Find new and lost search queries

Find the new keywords the site started ranking for this month and the search queries it stopped appearing for, by comparing two periods, so you can see which new content is winning and where visibility quietly disappeared.

Use this skill Install into your agent

The playbook

Period-over-period totals hide churn. A site can hold steady on clicks while gaining a hundred queries and losing a hundred others, and the two lists are more useful than the total: the gains show what is working, and the losses are usually the earliest sign of a problem.

Steps

Pull both windows. Two calls to google_search_console.query with dimensions: ["query", "page"] and rowLimit: 5000: the last 28 days ending 3 days ago, and the 28 days before that. For seasonal businesses use the same 28 days a year earlier and say so.
Set a floor. Keep rows with at least 20 impressions in whichever window they appear (state the floor). Without one the lists are dominated by single-impression long tail that churns constantly and means nothing.
Diff the query sets. New: queries in the recent window only. Lost: queries in the prior window only. Swapped: the same query in both windows but served by a different page. Sort each list by impressions.
Explain the new list. Group new queries by the page that serves them. A cluster of new queries on one URL usually means a new or updated page has started ranking; name the page and the theme.
Explain the lost list. Group lost queries by their former page. If one page lost many queries, check whether the page still exists and still returns 200 with your own browsing; if it does, continue with content-decay-audit for that page. If many pages each lost a few queries, that is diffuse and belongs to traffic-drop-investigation.
Report. Three short tables: top new queries (query, page, impressions, position), top lost queries (query, former page, impressions it had, position it had), swapped queries (query, old page, new page). Then two or three sentences on the pattern in each.

Gotchas

Lost usually means "fell below the floor", not "gone". A query at 25 impressions last month and 15 this month shows as lost. Say the lists are relative to the floor.
Row caps bite on large sites. At 5000 rows a big site is truncated and the diff will invent losses at the tail. If either window returns exactly the cap, raise it or narrow the comparison to a section of the site with a page filter.
Swapped is a cannibalization signal. If the same query keeps swapping pages, continue with keyword-cannibalization-check.
Search Console lags 2 to 3 days. End the recent window 3 days back.

Use it in your agent

sequel install

Installs the Sequel MCP server and skill into your coding agent. Full setup

Works with

Google Search Console

You don't need all of these connected. The agent adapts the playbook to the sources you have, and offers to connect a missing one.

Sequel CLI

Install Sequel skills into your agent

One command connects your agent to Sequel and installs the Sequel skill, so it knows this playbook exists and reads it when a question matches. The CLI signs you in, provisions a scoped API key and writes the config for you.

Already have an MCP client?

https://api.sequel.sh/mcp

Point it at this URL and sign in when prompted, or send an API key from Settings as a Bearer token. Skills come with it; nothing else to install. Manual setup per client

1
Install the Sequel CLI
One line installs the latest CLI with whatever package manager you have.
```
curl -fsSL https://sequel.sh/install | sh
```
2
Sign in
Authenticate in your browser and pick an organization.
```
sequel login
```
3
Install into your agent
Writes the MCP config and installs the Sequel skill file for agents that support skills. Pick an agent from the list, or target one directly by its slug.
```
sequel install
```
- Claude Code
  sequel install claude-code
- Claude
  sequel install claude
- Cursor
  sequel install cursor
- VS Code
  sequel install vscode
- Windsurf
  sequel install windsurf
- Zed
  sequel install zed
- Codex
  sequel install codex
- OpenClaw
  sequel install openclaw
- Hermes
  sequel install hermes

Other SEO skills

Analyze high-ranking landing pages

See which pages perform best in organic search: the landing pages that earn the most clicks and impressions, the queries behind each one, and how they compare with competitor estimates from Ahrefs.

Audit internal links to important pages

Audit the site's own internal linking: crawl navigation and body links between the site's pages to find valuable pages with too few inbound internal links, orphan pages, and the handful of cross-links that would lift striking-distance rankings.

Audit or draft an llms.txt

Check whether the site has an llms.txt, whether it follows the spec and points at the pages that matter, and if it is missing draft one from the pages Search Console shows people actually find, so AI assistants get a curated map of the site instead of guessing.

Audit redirect chains and loops

Follow every redirect on the URLs Search Console still sends traffic to, on the sitemap, and on backlinked pages, to find chains, loops, redirects to the homepage, and temporary redirects that should be permanent, so link equity and crawl budget stop leaking.

Audit referring domain quality

Grade the domains linking to a site by authority, traffic and link count, spot concentration risk and link-farm patterns, and separate the referring domains that carry weight from the ones that are noise.

Audit titles and meta descriptions

Compare the title and meta description of each top page against the queries it actually ranks for in Search Console, and find missing, duplicate, truncated or misaligned metadata on the pages where a rewrite would earn the most clicks.

Put this playbook to work

Connect a source, ask the question, and the agent follows these steps. Free to start.

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