rankforge

Honest, local-first SEO autopilot. Audit your site → research keywords → brief the SERP → write scored articles → weave internal links → publish → track rankings. One shared Python core, two front-ends: a CLI and an MCP server you can drive from any MCP client.

No SaaS, no account, no required API keys. Your site data and your .env never leave your machine — it's a single SQLite file you can delete and rebuild.

git clone https://github.com/Makeph/rankforge && cd rankforge
pip install -e ".[all]"          # or `pip install -e .` for the lean core
rankforge init
RANKFORGE_SITE=https://your-site.com rankforge audit
rankforge keywords research "your topic"
rankforge write "your best keyword"      # scored SEO + GEO before you ever publish
rankforge tick --dry-run                 # see what the autopilot would do

Why this exists

The "AI SEO autopilot" category (AutoSEO, Oscar AI, and friends) charges ~$150/month for a loop you can run on your own machine: pick a keyword, read the SERP, write an article, add links, publish, track. rankforge is that loop, rebuilt small and honest:

Idea	Seen in	How rankforge does it
"Connect your site, get daily articles on autopilot"	AutoSEO-style tools	tick worker with a daily cap and a quality gate — cron it, or don't
Real-time SEO/GEO article scoring	Oscar-style tools	A deterministic rubric (score) — every point traceable to a named check, same input → same score
Keyword research + competitor analysis	everyone	Zero-key: autocomplete expansion + DuckDuckGo SERP + competitor scrape
Auto internal linking	Oscar-style tools	Anchors matched against your crawled pages, idempotent insertion
Publishes to your CMS	everyone	WordPress REST (app password) or markdown export for any static site
Rank tracking incl. AI engines	AutoSEO-style tools	DuckDuckGo position history in SQLite; the GEO score covers the AI-answer side

Everything degrades gracefully: no key → article generation falls back through local agent CLIs to a deterministic outline; no WordPress → markdown export; no network → audit/score/link still work on stored data. Nothing publishes without passing the quality gate, and nothing publishes at all unless you configured a target.

The engine trick

Article writing is pluggable, and three of the engines are agent CLIs you may already pay for — so generation costs nothing extra and no API key ever enters this tool:

RANKFORGE_ENGINE = auto | anthropic | codex | kimi | qwen | outline

• anthropic — the Anthropic API (ANTHROPIC_API_KEY).
• codex / kimi / qwen — driven via their non-interactive prompt modes.
• outline — offline, deterministic: expands the brief into a structured skeleton with TODOs. Never publishable, never blocking.

auto walks whatever is actually available (rankforge engines shows the order). Every draft is scored; if it lands under RANKFORGE_MIN_SCORE, the engine gets one revision pass listing the exact named checks that failed — then the article is either ready or held as a local draft.

SEO score + GEO score

rankforge score <id> prints two rubrics, check by check:

• SEO 0–100 — keyword in H1/intro/headings, structure, length vs the SERP-derived target, density, internal + external links, readability, lists.
• GEO 0–100 — will an answer engine (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews) quote you? Question-phrased H2s, ≤60-word direct answers under them, an FAQ block, a liftable definition, lists/steps, concrete figures.

No magic, no vibes: the scorer is ~150 lines you can read, and the writer never sees it — only its plain-language feedback.

The pipeline

rankforge audit                      # crawl + on-page issues + site-wide findings
rankforge keywords research <seed>   # autocomplete → cluster → opportunity 0-100
rankforge brief <keyword>            # live SERP: target length, questions, outline
rankforge write <keyword>            # engine of your choice, scored, stored
rankforge links <id> --apply         # internal links from YOUR crawled pages
rankforge publish <id> [--dry-run]   # WordPress draft or markdown front-matter
rankforge track / report             # DuckDuckGo positions + movement over time
rankforge tick                       # all of the above, once a day, guardrailed

The autopilot's guardrails mirror the rest of the tool: RANKFORGE_DAILY_ARTICLES (default 1), RANKFORGE_MIN_SCORE (default 70, below = held as draft), WordPress posts land as drafts unless you say otherwise, and --dry-run always shows the plan first.

# typical cron line — one article per weekday morning, as WordPress drafts
0 7 * * 1-5  rankforge tick

MCP (drive it from any MCP client)

pip install "rankforge[mcp]"
rankforge mcp        # stdio server

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rankforge": { "command": "rankforge", "args": ["mcp"] }
  }
}

Tools exposed: audit_site, research_keywords, build_brief, write_article, score_article, suggest_internal_links, check_rank.

Configuration

Everything is optional — rankforge init drops a commented env.example.

Variable	Purpose	Without it
RANKFORGE_SITE	your site (audit, linking, tracking)	pass URLs explicitly
RANKFORGE_LANG	keyword/article language (en, fr, …)	en
RANKFORGE_ENGINE	writing engine	auto
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	the API engine	CLI engines / outline
WP_URL / WP_USER / WP_APP_PASSWORD	WordPress publishing	markdown export
RANKFORGE_DAILY_ARTICLES / MIN_SCORE / MAX_PAGES	guardrails	1 / 70 / 200

Install from source

git clone https://github.com/Makeph/rankforge
cd rankforge
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest          # offline test suite, no keys needed

Responsible use

rankforge is a content system, not a spam cannon: one article a day by default, a quality gate that refuses to publish weak drafts, WordPress drafts by default so a human stays in the loop, polite crawling with a real user-agent and jittered pacing, and rank checks kept to a minimum. Generated content is your responsibility — review it before it ships.

License

MIT © 2026 Aurore Biakou