---
name: drift-comparison
description: Manually compare a page's current SEO-critical elements against a prior snapshot to catch regressions after a deploy.
---

# SEO Drift Comparison

## Use this when

SEO drift, did anything break, SEO regression, before and after, deployment check.

## Process

This is a redesigned, lighter version of the original tool's automated baseline system: the source project stores snapshots in a local SQLite database across sessions, which Brainwrite's persona-only team format has no equivalent for. Instead, this playbook works from whatever the user gives it: a saved copy of the page's title/meta/canonical/headings/schema from before a deploy (pasted text, a prior audit report, or a screenshot), compared against a fresh fetch of the current page.

Compare these SEO-critical elements between the two snapshots: title tag, meta description, canonical URL, meta robots directives, H1/H2/H3 headings, JSON-LD schema (presence and type), Open Graph tags, and HTTP status code.

Classify every difference by severity: CRITICAL (a change likely to cause real traffic loss — canonical removed or changed unexpectedly, noindex added, schema removed, status code changed to an error) needs an immediate look; WARNING (a change that could matter — title or meta changed, heading structure changed) needs review within the week; INFO (a change that's probably intentional, like an updated headline) is awareness-only.

When a regression is found, route to the right specialist: schema changes to schema-markup, a Core Web Vitals regression to technical-seo-audit or core-web-vitals-data, a title/meta/heading change to content-quality-eeat, a canonical or noindex change to technical-seo-audit.

Report a diff table (element, before, after, severity) and a plain-language summary of what changed and what to check first. Be explicit that this compares whatever two snapshots the user supplies — it isn't continuous automated monitoring the way the original tool's SQLite-backed version was.