How to Check an AI Draft for SEO (Without Letting SEO Ruin It)

You have a draft. You briefed the tool properly, you edited for facts and voice, and you added your own material. It sounds like you and it says something real. Now you want people to find it.

This is the point where a lot of good pieces get worse. Someone opens an SEO plugin, sees a list of suggestions, and starts adding keywords until the score turns green. The score turns green because the tool counted the words, not because the piece got better. The reader who arrives from search can tell.

SEO review is a pass you run after the edit, not instead of it. It is short, it is mostly checking rather than rewriting, and the first rule is: do not break what already works in order to satisfy a checklist that does not know your reader.

When to do this pass

After the six editing passes in this series. Not before, and not during. If you optimize a draft you have not fact-checked and trimmed, you are polishing a draft you might delete.

The SEO pass is pass seven. It takes five to ten minutes. If it is taking longer, you are probably rewriting the piece around the keyword, which means the keyword was wrong for this piece to begin with.

Check one: does the piece match what the searcher actually wants?

Open an incognito window. Search the keyword you are targeting. Read the first five results, not to copy them, but to answer one question: what is the person searching this phrase trying to do?

There are really only a few possibilities. They want to learn how to do something. They want to compare options. They want a definition. They want to buy. The results will cluster around one of those, and that cluster is what Google has already decided the intent is.

If your piece does not match that intent, no amount of keyword placement will fix it. A tutorial will not rank for a comparison query. A personal essay will not rank for a how-to query. This is the most common SEO problem with AI drafts, because the tool wrote what you asked for, but nobody checked whether that matched what people search for.

If the intent does not match, you have two choices. Change the target keyword to one that fits what you wrote. Or note the mismatch and write a different piece for that keyword later. Do not twist a good article into a shape it was not built for.

Check two: the title

The title does two jobs. It tells the search engine what the page is about, and it tells the person scanning results whether to click. Those are compatible, but only if you write the title as a clear statement about what the piece delivers.

Three things to check:

Does the keyword appear in the title, in a way that reads like normal language? If you have to contort the sentence to fit the keyword, use a close variant instead. “How to check an AI draft for SEO” and “how to optimize AI content for SEO” are close enough that you should use whichever one reads better.

Does the title promise what the piece actually does? A title that promises a checklist should lead to a checklist. A title that promises a case study should lead to a case study. Mismatch here is how you get clicks that bounce.

Is it under about 60 characters? Longer titles get cut off in results. You can go slightly over, but the important words should land in the visible part.

Check three: the meta description

The meta description does not directly affect ranking, but it affects whether someone clicks. Write it for the person, not the crawler. One or two sentences, under 160 characters, that say what the piece covers and why it is worth reading.

AI tools write meta descriptions that sound like jacket copy. “Discover the secrets to unlocking your content’s full SEO potential.” Nobody reads that and thinks, “finally, exactly what I needed.” Say what is in the piece. Say who it is for. Stop.

Check four: headings

Headings are structure, and structure is how both readers and search engines understand what the piece covers. Check three things:

Does each heading describe what the section contains? “The real problem” is a heading that creates suspense. “Why keyword density does not work anymore” is a heading that tells the reader what they are about to learn. For most informational content, the second kind performs better in search and is easier to scan.

Is the keyword or a close variant in at least one heading? It does not need to be in all of them. One or two is enough. If it feels forced, leave it out of the heading and let the body text do the work.

Do the headings make sense read alone, in order? This is the same test from the editing pass, and it matters here because a reader scanning the page will read the headings before deciding whether to read the body. If the headings make a coherent sequence, the reader stays.

Check five: keyword placement

This is the part people overdo. Here is where the keyword (or a natural variant of it) should appear:

• The title (already checked)
• One heading (already checked)
• The first 100 words
• The meta description (already checked)
• Once or twice more in the body, where it lands naturally

That is it. If the keyword appears naturally in more places, fine. If it does not, do not add it. The piece is about the topic. If you wrote clearly about the topic, the related language is already there.

