# How we use OpenSEO & Vellum Assistant to run our SEO engine

*By Nicolas Zeeb · September 9, 2026 · 4 min · Guides*

How we replaced my Ahrefs subscription with OpenSEO and Vellum to save time and money by running an agent-native organic search and GEO engine directly with an Assistant.

Agentic products have been one of the most exciting things I've been using this year. Agentic email marketing, agentic video, and my new personal favorite, agentic SEO.

When I saw OpenSEO come out, I knew my chains to Ahrefs were finally broken.

It's not that Ahrefs lacks data or OpenSEO inherently has better data, rather Ahrefs was designed for only humans to use, until they launched their API/MCP which is more $$$.

The SEOs pulling and analyzing data manually aren't winning content. An agent will always be faster at pulling keywords and finding backlink opportunities, especially one that understands the full context and scope of the work you do like a Vellum assistant.

The future of SEO and even more so GEO belongs to agent-friendly tools, and continuing to rely on legacy UI-locked platforms is actively hurting your team's velocity and editorial output.

Here is why agent native SEO is replacing the traditional tool stack, and exactly how I use OpenSEO and Vellum to run our organic search and GEO engine every day.

## Trapped Data

Traditional SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush charge $130 or more per seat for interfaces built in the early 2010s. They treat search data as a destination you visit when you have a scheduled research block.

The workflow always looks the same:

1. Open a bloated dashboard
2. Search a seed keyword or competitor domain
3. Filter through dozens of columns
4. Export a spreadsheet
5. Clean the data in Google Sheets
6. Copy five relevant keywords into a Notion brief or Google Doc
7. Finally sit down to outline or draft the content

By the time you start writing, you spent an hour or so combing through data, missing tons of content opportunities in the process. Looking at the data yourself is necessary to come up with novel and new content ideas, but it shouldn't take up the hull of your time in generating articles for content pillars you have already defined.

Agent friendly tools invert this model completely.

For the content pillars I have defined, my assistant Viper knows to use our OpenSEO plugin to do keyword research and SERP analysis to include the most effective keywords we can capture and content structure from top performing articles on those keywords.

I could be doing all this, but it is less effective at scale. Here's how I go about it.

## How I Use OpenSEO

[OpenSEO](https://openseo.so/) gives you raw, un-bloated search data: keyword volume, difficulty, CPC, competitor ranking footprints, and live Google SERPs. Hooked into my vellum assistant, it turns search data into an active collaborator.

These three workflows that replaced our entire Ahrefs subscription.

### Finding Competitor Gaps

Finding competitor gaps isn't technically hard, the manual process is just taxing. You spend half your morning toggling between domain overviews, filtering out branded terms, cross-referencing against what you've already published, and trying to spot where the real overlap actually matters.

By the time you find clean gaps, you've burned your focus on data triage instead of building the piece that leverages your insight.

I just ask my assistant directly:

> Look up competitor X's organic footprint. Filter out their branded terms, and show me the top 5 high-intent keywords with search volume over 500 and difficulty under 35 where we don't currently rank.

Within seconds, my assistant queries OpenSEO, pulls the live ranking data, compares it against our published content catalog, and returns five actionable targets with verified search volume.

We skip the spreadsheet entirely. In the same breath, I can say: *"Take keyword #2 and generate an outline targeting that exact search intent."* The latency between identifying an opportunity and structuring the draft drops from an hour or two to roughly 5 minutes.

At scale, Viper knows to do this for every article. Look at competitor's content on a given topic/keyword, identify gaps, fill it in our content. This keeps the slop to a minimum, and ensures I have value adding, sometimes novel content that will help our domain rank above competitors.

### Live SERP and GEO Analysis

Traditional SEO stops at keyword volume. GEO requires understanding how both traditional search algorithms and generative AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) synthesize answers on a topic.

Before drafting, I have my assistant inspect the current ranking landscape:

> Pull the live top 10 Google results for [target query] via OpenSEO. Analyze the top ranking pages: What structure are they using? What specific questions or buyer requirements do they completely ignore? Where is the consensus weak?

OpenSEO crawls the live SERP and returns the actual pages winning today. My assistant breaks down the patterns:

- If all ten ranking articles are superficial listicles listing features without pricing, our editorial wedge is transparent pricing teardowns and real workflows.
- If none of the incumbent pages cover recent product updates from 2026, that freshness hook becomes our opening thesis.

Rather than writing generic summaries and hope Google ranks them, we use live SERP data to identify the exact analytical void on page one, then write the definitive answer that fills it.

This level of precision in content generation, especially at scale, can only be achieved with an assistant and tool like these. Ahrefs alone leaves you miles behind your competition running this stack.

### Rank Tracking in Chat

The other reason teams pay thousands of dollars a year for Ahrefs is tracking keyword positions over time.

For me, Viper takes care of rank tracking at the point of publication:

> Add these 6 keywords to our OpenSEO rank tracker. Flag any movement greater than 3 positions.

I never log into a dashboard to check daily ranking charts. If a page climbs to position #3 or drops below the fold, my assistant catches it during routine background monitoring and pings me with the delta.

## Why This Matters

SEO is far from dead, but the manual, dashboard-heavy way people practiced it is.

When you replace a tool like Ahrefs with an agent-friendly platform like OpenSEO, you are saving the ridiculous cost of the price per seat and the time you spend pouring over keyword/SERP/backlink data.

The marketing teams that dominate organic search and AI citations now and over the next few years will lean teams whose assistants have direct, friction-free access to search data at every stage of the writing process.

Stop clicking through menus. Put search intelligence where your work actually happens.

🔎OpenSEO Plugin
Bring keyword search volume, live SERP lookups, competitor gap mining, and rank tracking directly into your assistant's workspace.
INSTALL PLUGIN