Testing Manus AI for SEM/SEO Tasks: a New Bar Has Been Set
Manus is a new AI Agent that launched in March. It went quite viral on X and other platforms with early users reporting impressive results in having Manus achieve tasks beyond what other LLMs can do.
As far as we know, Manus is not an LLM itself, but rather is built on top of existing base technologies including Anthropic. It was critiqued following an explosive launch for being a “wrapper” on Claude. Manus is a Chinese company and its launch was something like a “DeepSeek moment” where a Chinese AI firm took prominence in the global AI dialog.
In this post, we’re going to look at Manus as an AI Agent for completing marketing tasks related to SEM and SEO. Frankly the short version: Manus has set a new bar for accomplishing knowledge work tasks through AI. Though it isn’t perfect, and we as users are also still just learning the product, clearly this tool represents a vision for the future of knowledge work: real AI agents, using web browsers to accomplish tasks from end to end.
Test #1: Running an SEO Audit with Manus
Our first test was prompting Manus to complete an SEO Audit. We issued a basic prompt to Manus, without much structure and written quickly. Here’s what we asked:
Perform an SEO audit of this website: [example domain]. The audit should cover: Analysis of keyword placement in title tags, headings, and body text on important pages. The SEO audit should include important technical SEO factors including the website crawl-ability, use of a sitemap, robot.txt configuration, and more. The SEO audit should look at Google’s index of the website to see how well Google has indexed the website. The SEO audit should include competitive research to show how strong competitive websites are from an SEO perspective. The SEO audit should include suggestions on how to improve SEO and a 30, 60, 90 day action plan. Format the SEO audit in a published webpage. Use the logo and visual style from the website https://openmoves.com/ for the formatting of the audit. (Don’t get confused, we don’t want to do the SEO audit on https://openmoves.com/, we just want to use the logo and colors from this website for the style of our SEO audit.) You don’t have to follow this prompt exactly, be creative and use other information you have about SEO audits to compile an impressive SEO audit.
The end product was very impressive given the rather lazy prompt. Manus one-shotted the formatting to match the OpenMoves website, producing a final product that looked basically perfect visually. The findings it delivered were well done, seemed basically correct, and covered what we asked. Obviously we could have given more specific prompting to get better output. It delivered basically a solid SEO audit and action plan, nicely designed, in a single output.
Manus Made This in One Shot
Test #2: Market Research
Our second test: using Manus for market research, including having Manus directly use our SpyFu account. In this case our prompt was long and detailed, here are a few excerpts from it:
Using Google Search, search for BOTOX New York City and identify 50 companies that are the most relevant. This should be the top ranked businesses on Google search and Google maps for BOTOX New York. Do not find aggregators like Yelp or other directories, find only actual businesses…
In column B, use SPYFU to identify the estimated monthly SEO clicks. In SPYFU, you can do this by entering the domain you’ve found into the search box, clicking search, then clicking SEO overview, then copying the data from “Est Monthly Seo Clicks” data on the page…
In column F, you will have to crawl each website to find a Locations page, and then based on the contents of this page try to identify the number of locations the business has. This is not structured data, it will be different for each website. If you can’t identify a number of locations then simply write Unknown. The best way to do this is to look for a Locations or Contact page on each website and then count the number of unique addresses. Report the count of addresses, not the actual addresses…
The outcome was a correctly formatted Excel document, in which Manus seemed to correctly find target companies, query the requisite data from SpyFu, and produce a useful final report. It did this in one prompt and with a higher degree of accuracy than ChatGPT Operator’s performance on a similar task.
Manus Can Make Excel Files Combining Google + SpyFu Research
Test #3: Google Ads Analysis in Powerpoint
Our third and hardest test: can Manus make a Google Ads analysis, in a finished and formatted Powerpoint, from end to end? Once again our prompt was long, we’ll just share an excerpt,
See attached a powerpoint template. We are going to work from this template. On slide 12 you can see where there is a template slide. This is the section you are going to edit. All your slides should be formatted roughly like slide 12: there is a data block, image, or report in the center of the slide, a heading for the slide, and 4 or 5 bullets summarizing the findings for the slide. It’s important that each slide looks visually good and matches this format. You can delete the actual template slide once you are finished. The slides you are making should all go in this section, the section between the Google Ads Opportunity Overview title slide, and the Performance Creative and CRO title slide…
You will make a series of new slides for the Google Ads audit. Starting on slide 12, the template, you can replace the template with a slide: Google Ads Account Overview. On the overview slide, provide a summary of the overall Google Ads account performance, including all campaigns of all statuses, over the last 13 months. Provide this in a table with rows for Clicks, Impressions, CTR, Cost, Conversions, Cost per Conversion, Conversion Rate. This performance table should be provided as the DATA portion of the slide. The bullets should summarize insights on performance…
The outcome here was impressive, but less complete than the other 2 tests. It required several revisions to get Manus to actually make useful PPT slides, and would probably require a more cleverly designed prompt and template to make this really perfect, however as a proof of concept this worked and shows a level of workflow completeness that is quite amazing: Manus logs in to Google Ads, queries data, pulls reports, makes slides, and generates commentary.
Manus Directly Makes Powerpoint Slides (But it needs a little help)
