soft-404-audit

soft-404-audit is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from JakeLabate/Claude-SEO-Skills. It costs 140 tokens per session (1,272 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A website checker that finds pages pretending to exist even though they are missing, empty, or show an error. These pages wrongly return a “200 OK” response instead of a real “not found” response.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to crawl a website, test missing addresses, find thin or error-template pages, and create a report for fixing soft 404 problems.
Why use it?
It helps prevent search engines from wasting time on fake pages or removing valid pages from search results. It also reveals servers that treat every unknown web address as an existing page.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to crawl a website, test missing addresses, find thin or error-template pages, and create a report for fixing soft 404 problems.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jakelabate/claude-seo-skills/soft-404-audit
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add JakeLabate/Claude-SEO-Skills --skill soft-404-audit
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JakeLabate/Claude-SEO-Skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for soft-404-audit

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jakelabate/claude-seo-skills/soft-404-audit/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jakelabate/claude-seo-skills/soft-404-audit)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jakelabate/claude-seo-skills/soft-404-audit"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jakelabate/claude-seo-skills/soft-404-audit/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for soft-404-audit

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jakelabate/claude-seo-skills/soft-404-audit"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jakelabate/claude-seo-skills/soft-404-audit.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 140 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,272 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00140 $0.01272
Opus 5 $0.00070 $0.00636
Sonnet 5 $0.00028 $0.00254
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00127

Measured 11d ago against content hash 755b69220241, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

soft-404-audit scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 5 executable files (scripts/audit_soft404.py, scripts/extract_pages.py, scripts/fetch_pages.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/soft-404-audit/SKILL.md · 111 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 111 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Soft 404 Audit

Audit a website for soft 404s and produce an actionable report. A soft 404 is a page that returns 200 OK but is really a "not found"/empty page — it wastes crawl budget and can get real URLs dropped from the index.

When to use this skill

Use this skill when the user asks to:

  • Audit or fix soft 404s (including Search Console "Soft 404" reports)
  • Find pages that return 200 but should return 404/410
  • Check whether the site returns a real 404 for missing URLs
  • Find empty or error-template pages served as live pages

Inputs to collect

  1. Site URL or URL list — a live site root to crawl (auto-seeds from /sitemap.xml), or a text file with --url-list. A URL list of the pages Search Console flagged works well.
  2. Scope — pages to crawl (default 500, --max-pages).
  3. Thin threshold — word count below which a 200 page is "thin" (default 50, --thin-words); raise it for content-heavy sites.

Workflow

Step 1: Crawl and probe

Use scripts/extract_pages.py:

python3 scripts/extract_pages.py https://example.com --max-pages 500 --output soft404_inventory.json
# already crawled once (e.g. in a full SEO audit)? skip the crawl and reuse the shared cache:
# python3 scripts/fetch_pages.py https://example.com --output page_cache.json
# python3 scripts/extract_pages.py --from-cache page_cache.json --output soft404_inventory.json

It records each page's status, title, first H1, visible word count, and whether error phrases appear in the title/H1, then sends one request to a deliberately non-existent URL to learn how the site handles missing pages.

Step 2: Run the audit checks

python3 scripts/audit_soft404.py soft404_inventory.json --output audit_report.json

Step 3: Evaluate the audit checks

Evaluate each check in references/audit-checks.md. Core checks:

Check Severity
Soft 404 (error page served as 200) High
Missing URLs return 200 (site-wide) High
Thin page matching the error template Medium
Empty / near-empty page Low

Read the full file on GitHub · 111 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 111 lines · 140 tokens per session scan A 755b69220241

Subscribe to this mod's changes

soft-404-audit is a skill published in the GitHub repository JakeLabate/Claude-SEO-Skills (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 140 tokens to every session and 1,272 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.