What to watch for in AI drafts specifically: the tool sometimes uses the exact keyword phrase too many times, especially if you put it in the brief. Read the draft and notice if the same phrase keeps showing up in a way that would sound strange out loud. Replace some of them with pronouns, shorter references, or just cut the sentence. A piece that repeats a phrase every other paragraph reads like it was written for a machine, because it was.

Check six: links

Two kinds matter here.

Internal links. Does this piece connect to other pages on your site? Link to them where they are genuinely relevant, using anchor text that describes what the linked page covers. Do not link the same page four times. One or two internal links per thousand words is a reasonable range for most sites. This helps search engines understand how your content relates to itself, and it helps readers find the next thing they need.

External links. If you cited a source, link to it. If you referenced a tool, link to the tool’s page. These links do not hurt your ranking. They help your reader, and they signal that you are connected to real information rather than making claims in a vacuum.

AI drafts sometimes generate links that look real but point nowhere, or they name sources without linking them. Check every link. Open every URL. This overlaps with the fact-checking pass, but it is worth a second look here.

Check seven: the URL

Short, readable, and descriptive. Include the keyword or a close variant. No dates unless the content is explicitly time-bound. No strings of numbers or auto-generated slugs.

This is a small thing, and you set it once. But AI-generated drafts sometimes get published with whatever default URL the CMS assigns, and that default is rarely good.

What not to do in this pass

Do not add a keyword to every heading. It reads like a glossary and it does not help.

Do not rewrite a good opening to lead with the keyword. If the keyword fits naturally in the first 100 words, good. If it does not, place it in the second paragraph and leave the opening alone.

Do not insert a section just because the competing articles have one. If you did not cover “common mistakes” because you covered something better, that is a strength. Matching the competition heading for heading is how you end up with the same article as everyone else, which is not a ranking strategy.

Do not add FAQ schema to questions nobody asks. If your common questions section answers things your readers actually want to know, it may be worth marking up. If you invented the questions to match keyword variants, skip it.

Do not run the SEO plugin until after you have done the checks above by hand. Plugins count. You think. Do the thinking first, then let the plugin catch anything mechanical you missed, like a missing alt tag or a title that is too long.

A short version you can tape to your monitor

1. Search the keyword. Does your piece match what the results are doing?
2. Title: keyword present, promise matches content, under 60 characters.
3. Meta description: for humans, under 160 characters.
4. Headings: descriptive, keyword in one or two, scannable in order.
5. Keyword in first 100 words, once or twice more in body, not forced.
6. Links: internal links to your own relevant pages, external links to sources. All open.
7. URL: short, readable, has the keyword.

Common questions

Should I use an AI tool to do the SEO pass? It can help with mechanical checks, like flagging a missing meta description or a heading that repeats the one above it. It cannot tell you whether your piece matches search intent, because that requires looking at real results and making a judgment. Use it for the mechanical parts. Do the judgment yourself.

How many times should the keyword appear? There is no magic number. If the piece is clearly about the topic and uses normal language, the keyword and its variants will show up enough. Counting exact occurrences is not a productive use of your time.

What about keyword density? Keyword density as a specific percentage target stopped being a useful concept a long time ago. Write clearly about the topic. If you are worried you used a phrase too often, you probably did. If you are worried you did not use it enough, read the piece aloud and check whether anyone would be confused about what it covers.

Should I optimize old posts before writing new ones? It depends on whether the old posts are close to ranking for something useful. If a post is on page two for a term that matters to your business, spending 20 minutes on it is probably a better use of time than writing something new. If it is nowhere, write the new piece.

Does AI content rank worse than human-written content? Search engines have said they evaluate content by quality, not by how it was produced. In practice, the AI drafts that rank poorly are usually the ones that were published without editing: thin on original material, padded with generic advice, and targeting a keyword without matching the intent. That is a quality problem, not an AI problem. Fix the quality, and the production method stops mattering.