Top 5 ways to use agentic AI for SEO and GEO

The businesses, marketing teams and agencies that win in the AI age will have agentic AI baked into everything they do, wherever it can possibly go. That’s our firm view, and we’re building the whole of Buried around it.

So this article is our take on the most effective ways to use agentic AI right now, across SEO and GEO. These are the places it’s making the biggest difference to us and our clients today.

First, quickly, what we actually mean.

What is agentic AI?

Generative AI produces something when you ask it to. You prompt, it answers.

Agentic AI takes a goal and does the work to reach it. It can use multiple tools and data sources, checks the results, and keep going until it has an answer. It can crawl dozens of sources, query a live dataset, write and run its own code, and come back with a finished output rather than a suggestion.

For SEO and GEO, that changes everything. Both disciplines run on large volumes of data and repeatable process, which is exactly the kind of work an agent thrives on. If you’re still getting your head around how AI search sits alongside traditional search, our guide to GEO vs AEO vs AI SEO is a good starting point.

The rule for when to use agentic AI

Our rule is simple. If you do something more than once, an AI agent should be doing it. Repetition is where AI wins, because it doesn’t tire, doesn’t lose focus, and reads ten thousand rows in the time it takes you to open the file.

Knowing when to use it is half the skill. Knowing when to step in is the other half.

“If you do something more than once, an AI agent should be doing it.”

AI is excellent at big, repetitive tasks that involve consuming a lot of data and returning an answer. Anything that would take a human hours of grinding.

What it’s bad at is stringing all of those tasks together, thinking like a human, and delivering something unique end-to-end. Ask it to run the whole process unsupervised and you get AI-generated slop. The same generic output already flooding the internet.

Our job as the experts is to design the flow. We work out where the AI needs human input, build review points at exactly those moments, and shape a process that’s optimal rather than fully automated. Done right, the output is as good as a skilled human would produce. It just lands many times faster.

Here’s where that pays off.

1. Research

AI can crawl multiple sources, ingest big datasets, and summarise them into the points that matter, in seconds.

You set the direction: the topics that count and where the good information lives. It reads, understands, and hands back a considered view almost instantly.

Any research that pulls from several sources should be done this way. A machine does the crawling and the reading and returns a summary in the exact format you need. Your value sits in the direction you give it and the judgement you apply to what comes back.

2. Data analysis

The right models can crawl a dataset you connect them to and produce genuinely accurate analysis from it.

In our own workflow, we connect Ahrefs and Athena straight into Claude via MCP. Around 95% of the time it returns accurate analysis in seconds that would take an analyst hours by hand.

The whole thing lives or dies on the brief. Give it the right time periods. Give it a clear starting point, like “I’ve noticed organic traffic to this section has dropped over this period, tell me why.” Then it goes to work. Tell it simply to “analyse X” and you’ll get description, not insight.

You also need the strategic understanding to know whether what it hands back is actually right. The tool is fast. The judgement is yours. If you’re weighing up the platforms behind this kind of work, our Ahrefs vs Semrush vs Moz comparison is a good read, and it underpins how we run analytics.

3. Development and building your own tools

This is the most exciting shift for us as a business, by a distance.

I’ve worked with hundreds of developers, designers and UX/UI specialists over the years. Using Claude Code is like having the best developer you’ve ever hired, across backend, frontend and UX, sitting beside you 24/7 at a fraction of the cost and working at hundreds of times the speed.

Good development resource has always been hard to access. That barrier has gone.

We have built tools around all of our processes and this has increased our efficiency by multiples. Things that used to cost six figures and months of work, we build in days for almost no cost. As with everything, the discipline is in the brief: know your parameters, know what you’re building, and set clear guidance at every step.

4. Content production and optimisation at scale

Building your own tools feeds straight into this. One of the best uses of development is creating tools that run your content engine.

The whole process from ideation, to briefing, to production, to publishing is built for agentic AI. It’s superb at the mechanical layers: drafting from a clear brief, generating and refining metadata, applying internal links consistently across hundreds of pages. The tidy-up that quietly falls behind on every content-heavy site is exactly what a machine should own.

The formats that win in AI search are expert-led, and the data backs it up.

Analysis of 2.6 billion AI citations found that comparative and listicle formats account for over 25% of all citations in AI-generated answers, well ahead of standard blog posts at around 12%.

That comes from real expertise and first-hand experience, which a model can’t invent. So you accelerate production, then apply your review points where opinion, accuracy and experience actually matter. Our SEO content strategy guide covers how we structure that.

(Full disclosure: there’s every chance this very article was briefed, drafted and pushed straight into our site through the Claude Wix connector. We couldn’t possibly say.)

5. Tracking and reporting

Manual report building is a thing of the past for us.

SEO and GEO reporting is so central to what we do that it earns its own point. It’s also where automation makes the cleanest, most immediate difference.

You can set up agentic reporting that mirrors exactly how you report: your metrics, your format, your commentary. It pulls the numbers, runs the analysis, and hands you the report, on schedule, without anyone rebuilding a deck from scratch every month. That includes the AI visibility metrics that now matter as much as rankings: brand mentions, citation quality, sentiment and share of voice across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.

It leans on the same analysis strength from point two, but this is about the tracking and reporting layer specifically. It feeds directly into the GEO performance metrics every marketing team should track, and it’s core to how we run GEO and analytics.

None of this works unless humans stay in charge

Look at the thread running through all five.

Humans direct the strategy. The most important skill now is understanding when you need to be involved and knowing what the AI is genuinely good at. Get that judgement right and the rest follows.

The second part is feeding it properly. What we do is unique and specific, and the AI can only reflect that if we give it everything it needs: the context, the data, the direction, the standards. Starve it of information and it defaults to the generic.

And it bears repeating, because it’s the mistake everyone makes: AI doesn’t handle long strings of complex tasks from start to finish. Hand it the whole job and you get the same slop that’s already out there. Give it the right piece of work, with all the information it needs to do it well, and it’s extraordinary.

What this means for your business

If you’re being asked in board meetings what AI actually does for marketing, this is the honest answer. Used properly, it makes the team measurably more efficient. More research, sharper analysis, more content, better reporting. All without dropping the standard, because a human still owns the decisions.

That’s the work we do with clients. We embed agentic AI into how a marketing team operates, so the efficiency is real and defensible rather than a demo that impresses once and delivers nothing.

If you want to work out where agentic AI fits across your SEO and GEO, and where it shouldn’t be trusted yet, get in touch.

Will Tombs

Founder, Buried