We Tested AI Agents for SEO on Three Real SEO Tasks
In a recent test, one private healthcare site had lost 1,449 visits a month from its homepage alone, a 27% drop worth roughly £2,250 a month. It had also lost around 1,500 monthly visits of informational traffic to AI Overviews.
But finding that manually across a large website takes days. We wanted to see if AI agents for SEO can do it in minutes.
So we tested Ahrefs’ Letaido across the three levers every Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign pulls: on-page SEO, content, and backlinks.
Why AI Agents for SEO Beat a Standard Chatbot
A chatbot hands you a to-do list. An AI agent works through it.
The second difference is data access, which determines whether the output is usable.
Letaido is Ahrefs’ AI agent tool. Inside the workspace, you get skills, which are specific tasks the agents already know how to run, console apps, where dashboards and reports live and stay updated, and automations, which run those tasks on a schedule.
Every one of those skills is plugged into Ahrefs’ index. Tim Cameron-Kitchen, Founder of Exposure Ninja, explains why that matters:
“All of these are also integrated with the massive amount of data that Ahrefs has. Huge, huge search data platform, which means that when you use one of these skills, you’re plugging into all that data.”
That connection is the whole argument for using a purpose-built agent over a general model. As he puts it, “this is insight that you wouldn’t get from just Claude or ChatGPT because they don’t have the access to the Ahrefs data that allows it to make these assessments about the relative performance of different pages on the website.”
For a marketing manager, the practical gain is defensibility. Recommendations arrive with evidence attached.
Lever One: On-Page, Tested on a Competitor Traffic Gap
The first test used a broad commercial prompt. The scenario: you work in-house at Sage, and Xero is pulling significantly ahead on organic traffic. Why?
No URLs were supplied. The agent asked clarifying questions, pulled Xero’s data from Site Explorer, and came back with an exec summary, traffic gap charts, a phased plan and a CSV.
Its finding was specific. Xero publishes calculators and tools as standalone pages. Sage has the same tools but gates them behind email capture and files them on the blog, which suppresses their visibility. The agent estimated the traffic gain from changing that format.
Tim Cameron-Kitchen summarises the headline: “The takeaway is we are not losing on content, we’re losing on structure.”
It also anticipated the internal objection. Each recommendation was validated against Ahrefs data and sequenced into phases with a projected traffic increase per stage.
Lever Two: Content, and Diagnosing an AI Overviews Problem
The second test used the declining content detection skill on The London Clinic, a private healthcare provider whose organic traffic had been sliding since summer 2025.
The agent returned the pages losing traffic, the volume lost, the commercial value of that loss, and 29 affected URLs in a CSV. It also surfaced a lost branded ranking and 404s with no redirects in place.
Roughly 1,500 monthly visits of informational traffic had gone to AI Overviews. The agent advised against chasing it. Tim Cameron-Kitchen disagrees: “There are ways that you could get The London Clinic featured in those AI Overviews. You might not get as many clicks from those searches as you used to do, but getting the business featured in those can lead to really high-quality branded traffic later on.”
The most useful finding came from changing the timeframe. A 12-month comparison exposed keywords losing clicks while holding their rankings, a pattern that a six-month view had hidden entirely. Those are searches Google now answers directly on the results page.
Because the numbers come from a search data platform rather than a language model, they can be checked. As Tim Cameron-Kitchen warns, “if ChatGPT starts giving you this data, then you’ve gotta be a little careful because it may have just hallucinated it.”
The run can then be scheduled as an automation, producing a live page that the wider team can check for new keywords hit by AI Overviews and the pages affected.
“The agent has not just told us that traffic is down, it’s actually shown us where it’s down and explained why it’s down. Your experience and your knowledge as a marketer then allows you to interrogate and work with the agent to find nuance with its findings,” Tim Cameron-Kitchen, Founder, Exposure Ninja
Lever Three: Backlinks, Turned Into a Prioritised Outreach List
The third test used a Brand Outreach Opportunities app, scanning competitor backlink profiles to find sites worth approaching. This test used Custom Solar competing against two rivals.
The output was a ranked list of competitor backlinks with link types and priorities, showing which sites link to more than one competitor. It will also draft outreach emails, though Tim Cameron-Kitchen is clear that the handover point sits early:
“We’ve turned our competitor’s backlinks into a prioritised list of outreach targets. The human still then has to go and do the outreach or get the business listed on the website, but you probably wanna be doing that for the time being anyway to avoid being a bit spammy.”
Prospecting and prioritisation are the slow parts of link building. Handing those to an agent while keeping relationship-building human is a sensible split, not a limitation.
How Much of Your Workload Can You Actually Hand Over
All three tests held the same pattern: the agents did the investigation and the analysis, and left the implementation to the people.
They found the reasons behind a competitor traffic gap, diagnosed a decline caused by AI Search and built a prioritised outreach list.
As Tim Cameron-Kitchen concludes, “this is a massive time-saver, albeit it doesn’t do all of this stuff for you.”
For teams running large sites, that trade is worth making. The analysis work that used to justify a retainer line item now takes an afternoon, which frees your specialists to do the work that actually changes rankings.
Get Your SEO and AI Search Strategy Right
If you want an advisory or hybrid approach to your SEO strategy, content at scale and authority building, book a consultation call with our expert team.
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