Video: "Hermes: This Free AI SEO Super Agent is Insane" by Julian Goldie on YouTube.
What makes Hermes different from a regular AI chat tool
Most AI tools work in a single turn: you ask, it answers, you ask again. That puts all the project management back on you. Hermes works differently — you give it a goal and it keeps checking progress after every step, deciding what to do next and continuing until the whole task is complete.
In practice this means you can hand it something like "build me a keyword cluster for a UK plumbing business" and walk away. It'll plan the cluster, identify related terms, group them by intent, and structure the output — without needing you to prompt each stage separately. That's a meaningful shift for anyone managing a lot of SEO work with a small team.
What Hermes can actually do for SEO
Julian's tests covered the kind of SEO tasks that normally eat an afternoon: keyword cluster planning, content calendar drafting, URL and navigation structure, internal link planning, and building static landing pages from scratch — including the HTML, metadata, schema, and deployment.
The content planning work was particularly solid. Ask it to plan a blog for a specific niche and it returns keyword clusters grouped by topic, suggested article angles, content types, rough word counts, and internal link depth. That's a working brief, not just a list of ideas.
Worth knowing: the output quality responds to how clearly you define the goal upfront. A vague instruction produces a vague plan. Specific targets — niche, audience, intent, format — get you output you can actually use.
The goal loop: how it stays on track
The agent checks its own progress at the end of every turn. If the task isn't done, it carries on. If it hits a dead end, it adapts and tries a different route. That's what separates it from a prompt chain you set up manually — there's a feedback mechanism built into the workflow rather than bolted on afterwards.
Hermes also runs multiple AI workers in parallel, and if one fails — say an API is down — it switches automatically. That matters if you're running it on a server rather than your laptop and don't want to babysit it.
What's overstated
The "super agent" framing is a bit much. Hermes is a genuinely useful autonomous agent, but it's not a one-click SEO department. The keyword choices it makes need checking against real search volume data — it doesn't have live access to search console figures, and its instinct for what a UK audience searches doesn't always match what the tools show.
Setup also takes more than five minutes. You need Ollama installed, a model downloaded, and Hermes configured. That's not hard, but it's a proper setup job rather than a sign-up and go.
Where this connects to NordSys
We use Hermes Agent in our own delivery workflow — it handles the structured, repetitive parts of SEO work that don't need human judgement on every step. If you want an AI agent set up for your business that actually runs multi-step tasks without hand-holding, that's exactly what our AI Agents service delivers — configured, tested, and ready to work.
See our AI Agents service →