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SEO Agency for Startups: Five Agent OS Prompts to Run Before You Hire, and When to Hand Over
Before you pay an SEO agency for startups, your Agent OS can do a surprising amount of the groundwork for you.
Audits, robots.txt checks, schema drafts, content briefs and outreach research are all repeatable jobs an agent handles well.
Below is a quick start, five copy-paste prompts, a one-week routine, and a clear line on where a human team should take over.
If you would rather skip straight to expert eyes, book a free SEO strategy session with Julian Goldie's team.
Quick start: what to give your agent first
Agents work best with context, so set this up once in a project folder.
- A file called
startup.mdwith your product, ideal customer, top three competitors and the city or market you sell into. - Your live domain and, if you have one, your staging domain.
- An export of your Search Console queries and pages, if the property is already verified.
- A rule at the top: draft only, never publish, never send email.
Then point the agent at Google's SEO Starter Guide and tell it every recommendation must trace back to an official page.
That one instruction stops most of the made-up advice.
Prompt 1: a crawl-and-index audit
This finds the problems that quietly stop a young site being indexed.
Read startup.md. Crawl https://[yourdomain] up to 200 URLs.
For every URL, record: status code, <title>, meta description, H1,
canonical, robots meta, and whether the H1 and main copy appear in the
raw HTML before JavaScript runs.
Flag: missing or duplicate titles, noindex on pages that should rank,
200 status on "not found" pages, staging URLs that are public,
and links that are not real <a href> elements.
Output a table sorted by severity, plus a one-paragraph summary.
Cite Google Search Central pages for each type of issue. Draft only.The raw-HTML column matters because Google's JavaScript SEO basics still recommend server-side or pre-rendering, as not every bot runs JavaScript.
Prompt 2: check robots.txt for AI crawlers
Plenty of startups block every bot during a beta and forget to undo it.
Fetch https://[yourdomain]/robots.txt.
Tell me, for each of these user agents, whether it is allowed or blocked:
Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, PerplexityBot,
Claude-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended.
Explain in one line what each one is used for, using only the official
docs from Google, OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic.
Then draft a revised robots.txt that allows the search crawlers and
leaves the training crawlers as I choose. Do not change the live file.The key facts your agent should find: OpenAI's bot documentation says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not appear in ChatGPT search answers, and GPTBot is set separately.
Perplexity's crawler page says PerplexityBot is not used for model training, and Google says Google-Extended has no effect on Search rankings.
📞 Want a human to check what the agent found?
Bring the audit table to a call. Book a free SEO strategy session and Julian's team will tell you which fixes come first.
Prompt 3: draft Organization schema
Consistent facts about your company help search engines tell you apart from similarly named brands.
Using startup.md, draft JSON-LD Organization markup for our homepage.
Include name, url, logo, description, and sameAs links to our real
profiles only (LinkedIn, X, GitHub, Crunchbase if they exist).
Do not invent addresses, phone numbers, ratings or founding dates.
Leave [CHECK] next to anything I must confirm.
Validate it against Google's Organization structured data docs.Google's Organization structured data docs recommend sameAs for exactly this reason.
Keep expectations sensible: Google's AI optimisation guide says no special schema is needed for its AI features, so treat this as tidy housekeeping, not a shortcut.
Prompt 4: brief your first money page
A startup only needs a handful of pages at first, so each one deserves a proper brief.
Read startup.md and the Search Console export.
Pick the single buyer problem with the clearest search demand.
Write a content brief for one page that answers it:
- the searcher's job to be done, in their words
- 6 to 8 H2 headings
- what we know first-hand that competitors cannot say
- [PLACEHOLDER] for screenshots, data or customer quotes we must supply
- 3 internal links to add
No invented statistics or testimonials. Draft only.The first-hand line is the important one.
Google asks for "non-commodity content", and a rewrite of what already ranks will not stand out to people or to AI answers.
Prompt 5: outreach list research (draft only)
New domains need their first links, and research is the slow part.
Find 30 websites that could genuinely mention [product] to their readers:
integration partners, niche newsletters, founder interview podcasts,
industry resource pages edited by a person.
For each: site, page URL, why it fits, contact page URL if public.
Exclude link farms, sites selling links in bulk, and private networks.
Write a short personalised pitch draft for the top 10.
Draft only. Do not send anything.If any placement ends up paid, Google's link qualification guide says to mark it rel="sponsored".
🔥 Learn AI SEO yourself, with the full Agent OS
Inside the AI Profit Boardroom you get step-by-step trainings on AI SEO, the installable Agent OS these prompts run in, and four live coaching calls a week with 3,400+ members.
A one-week groundwork routine
- Monday: run Prompt 1 and fix anything marked critical.
- Tuesday: run Prompt 2 and update robots.txt by hand.
