Academy12 Feb 2025• 12 min read

Agentic SEO Health Audit Sprint

Run a three-day agent-led SEO health audit to uncover indexation leaks, Core Web Vitals regressions, and content gaps before they cost you growth.

MB
Max Beech
Head of Content

Agentic SEO Health Audit Sprint

TL;DR: A quarterly SEO health audit keeps organic growth compounding. Agents do the heavy lifting -crawls, delta analysis, alerting -while humans approve remediation that protects brand tone, compliance, and roadmap commitments. You’ll leave with shipped fixes, regression monitors, and a refreshed backlog.

Key takeaways

  • The Chrome team confirmed Interaction to Next Paint (INP) replaces First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital from March 2024, and only 93% of mobile sites currently pass the INP threshold (Chrome Developers, 2024). Action now prevents ranking shocks later.
  • HTTP Archive’s 2024 Performance Almanac shows just 40% of the top 1,000 mobile sites meet all Core Web Vitals, with 66% still shipping unsized images (HTTP Archive, 2024). Your competitors are leaving obvious wins on the table.
  • Pair agent crawls with human review to de-risk automation: Product Brain handles evidence gathering, while marketing, engineering, and RevOps apply judgment, mirroring the AI Launch Desk governance loop.

Table of contents

Why a sprint instead of ad-hoc fixes?

Organic impact slips when technical debt accumulates quietly. The March 2024 INP change means “good enough” FID scores no longer cut it (Interaction to Next Paint becomes a Core Web Vital). Meanwhile, the 2024 Web Almanac performance chapter reports a widening gap between desktop and mobile vitals, with unsized images and bloated JavaScript as the biggest culprits.

Running a sprint:

  1. Creates urgency -teams know three days are blocked for evidence, alignment, and fixes.
  2. Forces prioritisation by traffic at risk rather than noise from generic tools.
  3. Lets agents and humans work in tandem: automated discovery, human-approved remediation.

Anchor the sprint in your existing growth engine. Feed outputs straight into the Community Signal Lab and Agent-Led ASO Sprint so messaging, community, and app store assets reflect the same improvements.

Three-day audit schedule

DayOwner mixAgent jobsHuman jobsOutputs
Day 1 – BaselineMarketing Ops + Product BrainCrawl priority templates, fetch Search Console deltas, pull CWV data via PSI APIApprove URL scope, confirm experiments to pauseEvidence board, tagged issues, INP outliers chart
Day 2 – Score & assignRevOps + EngineeringCluster issues by severity, map to revenue impact, draft remediation cardsValidate impact scores, sequence deploy windowsPrioritised fix backlog, owner assignments, rollback plan
Day 3 – Ship & monitorEngineering + Product BrainGenerate change diff, update monitors, draft regression alertsCode review, QA, sign off, schedule follow-up testsDeployment notes, updated dashboards, knowledge base updates

Agents work inside Athenic Product Brain, pulling structured evidence into /app/health. Humans stay in the loop via approvals inside the Workflow Orchestrator.

Instrumented SEO health scorecard

╭────────────────────────────┬─────────┬──────────┬────────────────────────────╮
│ Metric                     │ Target  │ Current  │ Agent / Owner               │
├────────────────────────────┼─────────┼──────────┼────────────────────────────┤
│ INP (mobile, key templates)│ <200 ms │ 265 ms   │ Agent: cwv-digest / Eng SEO │
│ Index coverage (critical)  │ >98 %   │ 92 %     │ Agent: sitemap-audit / Ops  │
│ 5xx rate (last 14 days)    │ <0.3 %  │ 1.2 %    │ Agent: log-scan / Platform  │
│ Render-blocking JS (kb)    │ <170 kb │ 240 kb   │ Agent: bundle-profiler / FE │
│ Structured data errors     │ 0       │ 18       │ Agent: schema-lint / Content│
╰────────────────────────────┴─────────┴──────────┴────────────────────────────╯

Agents update the scorecard every 12 hours during the sprint. Anything breaching target triggers a Slack alert plus a note in the health audit doc. Humans decide whether to hotfix or defer.

Mini case: Fixing INP for a documentation hub

  • Context: Developer-focused SaaS noticed support tickets rising after docs redesign. INP on template /docs/* slid to 280–310 ms.
  • Agent moves: Product Brain’s cwv-digest agent pulled PSI field data and flagged the long tasks. bundle-profiler traced the issue to a bespoke search widget loading six third-party scripts.
  • Human judgement: Docs PM confirmed the widget was optional for most flows; brand wanted to keep faceted search for logged-in customers.
  • Fix: Engineers lazy-loaded the widget behind an interaction, split vendor scripts, and cached search responses. Legal reviewed due to new cookie behaviour.
  • Result: INP improved to 178 ms (mobile) within 48 hours; support tickets referencing “docs slow” dropped 23% week-on-week. The pattern became a re-usable guardrail inside the AI Launch Desk backlog.

Summary and next steps

Running an agentic SEO audit every quarter keeps your growth machine compounding. The sprint forces conversation across marketing, product, and engineering, and transforms messy crawl exports into actioned fixes. Bake the cadence into your roadmap, attach owners to every metric, and keep regression monitors humming.

Next moves:

  1. Pencil the next audit six weeks before a core product launch so fixes land early.
  2. Extend the scorecard to international sections and app store listings to align with the ASO sprint.
  3. Feed resolved issues plus customer sentiment back into the Community Signal Lab to validate that technical wins translate into happier users.

QA checklist

  • ✅ Data sources captured on 12 February 2025 (Chrome Developers and HTTP Archive citations archived).
  • ✅ Agent workflows reviewed with Platform, Marketing Ops, and Legal for compliance.
  • ✅ Accessibility checks complete for table, ASCII chart, and link text.
  • ✅ Internal links confirm no duplication with existing SEO playbooks.
  • ✅ Legal/compliance sign-off logged in Athenic governance queue.
    Expert review: [PLACEHOLDER]

Author: Max Beech, Head of Content
Updated: 12 February 2025
Reviewed with: Growth Engineering council inside Athenic Product Brain