Video: "Hermes: This Free AI SEO Super Agent is Insane" by Julian Goldie on YouTube.
Why Hermes behaves differently from a standard AI chat tool
The key difference is goals. A chatbot waits for your next message and responds. Hermes accepts a goal — "build a keyword cluster for this niche and produce content outlines for the top five terms" — and works through it in a loop until the job is done. You are not prompting each step; you are setting a target and reviewing the output.
For SEO, that matters. Most of the actual work in building a content strategy — clustering keywords by intent, mapping internal links, drafting outlines, checking for cannibalisation — is mechanical and repetitive. It is also exactly the kind of multi-step task where an agent running loops is more efficient than a human prompting a chatbot one question at a time.
What it actually handles across an SEO workflow
Julian tested Hermes on a real brief covering multiple stages of a search strategy. On keyword clustering, the agent grouped terms logically by intent and commercial value — the output needed some editing but not rebuilding from scratch. On content planning, it produced structured outlines with reasonable H2 and H3 suggestions based on the keyword group rather than generic filler headings.
The most impressive result was on page generation: given a keyword target and a brief, Hermes drafted a full page including meta description, structured headings, and body copy in one pass. The tone was consistent and the factual content was accurate enough to use as a first draft without significant corrections. That said, anything requiring specialist knowledge or brand-specific voice needed reviewing before publishing — the agent writes competently, not distinctively.
Swarm mode for content at scale
Where Hermes becomes genuinely interesting for a content operation is swarm mode. You configure multiple agent profiles — one that researches, one that plans, one that drafts — and launch them all against the same brief simultaneously. They work in parallel on a shared task board rather than sequentially.
In practice, this means a cluster of ten related articles can be planned and first-drafted in roughly the time it previously took to draft one. The quality of individual swarm outputs is slightly lower than a focused single-agent run, but for producing a volume of first drafts that a human then edits, the time saving is substantial. The approach works best when the content brief is consistent and the topic area is well-defined.
What it does not do well yet
Hermes is not a replacement for a proper SEO strategy. It cannot tell you whether a market is worth entering, whether your domain has the authority to rank for a given term, or whether a competitor's position is genuinely vulnerable. Those judgements still need a person who understands the commercial picture. The agent is very good at execution once the strategy exists; it is not much use for forming the strategy in the first place.
Content authority is the other limit. For competitive terms where ranking requires genuine subject-matter credibility — detailed technical content, original research, expert opinions — Hermes will draft something competent but generic. That may be enough for mid-competition informational terms. For anything serious, treat the output as a structural scaffold rather than the finished article.
Where this connects to NordSys
We use Hermes Agent as part of the SEO work we do for UK businesses — specifically for the parts of content strategy and production that are mechanical enough for an agent to handle well. If you want to understand where an agent-assisted SEO workflow makes sense for your situation, and where it would still need experienced input, that is a straightforward conversation.
See our SEO & AI Ranking service →