexed, or canonicalized to an unintended URL. Warnings cover material ranking declines, lost query visibility, blank or generic metadata, or missing schema. Info-level changes represent expected content or metadata updates with no observed search-performance harm. Search Console data can lag and may suppress low-volume queries; a live crawl cannot prove that Google has indexed a page or adopted its canonical. Position changes can reflect seasonality, SERP composition, location, device mix, or competitors rather than a site regression.