Commodity Checker
Commodity content gets replaced in seconds.
ChatGPT rewrites your “10 tips” in 60 seconds. Google AI Overviews answer “What is X?” directly. Blind comparisons get replaced by AI frameworks before your article is even clicked.
The deeper problem: most content audit tools optimize for matching the competition – in other words, for even more commodity.
8 dimensions, one weighting, one score
D1 – Proprietary Data
Original measurement data, internal metrics, real project numbers only you could have collected.
D2 – Personal Experience
Your own execution of the task – not just secondhand theoretical knowledge.
D3 – Opinion / Stance
Clear position the author defends. No ‘it depends’ fence-sitting.
D4 – Specificity
Concrete numbers, industries, time frames and situations instead of vague generalizations.
D5 – Replication Resistance
How hard is it to replicate your content via a ChatGPT prompt? (inverted)
D6 – Information Gain
What does someone with two years of expertise in the field still learn from this?
D7 – Entity Signals
Author attribution, credentials, linked bio, Schema @type:Person.
D8 – Structural Originality
Does the article structure reflect a unique knowledge schema or is it the standard template?
Five phases. Fully automatic.
Input & Fetch
URL or text input detected. Full text, title, H-tags, meta description, author signals and schema get extracted.
Surface Analysis
Determine the commodity fingerprint based on title and H-structure. Derive the primary keyword for the SERP comparison.
SERP Delta
Compare against the top-3 competitors via DataForSEO or web search. Differentiation score from 1 to 5.
contentEffort Score
Evaluate eight dimensions, calculate the weighted score, run the five-question self-test in parallel.
Report
Strengths, rescue plan, headline rewrites and prioritized immediate actions – all in one structured Markdown report.
6 typical patterns that get replaced
Pattern A: Tips List
Fully AI-replicable in under 60 seconds. Any GPT prompt with the keyword produces the same content.
Pattern B: Definition Stub
Definitions are commodity by nature. AI Overviews answer them directly from structured data.
Pattern C: Blind Comparison
Comparisons without your own decision history are exactly what AI does better than humans.
Pattern D: Standard Guide
Comprehensiveness as the only value. Hundreds of competitors share the exact same structure.
Pattern E: Tutorial Clone
Tutorials without your own execution get instantly outranked by official tool documentation.
Pattern F: Non-Commodity
Already has a clear perspective, proprietary data and personal context. Optimization, not repair.
Five questions the skill answers automatically.
Alongside the score calculation, a five-question self-test runs in parallel. The result feeds into the report and gives you a second, independent view on the question: how replaceable is my content really?
The questions are designed to work without the tool too – you can use them as a sanity check before publishing. For the methodology behind each question and concrete examples from real audits, see my blog post Commodity Content: Am I Already Replaceable?
Christian Ott
SEO Consultant & Product Developer
I have been doing SEO professionally since 2014. I built the Commodity Checker because I keep running into the same pattern in audits: solid content, technically clean – and still entirely replaceable. Score tools that only optimize for SERP patterns do not help here.
The skill is the heuristic implementation of a question I ask myself in every audit: would anyone miss this page if it went offline tomorrow?
What you should also know
No. The score is a heuristic estimation that draws on publicly discussed analyses of the Google Content Warehouse Leak 2024 (via Shaun Anderson / Hobo-Web). Google has never officially confirmed the attribute, nor the weighting. The score is meant as orientation – not as a ranking prediction.
You need Claude Code – the CLI from Anthropic. There is a free plan and paid Pro plans. The skill itself is free and available under the MIT license on GitHub.
A full analysis with URL fetch, SERP delta, 8-dimension scoring and report typically takes between 30 seconds and 2 minutes – depending on article length and whether DataForSEO is available as the SERP source. In quick mode (headline only) it is much faster.
Yes. The skill detects the input language automatically and responds accordingly. The fingerprint patterns were primarily developed for DACH-typical structures, but transfer cleanly to English-language content.
The skill tries DataForSEO first, then web search as a fallback. If neither is available, the SERP delta phase is skipped and explicitly flagged in the report. The other phases (fingerprint, 8 dimensions, self-test, rescue plan) run normally.
Yes – the skill analyzes only publicly accessible content. It is useful for benchmarking competitor articles or scoping out a topic before writing. You are responsible for ensuring you have the right to analyze the content.
Surfer and Clearscope optimize for SERP patterns (word count, topics, NLP terms) – meaning matching the existing competition. The Commodity Checker measures the opposite: how far you move away from that competition. Both perspectives complement each other.
Installed in one line
claude skills install commodity-checker.skill
This skill is not affiliated with Google and does not represent any official statement by Google. All ratings are heuristic estimates based on a custom methodology that draws on publicly discussed analyses of the Google Content Warehouse Leak (2024, via Shaun Anderson / Hobo-Web) – not a verified statement about Google’s actual ranking logic. No liability is assumed for accuracy, completeness or impact on rankings. The skill analyzes only publicly accessible URLs.
