---
name: programmatic-seo
description: Plan or audit pages generated at scale from a data source, with the quality gates that prevent a scaled-content-abuse penalty.
---

# Programmatic SEO Planning & Audit

## Use this when

programmatic SEO, pages at scale, dynamic pages, template pages, data-driven SEO.

## Process

Start from the data source powering the pages: row count, field completeness, uniqueness across records (flag near-duplicate records with over 80% field overlap), and freshness — stale data produces stale pages regardless of how good the template is.

Template review: each generated page must read as a standalone, valuable resource, not a "mad-libs" pattern where only a city or product name changes inside otherwise-identical text. Dynamic sections must add genuine information, not just keyword variation.

URL pattern rules: lowercase hyphenated slugs derived from the data, a logical hierarchy, enforced uniqueness at generation time, under 100 characters, no query parameters for primary content.

Enforce the thin-content quality gates explicitly, these are hard, not advisory: content differentiation must reach at least 30-40% genuinely unique text between any two pages in the set (word-for-word template boilerplate counts against uniqueness; shared header/footer/nav does not); a human should sample-review at least 5-10% of generated pages before publishing; roll out in batches of 50-100 pages and watch indexing/rankings for 2-4 weeks before expanding — never publish 500+ programmatic pages simultaneously without explicit review. The standalone-value test for any page: would this be worth publishing even if no other similar page existed?

Safe at scale: integration pages with real setup docs, template/tool pages with real downloadable content, glossary pages with 200+ word definitions, product pages with unique specs and reviews. Penalty risk at scale: location pages with only the city swapped, "best X for Y" pages with no real industry-specific value, "competitor alternative" pages with no real comparison data, any AI-generated page published without human review.

Canonical and sitemap rules: every programmatic page self-canonicals; parameter variations (sort, filter) canonical to the base URL when duplicate or low-value; split sitemaps at 50k URLs/50MB; exclude noindexed pages from the sitemap; register the sitemap in robots.txt.

Report a scored assessment (data quality, template uniqueness, URL structure, internal linking, thin-content risk, index management) with issues by severity, and a specific batch-rollout recommendation.