Open-source SEO your AI agent can run
The SEO tools everyone pays for run into the hundreds a month, every month. OpenSEO is the open-source version you run yourself. You own the tool. You rent just the data, one lookup at a time. And your AI agent can drive the whole thing.
A whole SEO workbench you run yourself.
OpenSEO is a full SEO workbench you run yourself. Keyword research, rank tracking, competitor analysis, and backlink checks. Site audits that crawl your pages for broken links and thin content. And it tracks how your own brand shows up in AI answers. The project bills it as an open-source alternative to Semrush and Ahrefs.
Why those tools cost what they cost.
Here's why those tools cost so much. The expensive part was never the software. It's the data. Ahrefs and Semrush each run their own web crawler, indexing billions of pages to build their own map of the web. On top of that sits the big software suite. And it all comes as one monthly subscription that runs into the hundreds, with no way to buy just the piece you want.
OpenSEO runs no crawler at all.
OpenSEO's move is to not run a crawler at all. The data comes from DataForSEO. It already crawls the whole web and sells the results by the request. You bring your own key and pay them directly, at cost. It's like electricity. You don't build a power plant to turn on a light; you meter it from the grid. OpenSEO meters the SEO data instead of crawling for it. So the bundle comes apart. You rent the data one lookup at a time, and it's cheap. A keyword search runs about a nickel. A rank check, about a fifth of a cent. The tool on top is open-source, and you host it yourself, with no subscription to OpenSEO at all. You do still pay DataForSEO for the data; that part isn't free.
And your agent can call every one of them.
Because the tool half is just software you own, they gave it a real MCP server, with OAuth. That means a coding agent, like Claude Code or any MCP client, can call the same SEO tools you do. About seventeen of them, across four groups: keyword research, competitive research, local business, and Search Console. Here it is running a real keyword search, picking the ones worth keeping, and saving them back. Those are the exact calls your agent would make.
It ships the judgment, not just the buttons.
And here's the part that's actually clever. It doesn't just hand the agent buttons. It ships seven Agent Skills, written playbooks that give it real SEO judgment. The keyword skill tells the agent where to start: the queries you already rank for just below page one, where a small nudge moves you up. Prioritize by intent, not raw volume. And one line stands out: do not invent metrics. If OpenSEO does not return a value, write unknown.
Get it.
# self-host with one command $ docker compose up -d # image: ghcr.io/every-app/open-seo
Getting it running is quick. Self-host with one Docker command, straight off the project's own image. Or deploy it to Cloudflare Workers, on their free plan. Either way, you bring your own DataForSEO key and pay for the lookups. It's MIT-licensed, TypeScript, on version 0.1.1: young, and shipping fast. There's a hosted version too, and it openly adds twenty-eight percent over the data cost. Self-host, and you skip that.
The suite you rent, rebuilt as the tool you own.
So if you always figured an SEO tool had to be a monthly subscription, this is the version you own instead. You rent the data by the request, and your agent can run the whole thing. It's open source, and the link is on screen. New repo tomorrow.
