I Reviewed an SEO Tool — It Found a Real Bug on My Own Site

I run repoverifier.dev — a site where I clone AI/dev tool repos, actually run them, and publish honest verdicts instead of taking the README's word for it. Recently I tested an open-source SEO auditor called SEOnaut by running it against my own site.

It found a real, live bug.

The tool: SEOnaut

SEOnaut is a self-hosted, open-source SEO auditing tool written in Go (710+ stars, MIT licensed, ships as a Docker container). Unlike a lot of "AI-powered SEO" tools that just summarize what a paid API tells them, SEOnaut crawls your site directly and checks real things: broken links, missing meta tags, header issues, redirect chains.

To test it properly, I didn't just read the docs — I ran it against my own live site and watched what it surfaced.

What it caught

During the crawl, SEOnaut flagged a 404 on one of my own use-case pages: an external link pointing to a GitHub repo that had since been deleted or renamed. It was a small thing — one dead outbound link — but it was real, it was live on my site, and I wouldn't have caught it without running the tool.

I fixed it on the spot, mid-review.

The rough edges

A couple of things worth knowing if you're considering it:

• No ARM64 image on GHCR. If you're on Apple Silicon, the published Docker image won't pull cleanly — you have to docker build from source. The bundled docker-compose.dev.yml doesn't solve this either; it only adds a debug port to the database service.

• Security-header warnings fire indiscriminately. SEOnaut flags missing HSTS/CSP/X-Content-Type-Options headers on every asset it sees — including third-party scripts you don't control, like Cloudflare Insights or Google Tag Manager. Worth knowing so you don't chase headers you can't actually fix.

Neither of these is disqualifying — they're just the kind of friction you only find by actually running the thing, which is the whole point of how I review tools.

Verdict

SOLID. It does what it claims, the install friction is documented and solvable, and it caught a genuine issue I'd have otherwise shipped with. The noise on third-party headers is a caveat, not a deal-breaker.

Full write-up with setup steps and more detail: repoverifier.dev/reviews/stjudewashere-seonaut

I review AI and dev tools the same way every time: clone it, follow the README on a clean machine, test the actual claim, publish what happened — good or bad. If you want to see more of these, repoverifier.dev has 19 so far.