Rank tracking with Claude: track and review keyword rankings by asking

What does Claude actually track?

Claude tracks nothing by itself. Connected to MrKeyword's MCP server, it reads and manages a rank tracker whose positions are the average positions Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools report for your own verified site, recorded daily. Claude chooses the tools, calls them and writes up the result; the numbers come from the search engines' own reports.

If MrKeyword is not connected to Claude yet, the Claude SEO MCP setup guide walks through it: create a token in Settings → Connections → API & MCP Tokens and add https://app.mrkeyword.io/mcp to Claude Code, Claude Desktop or Cursor. Adding and editing tracked keywords needs a token created with “Allow this token to make changes” ticked; reading rankings works with any token.

Average position versus a live rank check

A live rank check looks at one results page at one moment from one place; Search Console's average position summarises where your link appeared across all the searches that showed it. Both are useful, and they answer different questions.

Google's Search Console help defines position as the topmost position occupied by a link to your site, averaged across the queries in which it appeared, and says a link must get an impression for its position to be recorded. It also warns that for your own search the position might differ from the average, naming search history and location among the reasons. Desktop and mobile are reported separately. Our guide to Search Console average position covers the details.

When does the difference matter? If you need to know where a competitor ranks, how you appear in one city, or where you sit for a keyword that gets no impressions yet, you need a live SERP rank tracker. If you want to know whether real searchers are seeing you more or less, and whether that turns into clicks, the average is the more honest number. Do not build your own scraper to fill the gap: Google's spam policies count scraping results for rank-checking as a violation. The guide to tracking keyword rankings compares both kinds of tracker.

The rank tracking workflow in Claude

Track the keywords, set the page each one should rank with, review weekly from a summary, and annotate changes so the history explains itself.

1. Track keywords

   Ask “Track these keywords on my site” and Claude calls track_keywords. It accepts up to 100 keywords per call, a market (US, CA, IN, GB, AU, or ALL for any country, the default), a device (all, desktop, mobile or tablet) and an optional target page. Keywords count against the plan's allowance: 25 on Free, 500 on Starter, 1,500 on Growth and 5,000 on Agency. A call that would go over is refused and adds nothing; keywords already tracked are skipped, not duplicated. get_account_usage shows how many are used.

2. Set target pages

   set_target_page records the URL you intend to rank for a tracked keyword (an empty value clears it). From then on, get_rankings with the wrong_page filter lists keywords where Google ranks a different URL from the one you chose, which often points to two pages competing for the same query.

3. Open each week with the summary

   get_rank_summary is the one-screen opener: average position and its change, how many tracked keywords sit in the top 3 and top 10, how many moved up or down, the five biggest gains and five biggest drops, and “closest wins”, keywords at average positions 11–20.

4. Drill in with filters

   get_rankings returns each tracked keyword's average position over 7, 28 or 90 days (28 by default), its change against the previous period of the same length (positive means it moved up), clicks, impressions, the page that ranked and the target page. Filters: moved_up, moved_down, top3, top10, not_ranking and wrong_page. Sort by position, change, clicks, impressions or keyword. Set engine to bing for Bing positions; Google is the default.

5. Explain changes with history and notes

   get_keyword_history gives daily clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for one keyword, up to 365 days back (90 by default), together with any annotations. add_annotation records a dated note against a keyword, such as a rewrite, a redesign or a migration, so a later drop or gain sits next to its likely cause.

Built-in prompts: weekly review and client report

Two ready-made MCP prompts run the review for you: weekly_seo_review for your own weekly check and client_report for a report someone else will read.

• weekly_seo_review (site, and a 7, 28 or 90-day window, 7 by default) calls get_rank_summary, then get_rankings for movers down and up, then wrong_page keywords and seen_not_clicked queries, then get_daily_issues, and finishes with exactly five actions for the week, each tied to a keyword or URL. Its rules tell Claude to say once that positions are Search Console averages, and never to state a number no tool returned.
• client_report (site, a 7, 28 or 90-day window, 28 by default, and an optional client name) gathers the rank summary, the top-10 keywords by clicks, near-miss queries, the latest site audit and any saved report, then writes a summary, visibility, wins, a watch list, technical health and next month's recommendations. It states the date range and data source near the top and does not forecast traffic or mention competitors.

/mcp__mrkeyword__weekly_seo_review

Example rank tracking prompts for Claude

Name the site and the period, and ask for actions rather than a dump of rows. These are example prompts with the tools they usually lead to, not recorded answers.

What to keep in mind about the data

The newest days are a little behind, small queries can be missing, and daily figures move more than weekly ones.

• Delay. Google says collected Search Console data should normally be available in 2 to 3 days, and daily data follows local time in California.
• Missing rare queries. To protect privacy, Google says the Performance report does not show all data and may not track queries made a very small number of times. A tracked keyword with few searches can show no position for days.
• Compare equal periods. get_rankings already compares each period with the previous one of the same length. For decisions, 28 or 90 days is steadier than 7.

What MrKeyword does not do

It tracks your own verified sites from the search engines' own reports; it is not a SERP scraper.

• Own verified sites only. Rankings come from the Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools properties connected to your workspace.
• No competitor rankings. There is no tool for where another site ranks.
• No live SERP checks. Every position is an average for a period, never a scrape of the results page.
• No local-pack or grid tracking. There is no city-level, map-pack or geo-grid rank tracking.
• No changes to your site. Action tools change data inside MrKeyword only, such as tracked keywords, target pages and notes.

Related guides: keyword research with Claude for choosing what to track, the Google Search Console MCP guide for query-level questions, SEO audits with Claude for technical fixes, and what an SEO MCP server is. The developer reference lists every parameter.

Questions and answers