WIP: SEO NEO

[Peter Knight]

Hi everyone

I've started a new module called SEO NEO
It's a new SEO module built for today's SEO, on today's ProcessWire.

I hadn’t planned another module, but I keep returning to the same niggling thought:

SEO is too important to our clients' sites (and businesses) to depend on modules that are not

• being actively developed
• keeping pace with how SEO works today.

So that's pretty much it.

SEO NEO will be free.
An Ultra/Pro version will follow and include genuinely useful additions for industry professionals.

I'll have more soon, but if you have any SEO requests, my DMs are open.

Cheers
Peter
 

[Stefanowitsch]

@Peter Knight sounds great. I am still using SeoMaestro on every Project but I am interested in every module that covers this topic.

[Peter Knight]

9 minutes ago, Stefanowitsch said:

@Peter Knight sounds great. I am still using SeoMaestro on every Project but I am interested in every module that covers this topic.

Good to know. Thanks Stefan 

[psy]

6 hours ago, Stefanowitsch said:

@Peter Knight sounds great. I am still using SeoMaestro on every Project but I am interested in every module that covers this topic.

Ditto. One thing missing in SEOMaestro is support for urlSegments. Fix is via a hook. Be great if SEO NEO supported urlSegments natively.
Looking forward to seeing the new module 🙂 

[Peter Knight]

Thanks @psy

I must admit, I haven't really used urlSegments myself, but I'll certainly add it to the list. 
Hoping to spin up a test site soon, exclusively for testing this type of thing. I just have to decide what I want to scrape for content. Breweries of the world or skyscrapers etc. Just like the PW demo site.

 

[wbmnfktr]

On 4/30/2026 at 11:17 AM, Peter Knight said:

module built for today's SEO

Can you define this a bit more detailed?

I mean we have a lot of new AEO, GEO, LLMO, AIO, VEO, NEO, AISO acronyms out there.

The name would suggest that NEO (Neural Engine Optimization) would be the focus... is this the case?

[Peter Knight]

Hey

NEO in this instance is more aligned to “new” than any acronym or AI /LLM technology. I guess the upper case letters suggests an acronym but, honestly, I just liked the visual rhythms of both words. 

Not sure if this answers your question or if I misunderstood? 

[wbmnfktr]

On 5/2/2026 at 3:43 PM, Peter Knight said:

Not sure if this answers your question or if I misunderstood? 

That answers my question perfectly fine. You understood me here.

[Mikel]

Hi Peter,

great to see someone tackling this. SeoMaestro is solidly built and still maintained for bugfixes, but the last feature release was June 2022 and Wanze himself has mentioned he's stepped back from active PW work, if I remember correctly. A few things that come up in client work aren't covered by it alone.

I showed your announcement to our SEO specialist and asked him to put together a wishlist. We then discussed it internally and stress-tested every point. What kept coming up wasn't really "we need new features" – it was "the pieces exist, but they don't talk to each other".

There's already a lot of good, actively maintained tooling in the ecosystem:

• Wire Request Blocker (Ryan) – AI bot throttling since September 2025
• ProcessRedirects (apeisa / teppokoivula) – 301s, wildcards, CSV import/export, v2.2.5 released Dec 2025
• Process404Logger (kixe) – clean 404 logging
• SeoMaestro (Wanze) – the meta/OG/sitemap foundation everyone already uses

The actual pain in daily work is that these live as separate islands. A site owner has to install four modules and configure each one in its own admin section. The obvious workflow between them doesn't exist either – a 404 logged by Process404Logger doesn't surface in ProcessRedirects as a redirect suggestion, even though that's exactly the kind of pairing that would save real time.