- Wednesday: run Prompt 3, check every [CHECK] tag, and add the markup.
- Thursday: run Prompt 4 and write the page yourself from the brief.
- Friday: run Prompt 5, then hand-pick five pitches to personalise further.
The week after, check Search Console's generative AI performance reports and Bing's AI Performance report for early signs of visibility.
Expect slow movement: Google says some changes take hours and others several months.
Want each step walked through on a live call? Learn AI SEO yourself inside the AI Profit Boardroom, where the Agent OS and these workflows are taught step by step.
Reading the agent's results like an SEO
Agents produce long tables, so triage them in this order.
- Anything blocking indexing first: stray noindex tags, blocked crawlers, public staging copies.
- Then rendering: pages whose main copy only appears after scripts run.
- Then duplicates: the same page reachable at several addresses, which wastes crawling.
- Then titles and descriptions: missing or repeated ones on pages you care about.
- Last, nice-to-haves: image alt text, internal link tweaks, markup.
Ask the agent to re-run Prompt 1 after each batch of fixes and compare the two tables, so you can see progress rather than guess.
Agent mistakes to watch for
- Confident myths: some agents still recommend meta keywords, which Google's Starter Guide says it does not use.
- Invented facts: schema drafts with made-up addresses or founding dates, which is why Prompt 3 forces [CHECK] tags.
- Over-production: suggesting a page for every keyword variation, which Google treats as scaled content abuse.
- Quiet sending: any tool that tries to email prospects; keep the draft-only rule in every prompt.
Worked example: a two-person booking app
- Prompt 1 shows the pricing page loads its copy only through JavaScript.
- The founders switch that page to static rendering.
- Prompt 2 reveals a leftover "Disallow: /" from the beta, which they remove.
- Prompt 4 produces a brief for "booking software for yoga studios", their strongest segment.
- Prompt 5 finds three studio-software partners with public integration directories.
What the agent cannot do for you
- Decide which customer segment is worth owning in search.
- Supply the first-hand data and stories that make a page worth citing.
- Build relationships with editors who will mention you.
- Guarantee anything: OpenAI says ChatGPT search placement is not guaranteed, and Google says no one can promise a #1 ranking.
When to hand it to a pro
Bring in a team when the audit throws up rendering or migration problems, when a launch date is fixed, or when nobody has time to run outreach every week.
Your agent's work is not wasted when you do hand over.
Pass on the audit table, the revised robots.txt draft, the schema with its [CHECK] notes, your page brief and the outreach shortlist.
A good team can then skip the discovery week and start on fixes and pitches straight away.
Ask them to keep the same files updated, so you always own a current record of what was changed and why.
That also makes it easy to compare progress later, or to switch partners without starting again from nothing.
Google itself says the best time to hire is before a new site or redesign goes live.
Goldie Agency is Julian Goldie's SEO, GEO, AEO and link building agency; by Julian's own published numbers it has handled 1,000+ campaigns for 240+ clients, and its link building is "Manual outreach, no PBNs".
Hand over your agent's outputs and save everyone time: Book a free SEO strategy session.
Running a software product? See the SaaS version of this groundwork as well.
📞 Ready for a team to take it from here?
Book a free SEO strategy session and leave with a priority order for fixes, pages and links.
🎁 Free: more prompts and the link building book
Grab the 200+ AI SEO Prompts pack for your Agent OS, plus Julian's free link building book.
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FAQ
Can my Agent OS replace an SEO agency for a startup?
It can handle the repeatable groundwork: audits, robots.txt checks, schema drafts, briefs and outreach research. Strategy, first-hand content and editor relationships still need people.
Should my agent publish changes directly?
No. Keep every prompt on draft only, and make the live changes yourself after checking them.
Which AI crawlers should a startup allow?
Allow the search crawlers, such as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot, if you want to appear in those tools. Training crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot are separate choices.
Does an llms.txt file help with Google?
No. Google says Search does not use llms.txt or other special AI files, so there is no need to create one for Google.
Final word on SEO Agency for Startups
Run the five prompts, fix what they find, and book a free strategy session when you are ready to bring in an SEO agency for startups.
About Julian
I'm Julian Goldie, an AI entrepreneur, SEO expert and the founder of the AI Profit Boardroom, which has 3,400+ members.
I help business owners scale with AI agents, automation and SEO.
My YouTube channel has 400,000+ subscribers, and I run Goldie Agency, a seven-figure SEO agency.
Related guides on agentos.guide
→ SEO Agency For SaaS Prep: 5 Prompts For Your Agent OS
→ Hire SEO Agency Prep: Do The Groundwork In Your Agent OS
→ Outsource SEO Services: Do the Groundwork In Your Agent OS
→ How To Get My Business On ChatGPT With Your Agent OS
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