SEO position and content decay watch

Every Monday morning this checks where your pages actually sit in Google, compares that against the week before, and writes up the ones that are slipping with a specific prescription for each.

You give it a list of pages and the query each one is meant to rank for. It runs one Google search per query, finds your best-ranking URL, and records the position, which of your URLs Google chose, who holds the top spot, and who holds the answer box. Those readings go into a Google Sheet you own, one row per query per week, so the sheet doubles as a rank history you can chart.

A page is only reported when it crosses a threshold you set: down three or more places, off page one at all (the step from #10 to #11 is the step nobody follows), or gone from the results. Everything else is written to the sheet and left alone. Four things it flags that a position on its own would miss:

- Google started answering the query itself. An answer box you do not own has appeared on a query you rank near the top of, so the click is taken before your result is reached. That is a loss of traffic without a loss of rank, and it needs a different fix. - The wrong page of yours is ranking. Two of your pages are competing for one query, and the fix is a merge and a redirect, not a rewrite. - The whole set moved at once. When most tracked queries drop in the same week it was usually Google, not your pages, and the report says to re-measure before anyone rewrites anything. - The page cannot rank at all. It fetches each slipping page and reports a 404, a redirect, a noindex tag or a canonical pointing somewhere else, because none of the content advice matters until that is fixed.

For each slipping page Claude gets the query, both positions, who ranks around it now, the People-also-ask questions, and what the page currently contains - its title, its length, and the years its copy still mentions - and comes back with one call: refresh, consolidate, re-target, fix, or wait, plus two to four concrete changes tied to the evidence. That posts to Slack in a thread under a one-line summary, so a quiet week is one message.

Setup: an empty Google Sheet, a Slack channel, your domain, and your pages with the queries they target. It needs Serper, Anthropic, Google Sheets and Slack, and nothing else. Each run spends one Serper search per tracked query and one Claude call per page written up, capped at five a week by default.