So the honest question for SEO NEO might not be "what new features do we need" but rather: could SEO NEO act as the umbrella that connects what's already there? A central admin section that surfaces:

• SEO health (missing descriptions, duplicate titles, noindex flags) as a Lister-based audit view – this genuinely doesn't exist in the ecosystem yet
• 404 hotspots from the logger with a "create redirect" action wired into ProcessRedirects
• AI crawler activity from Wire Request Blocker
• SeoMaestro field status across templates

Plus the few things that are genuinely missing on the meta-handling side:

• Native urlSegments support – as psy mentioned earlier in the thread, currently needs a hook in SeoMaestro
• Schema.org helpers with documented hooks – ready-made generators for the common types (Article, FAQPage, Person, Organization, BreadcrumbList) that developers can call from templates. Not auto-detection (that doesn't work without explicit mapping), but a clean API.

What we deliberately left off the list:

• llms.txt generator – recent log file audits show GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot don't actually fetch the file. The spec is unofficial and no LLM lab has committed to honoring it. Worth revisiting if that changes.
• Yoast-style content analysis with traffic-light scoring – tends to produce text optimized for the algorithm rather than the reader.

Whether the right path is one big new module or a coordination layer on top of the existing ones is your call. But from the user side, the bigger win would be coherence rather than yet another standalone tool.

Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Cheers, Mike

[Peter Knight]

Hi Mikel and SEO specialist

Thanks for taking so much time to list your thoughts. 

Quote

SeoMaestro is solidly built 

I completely agree, and it's a testament to both SEO Modules and ProcessWire itself that they have worked together for so long.

I hope my original post doesn't come across as a criticism of either Module or the developers. Life moves on, and understandably, the developers have new priorities. 
 

Quote

There's already a lot of good, actively maintained tooling in the ecosystem:

Yes, agree too. And I don't intend to recreate existing Modules simply for the sake of it. But I also want SEO Neo to rely on other modules as little as possible.

So it's likely that SEO Neo will act as an umbrella/coordinating layer for companion Modules. All working together.

It's an ambitious task, but I would prefer to build from the ground up with modular components (sub-modules) that can work together rather than end up with a Module which relies on various "3rd party" modules. I realise this somewhat contradicts my earlier statement.

But to answer your specific points:

SEO health (missing descriptions, duplicate titles, noindex flags) as a Lister-based audit view – this genuinely doesn't exist in the ecosystem yet
Yes, this is on the roadmap and has been on my mind for some time. The module should have an SEO health dashboard that can display the basic rolled-up audit of your site.

I use SEM Rush extensively (alongside several other SEO tools). SEO Neo won't try to replace them, but will surface critical issues within PW itself. I see this as a big benefit to SEO specialists, developers and editors, even if it serves as a launch pad for deeper investigation via more powerful SEO tools.

404 hotspots from the logger with a "create redirect" action wired into ProcessRedirects
Yes, this is being developed currently with a focus on 404 logging. 

AI crawler activity from Wire Request Blocker
Have added to the roadmap.

SeoMaestro field status across templates
SEO Neo will have a field status overview if that's what you mean? It won't report on other SEO modules' gaps.

Native urlSegments support – as psy mentioned earlier in the thread, currently needs a hook in SeoMaestro
urlSegments is done and working since my last post. I am stress testing on a larger site shortly. Canonical, og:url, twitter:url and hreflang all preserve $input->urlSegmentStr() natively. I also have a config setting for sites that want segments collapsed instead. The hook needed for SeoMaestro isn't required in SEO Neo.

Yoast-style content analysis with traffic-light scoring – tends to produce text optimized for the algorithm rather than the reader.
I am keen for SEO Neo not to become a Yoast copy. 

Schema.org helpers with documented hooks – ready-made generators for the common types (Article, FAQPage, Person, Organization, BreadcrumbList) that developers can call from templates. Not auto-detection (that doesn't work without explicit mapping), but a clean API.
Noted.

 

Finally, the rollout of SEO Neo's core module and individual components will likely be phases. The Neo in SEO Neo is more a nod to a new approach rather than Nearly Everything at Once. 

P