Website Scan for SEO: What AI Learns From Your URL
Website Scan for SEO: What AI Learns From Your URL
VellumUp8 min read
walter writes ai starts with a website scan for SEO because the URL is the only honest source of truth about your pages, products, tone, and internal links. This guide explains what “scan website” actually means, what data gets extracted, and how that turns into brand-voice matching, topic research, and SEO-optimised articles that publish cleanly on WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow.
Website Scan for SEO: what “scan website” really means in walter writes ai
Website Scan for SEO, in practical terms, means crawling your public site like a search engine, then turning what it finds into a writing and publishing blueprint. It is not a “read the homepage and guess” workflow. A real scan maps the content you already have, the structure you already rely on, and the language your customers already respond to.
When we set up automated content systems, the biggest failures come from skipping this step. The AI writes in a generic voice, targets the wrong search intent, and links to the wrong pages (or none at all). A scan fixes that by learning your site before it writes a single sentence.
If you have ever tried an “ai writer free” tool and hated the output, it usually did not know your business. It only knew your prompt.
Writing websites: the pages and templates a scan pulls in (and why it matters)
Writing websites well requires knowing what the website actually contains. The scan’s first job is to inventory your site so the AI can write with context and avoid duplicating what already exists.
Navigation and hierarchy (menus, breadcrumbs, hub pages)
Page types and templates (product vs collection vs article vs documentation)
On-page SEO signals (titles, headings, internal anchors, schema hints when visible)
This is where platform differences matter.
On WordPress, a scan needs to understand posts vs pages, categories/tags, and common URL patterns like
/blog/
or
/category/
. If you plan to auto-publish, your integration has to map correctly to your CMS fields and taxonomy. VellumUp supports that through the WordPress auto-publishing integration so the scan results can flow into draft or scheduled posts without manual copy-paste.
On Shopify, the scan has to treat product and collection pages as first-class SEO assets. A lot of “etsy seo tools” advice is portable (keywording, intent matching), but Shopify needs better internal linking between collections, products, and guides. That is why the Shopify integration for publishing SEO content matters: it lets the system place content where it can actually support product discovery.
On Webflow, structure is everything. Webflow sites often have clean design but inconsistent collections and slug rules. The Webflow publishing integration helps keep the scan-to-publish pipeline aligned with your CMS collections.
A scan is also where you catch problems that kill rankings quietly: orphan pages, duplicate titles, thin category pages, and broken internal paths.
AI writing: how brand voice learning is extracted from your URL
AI writing that ranks and converts is mostly voice discipline. The scan is where the system learns what “sounds like you” by analyzing real copy that already exists on your site.
Brand voice learning usually pulls signals like:
What the scan looks at
What it learns
What it changes in output
Sentence length and rhythm
Punchy vs detailed
Shorter intros, fewer long clauses
Common phrases and terminology
Your “in-house” language
Uses your product names and customer terms consistently
Tone markers
Formal, friendly, technical, bold
Matches your level of confidence and directness
CTA patterns
How you ask for action
Keeps CTAs aligned with your existing style
Formatting habits
Headings, tables, FAQs
Mirrors how your audience consumes info
One sentence you can hold us to: If the scan cannot explain your voice in plain language, it cannot reproduce it in long-form content.
This is also where “humanizer” claims get misunderstood. A “walter writes ai humanizer” approach should not mean swapping words to dodge detectors. It should mean writing like a competent human brand: specific, consistent, and grounded in your real product.
If you want the failure modes to avoid, keep AI writing mistakes that hurt SEO and trust bookmarked. The most common one we see is fake specificity: confident statements with no real details from the business.
walter writes ai: internal link structure, topical authority, and content planning
walter writes ai uses the scan to understand your internal link graph so it can build topical authority instead of publishing isolated posts.
