Find striking-distance keywords with AI

1. Shortlist the queries. The agent calls search_insights with the striking_distance recipe. That returns queries at average positions 6 to 20 with their ranking page, impressions and clicks, already sorted by impressions. One call, one data pull.
2. Group by page. No extra call: the agent regroups the shortlist so a page with five near-miss queries rises above a page with one.
3. Read each top page's full query set. For the top pages, the agent calls search_analytics with dimensions query,page and a page filter. This shows the queries ranking well, the ones in striking distance and the ones far below, which tells you what Google thinks the page is about. One data pull per page, so one to three here.
4. Recommend one change per page. The agent compares the query wording with what it knows of the page (or with the page itself, if your client can fetch URLs) and names the edit most likely to help.

A full run is about 2 to 4 data pulls, which fits inside the free plan's 15 a day. If you only want the list without the per-page breakdown, stop after step 1 and it costs one.

This is a real run on mcpsearchconsole.com, covering 2 September to 30 September 2026 (the last 28 days of final data at the time). The site is young, so the noise floor was lowered to 3 impressions to show more than one row. Every row below came back from search_insights; nothing was added by hand.

Two things stand out. First, every striking-distance query lands on the homepage, so grouping by page gives one clear target. Second, four of the five queries pair "Search Console MCP" with "Claude". The site has a dedicated guide for that pairing, but in this window Google matched these queries to the homepage instead, at positions 8 to 10. The follow-up search_analytics call on the homepage showed the same pattern at larger scale: "google search console mcp" had 136 impressions at position 54.0, so the broad head term is still far off while the Claude variants are close.

The recommendation the agent gave: make the Claude angle explicit on the homepage (a heading and a short section on using it with Claude) and add a prominent link from the homepage to the Claude guide, so whichever page Google prefers has the words it needs.

Each row falls into one of a few cases. Use the rule that matches.

• Position 6 to 10, decent impressions, zero or few clicks. You are on page one but low. Rewrite the title so it starts with the query's wording and check the description answers it. This overlaps with fixing low-CTR pages; do that first because it is the cheapest edit.
• Position 11 to 20. You are on page two. Titles alone rarely move this. Add a section that answers the query directly (an H2 phrased like the query, then the answer in the first two sentences under it), and add two or three internal links to the page from pages that already get clicks.
• Several queries on one page. Work on that page first. One edit can lift every query in the group, which is why the prompt groups by page.
• The ranking page is the wrong page. If the query belongs on a different page you own (as with the Claude queries above landing on the homepage), strengthen the right page and link to it from the one Google picked. If both pages keep trading places, treat it as keyword cannibalization instead.
• Very low impressions (under 10 in 28 days). Note it and move on. The position average is too unstable to act on, and the click upside is small even if it reaches the top three.

Change one page at a time and give it two to four weeks before judging. Search Console data trails by about two days and positions move slowly, so ask the agent to re-run the same prompt next month and compare.

• Average position is an average. Position 9 can mean you rank 5th on mobile and 14th on desktop, or 3rd in one country and 20th in another. Ask the agent to split by device or country before rewriting a page for a query that averages out.
• No search volume or difficulty. Impressions are the only demand signal, and they only count searches where your page appeared. A query at position 18 with 12 impressions may have far more volume than that; Search Console cannot tell you how much.
• No competitor view. The data says where you rank, not who outranks you or why. Look at the live results page before deciding what the new section should say.
• Anonymized queries are missing. Google withholds rare queries for privacy, so a page can show impressions with few or no query rows behind them.
• Fresh data lags. The last two days or so are not final, so the window ends a little before today.

Comparing tools for this? See our round-up of the best SEO MCP servers. To set up the connection first, follow the guide to use Search Console in Claude.