Video: "Hermes Agent: Free AI SEO agent is wild..." by Julian Goldie on YouTube.
What Hermes Agent is, and why SEO suits it
Hermes Agent is a free, open-source autonomous agent from Nous Research. It is not a chatbot — it is designed to work through multi-step tasks in a loop, using tools and writing files along the way. You give it a goal rather than a prompt, and it keeps going until the job is done or it runs into something it can't resolve.
SEO is a reasonable fit for this kind of agent because the work is genuinely structured. A site audit follows a sequence. A content calendar has a logic to it. Keyword clustering, brief writing, and internal linking all have rules you can describe. That said, a 50-page site is a big ask — there are a lot of moving parts and the agent has to hold a plan across many steps.
The goal feature: give it an objective and stand back
The key capability here is Hermes Agent's goal function. Instead of prompting it turn by turn, you describe the end state — in this case, a complete 50-page SEO site covering a specific niche — and the agent plans the project, breaks it into tasks, and starts working through them. It generates files locally: keyword lists, cluster maps, page outlines, brief templates, a proposed URL structure and navigation.
In practice, the planning phase is the strongest part. The agent produces a coherent site architecture, organises pages into topic clusters, and maps internal linking depth correctly. It knows that a 50-page site needs hub pages, spoke pages, and a clear hierarchy — and it builds that in. That part is genuinely useful and would take a human SEO several hours to do from scratch.
Swarm mode: running multiple agents in parallel
Where it gets more interesting is swarm mode. Rather than one agent working through 50 pages sequentially, swarm mode spins up parallel agents to handle different sections simultaneously. One works on the tech cluster, another on the location pages, a third on supporting articles. In theory this makes the agent much faster for large site builds.
Worth knowing: swarm mode works best when the tasks are genuinely independent. If the agent on the location pages needs to know what the hub page says before it can write anchor text, you can hit co-ordination problems. That is still mostly a limitation of the current Hermes version rather than a fundamental issue — the team is actively working on agent-to-agent communication.
Where the output needs human review
The content drafts — actual page copy — are where you still need to check the work. The agent can write to a brief and stay on topic, but it does not know your client's tone, their differentiators, or the specific things that would make a reader actually trust the page. You get functional first drafts, not finished copy.
The other thing to watch is factual grounding. Hermes Agent draws on what is in its context and training — it does not browse live for updated pricing, statistics, or regulation changes. For content where accuracy matters (financial services, healthcare, legal), you need a review step before anything goes near a CMS. This is not a criticism of the agent; it is just how autonomous agents work right now.
Where this connects to NordSys
Hermes Agent is a capable free tool, but getting real SEO value out of it means knowing how to set up the goal properly, structure the brief, review the output for accuracy, and integrate it into a wider content and linking strategy. That is the kind of work we do with clients — combining AI tools with SEO expertise so the output is actually useful, not just voluminous. If you want to explore what an AI-assisted SEO workflow could look like for your site, our SEO & AI Ranking service is the right starting point.
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