A website audit is a structured review of whether your site can be found by search engines, read by AI tools, and trusted by the people who land on it. It covers the technical base, the content, the structure linking it together, and the signals other sites send about you. Done properly it ends with a short list of what to fix and the order to fix it in.

We run two. The Complimentary Website Overview is a free surface review: where you stand in search today, the gaps standing open in your market, and the one change worth making first. The Brand Authority Audit is the deep version, built for a business deciding whether to commit to a retainer.

Neither is a tool report. A scanner finds faults. An audit decides which of them is costing you money.

The report a scanner gives you

A business runs its site through a free checker. Back comes a score out of a hundred and three hundred and forty issues, sorted by the tool's own idea of severity. Missing alt text sits in the list next to a page Google cannot reach at all. Nothing says which one is losing the enquiry.

The owner forwards it to a developer, who fixes the cheap ones. The score improves. The rankings do not move, because the thing holding them down was never on the list.

Why a list of faults is not a diagnosis

A scanner reads your site on its own. It cannot see the three competitors ranking above you, what they cover that you do not, or which search you are closest to winning. Those are the questions deciding where your money should go, and no automated report asks them.

This is why audits have earned a poor name. Most are a tool export with a logo on the front. The findings are real and the priorities are invented, so the work following it is busywork with a report to justify the bill.

What the two audits cover

The Complimentary Website Overview is free, and covers:

• Which searches your site appears for now, and where it sits on each
• Content depth measured against the sites currently outranking you
• The technical base: speed, whether Google can crawl and list the site, schema
• Structure and internal linking, and whether the pages back each other up
• Trust and conversion signals on the pages a buyer actually lands on
• One quick win worth doing first, whether or not you work with us

The Brand Authority Audit goes further, for a business weighing a retainer:

• Measured AI Share of Voice: how often you are named in Google AI Overviews for your own subject
• Competitor tables showing who owns the searches you want and by how far
• The depth gap in numbers, article by article
• Site forensics, and what each finding costs while it stands
• The retainer scope the findings call for, and the first ninety days of work

The Overview is free and carries no commitment. The Brand Authority Audit is quoted on request, and comes at no charge for a business coming onto a retainer.

What an audit finds that a tool does not

The findings are rarely dramatic. For a business with content already published, the most useful one is usually a short list of pages sitting between positions eleven and twenty: close enough to page one that rewriting them properly moves faster than publishing anything new.

The second is the depth gap. Your articles run eight hundred words on subjects your competitors cover in two thousand, with sources, and the rankings have followed accordingly. No scanner reports that, because it never opens a competitor.

For a business starting from nothing, the overview works out which subject to own first and which questions to answer before anything is written. Either way it takes the guessing out of where to start.

What changes after the audit

An audit ends with an order of work, not a score. The difference shows up in what happens next: the first month is spent on the two or three things deciding the rankings, instead of on forty small fixes a tool sorted by its own severity rating.

A law practice we audited found an outdated site with no optimisation on it at all. The audit named what had to change before a single article was written, and the rebuild followed the order it set. Nine months later the firm sat on page one for three of its main terms, with no money spent on ads.

There is a second reason to know where you stand. AI tools name businesses whose sites they can read and whose claims other sources back up. A site failing on either count is skipped in AI answers, and no traffic report will ever tell you it happened. The audit is where that becomes visible.

Read the thinking behind this