A good scan identifies:
Which pages already attract search traffic (often your “money pages”)
Which pages are link hubs (pricing, category, cornerstone guides)
Which pages are orphaned (no internal links pointing in)
What anchor text you already use (and what you never use)
This matters because internal linking is not decoration. It is how you distribute relevance and authority across the site. Google’s own documentation on how Google Search works makes it clear that discovery and understanding depend on links and structure.
Once the system knows your structure, it can plan content in clusters. Example from a real setup pattern we use:
One “hub” guide targeting a high-intent keyword
6 to 10 supporting articles targeting long-tail questions
Internal links that point back to the hub and forward to conversion pages
That is what people mean by “content machines” when they use the term correctly: not mass publishing, but repeatable, structured growth.
If you want a deeper walkthrough of how that product-level workflow is supposed to look, The Complete Guide to Walter Writes AI breaks down the moving parts.
Best AI for writing: what a scan enables that prompt-only tools cannot
Best AI for writing is not about the model. It is about the system around the model: research, constraints, linking, and publishing.
A scan enables three things prompt-only tools cannot do reliably:
First, it prevents duplication. If you already have a “pricing” explanation or a “shipping policy” guide, the plan should expand around it, not rewrite it.
Second, it makes topic research specific to your site. Instead of generic keyword lists, the scan lets the planner target gaps around your existing categories, products, and customer questions. For keyword data and difficulty, we still sanity-check against industry tools (people often pair workflows with “surfer seo” for on-page guidance), but the scan is what makes the topics fit your actual site.
Third, it makes publishing clean. A tool can write a great article and still fail if it cannot place it into the right CMS type with the right fields. That is why integrations matter. If you are evaluating options, our opinion is simple: any AI writer without reliable auto-publishing is a drafting tool, not an engine. Start from the full list of CMS integrations and work backward from your stack.
For SEO benchmarks, remember that speed and UX still gate performance. Google’s Core Web Vitals guidance is worth reviewing because slow templates can cap your gains even with strong content.
Website Scan for SEO setup: what you should prepare before scanning
You can run a scan in minutes, but you will get better output if you prepare the inputs that a crawler cannot infer.
Here is the short checklist we use when onboarding a site:
Pick 3 to 5 pages that represent your best writing (homepage, top landing page, a strong blog post). This anchors voice learning.
Identify your highest-value conversion pages (product, service, demo, pricing). These become internal link targets.
Decide what not to touch (legal pages, thin legacy posts, partner pages). The scan can find them, but your rules should exclude them.
Confirm your CMS and publishing preferences (draft vs scheduled, categories, author, featured image rules).
List any “must-say” and “never-say” terms (brand compliance, regulated claims, competitor names).
One practical note: if your site blocks crawlers with robots.txt or noindex tags, scanning will be incomplete. That can be intentional, but you should know it upfront.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do publishers check for AI writing?
Some do, especially for guest posts and editorial submissions. On your own site, the bigger risk is not “getting caught” but publishing weak, generic pages that do not earn links or rankings.
Does Walter write pass AI detection?
Detection scores are inconsistent and easy to game, so we do not treat them as a goal. The goal is content that is accurate, brand-consistent, and useful enough that users stay and convert.
What is the content machine?
A content machine is a workflow that repeatedly finds topics, writes, links, and publishes on schedule. The scan is what makes it site-specific instead of mass-produced content.
Is 20% AI detection bad?
Not by itself. A low or high percentage does not tell you if the content is correct, differentiated, or aligned with search intent, which is what rankings and conversions respond to.
Next step: scan your site like a search engine would
Start by auditing your current structure: list your top 20 pages, your top 5 conversion pages, and the 10 topics you wish you ranked for. Then run a website scan for SEO and compare what the crawler finds with what you think your site looks like. The gap between those two is where your fastest SEO wins usually live.
If you want the scan to immediately turn into a publishing plan, create your workspace and connect your CMS so articles can be scheduled end-to-end from day one: create a VellumUp account to scan your URL.
VellumUp8 min read
