Ranking Opportunities Audit is a structured agent prompt that uses 📝GSC MCP to surface 📝striking distance queries, CTR ceiling problems, and brand-versus-non-brand opportunity classes for a verified site over a defined trailing window, with validation steps that account for GSC's known data inaccuracies (phantom pages, anonymized queries, noisy position averages on low-impression rows).
The audit identifies the highest-leverage ranking improvements available without commissioning new content. An agent invokes it inside a content creation loop, the GSC tools surface the data, and the output is a prioritized list of opportunities tagged by class with the current ranking page named so on-page changes can be scoped.
Three opportunity classes structure the analysis, all subject to a minimum-impressions floor of 100 over the window because GSC position averaging is noisy below that threshold. Striking distance covers queries in positions 4-20. CTR ceiling covers queries at position 3 or better but underperforming for that position (rough rule: position 1 expected ≥ 25%, position 2 ≥ 15%, position 3 ≥ 10%) — a title or snippet problem rather than a ranking problem. Brand-versus-non-brand separates queries containing the site's name from growth queries, since brand queries rank by name recognition rather than content quality and should be excluded from opportunity-finding.
The prompt below is designed for paste-into-Claude use. The agent calls gsc_top_queries, validates that each candidate ranking page actually exists on the live site (GSC reports phantom URLs that have been deleted, redirected, or never existed canonically), optionally drills into gsc_search_analytics for query-to-page mapping, and returns a ranked list with recommended action. Replace the site URL and brand keyword for audits of other properties.
Audit ranking opportunities for `sc-domain:mythos.one` over the last 90 days. Use the gsc tools as follows:
1. `gsc_top_queries(days=90, limit=100)` for the full query landscape.
2. Identify three classes of opportunity from the results. All three require impressions ≥ 100 over the window — GSC position averaging is unreliable below that threshold:
- **Striking distance**: position between 4 and 20. These are queries one well-placed update could move into the top 3.
- **CTR ceiling**: position ≤ 3 with CTR below expected for that position (rough rule: pos 1 ≥ 25%, pos 2 ≥ 15%, pos 3 ≥ 10%). These are title/snippet problems, not ranking problems.
- **Brand vs non-brand**: separate queries containing "mythos" from the rest. Non-brand queries are growth queries.
3. For each candidate opportunity, run `gsc_search_analytics(dimensions=["query","page"], filters=[{"dimension":"query","operator":"equals","expression":"<the query>"}])` to find which page is currently ranking.
4. **Validate each ranking page is real before recommending action.** First, exclude obvious phantoms by URL structure (query strings, fragments, trailing-slash mismatches, alternate protocols/subdomains, path segments the site doesn't actually use) without any fetch — flag those as PHANTOM and move on. For the remainder, run concurrent HEAD requests to verify existence (e.g., `curl --head ... | xargs -P 10` in shell, or `httpx` with a thread pool in Python; 100 URLs completes in under 10 seconds). URLs returning 404 or redirecting away from themselves are PHANTOMS — exclude from the recommendation list. Do NOT load a sitemap into context for this check — at any meaningful site scale the sitemap is multi-megabyte and would consume 200K+ tokens. If a real page exists but isn't the canonical one for the query, mark as a query-to-page mismatch separately.
5. Output a prioritized list of 10 opportunities with: query, position, impressions, CTR, opportunity class, verified ranking page URL, recommended action. Preface the output with a one-line note that GSC suppresses low-volume queries for privacy (typically 20-50% of total impression volume), so the visible list is incomplete by design and totals should not be claimed as exhaustive.
Skip the brand-dominant queries (e.g., "mythos", "mythos ai") in opportunity-finding — those rank by virtue of name, not content quality. Focus on queries where content/SEO work could change the result.This is the first lens BotBrian runs when asked about SEO performance for a site already in 📝GSC MCP. The 90-day window catches drift; the three-class split prevents wasted optimization effort; the validation step keeps phantom URLs out of recommendations.