⚡ How it works
- Your AI researches. The Claude app at claude.ai, or a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor), connects to DispatchSEO over MCP, reads the served playbook, and mines keywords from your Search Console data, Google Autocomplete, and what it already knows about your product. Ideas land in a queue with the reasoning attached.
- You approve, or don't. Each idea is a card on the dashboard: the keyword, why it's winnable, the angle. Approve, reject, or reorder. Prefer full autopilot? Flip on auto mode and skip the queue entirely.
- The pipeline builds. Every morning a scheduled job picks the oldest approved idea and builds it into a real pull request against your site's repo: a guide or a small free tool, checked against the live SERP and run through a sameness reviewer so page twelve doesn't read like page three.
- It tracks what happened. Daily rank checks, hourly Search Console snapshots, index verification, and a journey view that tells you which SEO stage you're actually in. When a scheduled job breaks, you get a red banner and an email instead of silence.
The backend is deliberately boring: state, scheduling, and an approval gate. The thinking happens in your agent, where your product knowledge already lives.
🤖 Which coding agent
DispatchSEO talks to your agent over MCP, so "which agent" is a real question with a real answer — including the parts that aren't finished yet.
Connecting is one paste and gets you the whole tool set: research, the queue, approvals, backlinks, reports, and building a guide when you ask for one. The overnight builder is the separate thing — scheduled jobs that run an agent with nobody watching — and all three do that. Every workflow carries every agent and asks the dashboard which to run, so switching agent takes effect on the next scheduled run with no repo change.
The honest difference is who pays: Claude Code runs on a subscription you already have, Cursor runs on your Cursor plan's API key, and Codex is metered by OpenAI per run.
You can also skip coding agents entirely. Add DispatchSEO to the ordinary Claude app at claude.ai as a custom connector and your Claude does the research and the writing on the subscription you already have, then hands the article back for the backend to check, finish and publish. It won't build interactive tools or run the overnight builder, and claude.ai has to be able to reach your install, so that path wants a public URL rather than a laptop. ChatGPT can't connect yet.
docs/AGENTS.md has the details, the support tiers, and how to add an agent.
✅ What you need before you start
- Somewhere to publish. Either WordPress you host yourself, connected once from Settings with an application password and posted to directly, or your site's source in a GitHub repo, where content arrives as pull requests. Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, Webflow and Ghost have neither door and won't work.
- An AI to drive it. Your AI is the engine, and it can be the ordinary Claude app at claude.ai or a coding agent. Claude Code runs on the Claude subscription you already pay for; Codex and Cursor do everything Claude Code does here, including the overnight builder. Codex is metered by OpenAI per run, and Cursor builds draw on your Cursor plan's included usage. See the table above.
- A machine with Docker (~1 GB RAM). A laptop works for a test drive, but a machine that stays on is much better for daily use - a $5 VPS, a Raspberry Pi, a desktop that never sleeps. Schedules only run while the machine is awake.
- Google Search Console access to your site.
That's the whole list. No API keys to buy, and no account on our side.
📖 Documentation
Everything is at dispatchseo.com/docs - every page, every setting, every tool.
Pointing an agent at this? Add .md to any docs URL for clean markdown, or
fetch the entire documentation set in one request:
llms-full.txt. There's an index at
llms.txt and a SKILL.md that
walks an agent through connecting a site.
Stuck during setup? The troubleshooting page covers the errors people actually hit. If yours isn't there, ask in the Discord or in Discussions - questions get answered and usually turn into a docs fix.
🗓️ Using it day to day
Once the wizard is done, the loop is small on purpose:
The dashboard's Home page always names the next action, so you don't have to work out what to do when you open it.
🧰 What's in the box
- MCP server with the full tool set: the queue, keywords, rankings, pages, GSC stats, backlink prospects, trend topics, site profile. Anything the dashboard can do, your agent can do over MCP; parity between the two is a hard rule in this codebase.
- Trend radar: scan for rising topics in your niche, expand a topic into concrete guide angles, and queue the good ones.
- Guide and tool builders: guides publish at most one per day, flat and permanent (so a queue of thirty approved ideas doesn't become thirty posts in a week); free-tool ideas build on approval.
- Backlink playbook: a prospect list prefilled with your product's copy, tracked per submission.
- Multi-site: one deployment manages any number of sites. Each project gets its own MCP token, its own data, its own settings.
- A password-gated dashboard for the one human in the loop.
💵 What it costs to run
Nothing, unless you want paid data. The tiers stack:
Free mode finds keywords you can win. Paid mode also knows which ones are worth winning.
☁️ Cloud version
There's a hosted version for people who'd rather not run a machine: we host it, bundle the SERP + volume data into one bill, and replace the Google service-account ritual with one click. It's at dispatchseo.com. Self-hosting stays feature-complete either way - the cloud sells convenience, not capability.
🧑💻 Developing from source
git clone https://github.com/NeoZi12/dispatchseo
cd dispatchseo
pnpm install
cp .env.local.example .env.local
pnpm dev
This is the contributor path, not the way to self-host - that's the one-command
Docker install behind the button at the top. Fill in .env.local (Supabase +
the three secrets) before starting, then open the dashboard on
localhost:3000.
pnpm build is the typecheck - run it before opening a PR. There is no
separate lint or test setup.
🏗️ Architecture, briefly
Next.js App Router, Postgres for state (a bundled container when self-hosted,
Supabase in the cloud version), mcp-handler for the MCP server at /api/mcp.
Schedules and builds run in-stack (cron + builder containers) or on GitHub
Actions. One deployment is multi-tenant: the MCP bearer token selects the
project, crons loop over all projects, the dashboard switches with a cookie.
Architecture covers this properly. CLAUDE.md has the full conventions; it's written for agents, which turns out to make it decent documentation for people.
🤝 Contributing
Issues before PRs, and you must understand every line you submit, including the AI-assisted ones. Details in CONTRIBUTING.md. Questions go to Discussions or the Discord; vulnerabilities go through private reporting.
📄 License
AGPL-3.0. Use it, self-host it, fork it. If you run a modified version as a service, share the source. That's the whole deal.