u/HeatPrevious1395

Sharing the prompt-engineering side of an internal pipeline I just open-sourced. The whole system is 7 Claude Code slash commands chained together, each with a strict role + output contract:

- /seo-research → Perplexity Deep Research API; structured output into 7 sections (Market Context, Stats with source URLs, Competitor analysis, Quotes, Unique angles, Internal links, Raw output)

- /seo-brief → reads research, produces a brief with search intent, SEO metadata, content outline, required data points, internal link map, differentiation notes

- /seo-write → reads brief + research; outputs markdown with frontmatter, intro/H2s/conclusion/FAQ/internal-links sections; enforces voice from a YAML config

- /seo-optimize → 10-check SEO score (0-100), with specific fix suggestions

- /seo-publish → builds CMS payload, hard human gate, ships to Sanity via direct HTTP

- /seo-status, /seo-daily → orchestration

What I'd flag prompt-design-wise:

- Each command reads ./pipeline.yaml for state. Stateless re-entry across sessions because all state is in files.

- Brand voice + tone + content pillars live in one YAML (config/seo-settings.yaml). Every prompt references it instead of hardcoding the brand.

- Human gates are non-negotiable in 4 of 7 steps. Trying to remove them produces visibly worse content.

- The "real examples enforced, no hypotheticals" line in the /seo-write prompt is the single highest-impact instruction in the whole pipeline.

Repo: https://github.com/viren040/content-seo-orchestrator (MIT) — all the commands are in .claude/commands/.

Curious what prompt patterns others are using for multi-step content/marketing pipelines.

The "rank" mental model is broken for AEO. There's a great recent r/b2bmarketing post arguing the word "rank" has no place in AEO only 16% of B2B AI queries trigger retrieval, and citation order doesn't equal preference. Agree with all of it.

What that argument left open: if you're not optimizing for rank, what are you optimizing for? My take after running content for ~12 months: SEO optimizes for the click. AEO optimizes for inclusion in the answer. Different game, different brief, different proof.

The pipeline I built (and just open-sourced) treats them as separate but interlocking jobs:

SEO half — 10-check scorecard (keyword placement, density, meta, headings, content length, internal links, readability, real-example density). Standard stuff but scored consistently.

AEO half — different brief template that forces: FAQ-shaped sub-headings (so the post can be pulled as an answer), explicit query format in H2s, named-entity density (real customer names, real numbers), source-attribution on every stat, schema type override (HowTo / FAQPage when the post is question-shaped).

Both run as separate /seo- commands chained in a Claude Code pipeline. 15-20 min/day per post.

Result on one brand (12 months, full GSC data in the repo): 131 → 964 avg impressions/day (7.3×). 18× monthly impressions. 51.8% of total site impressions from the pipeline-produced content.

Honest caveat: clicks did NOT keep pace with impressions. That's the next gap — title/meta optimization for CTR, which is a separate /seo-refresh command on the roadmap.

Repo: https://github.com/viren040/content-seo-orchestrator (MIT, fork it). Genuinely curious how others are scoring AEO-shape — most "AEO checklists" I've seen are just SEO checklists with the word swapped.