Strategic SEO & AI Search Audit

Why you may need an external audit

Four reasons, and they’re usually more than one at a time:

  1. Your in-house SEO hasn’t worked in a specific area before: international SEO, AI search visibility, or a retail vertical.
  2. Your in-house SEO has looked at the same site every day for three years and has gone blind to it. That isn’t a failing, but it happens in every field, and an outside perspective is the standard remedy.
  3. The team has the skill but not the weeks an in-depth audit takes.
  4. All of the above.

There’s a fifth now. Your traffic changed shape, and nobody can tell you whether it was a core update, a shift in how demand is being answered upstream of your site, or both.

What a strategic audit actually is

A strategic audit is a snapshot of where your site stands, a diagnosis of what’s holding it back, and a prioritised plan for the short, medium and long term.

What it covers depends on three things:

  • Your business objectives. Selling products and maximising ad impressions are different problems.
  • Your industry. Real estate and news publishing fail in different ways.
  • Your markets. Local, national and multi-country sites have almost nothing in common structurally.

So no two audits are the same. Broadly, an audit draws from four tracks:

Retrieval & technical foundations — crawling, indexing, architecture, canonicalisation, internal linking, duplication, rendering. Including what most audits still skip: the gap between what your server sends and what AI crawlers actually fetch and understand.

Semantics & entity architecture — structured data, topical architecture, and how search engines and language models currently resolve your brand as an entity. Or fail to.

Content & demand — content audit, topical and entity research, on-page, and where your content is being summarised upstream rather than clicked.

Market & competitive context — international configuration where relevant, link profile, and who is actually being cited in your category.

How I run one

First, a long conversation about your business goals and your marketing plan. Until I understand what the company is trying to achieve, an audit is just a list of technical opinions. That conversation is what gives the findings meaning.

Then I’ll ask for access to Google Search Console, your analytics platform, and anything else you measure with — Bing Webmaster Tools, Adobe Analytics, HubSpot. I’ll also ask for recent server logs, and not only for Googlebot: how GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended crawl your site is now part of the diagnosis.

What you get is not a list of issues with best practices attached:

  • A clear, jargon-free, visual explanation of each issue and why it matters commercially;
  • One or more solutions for each;
  • A prioritised implementation checklist, weighted by effort against likely impact;
  • All the working documents, so your team can verify the reasoning rather than take it on trust.

Every audit includes a 30-day follow-up period, with regular video calls to work through the findings with whoever has to implement them, and to set up a potential and recommended ongoing consultancy support.

An audit nobody implements is an expensive PDF.

If you don’t need the full audit

I also run vertical audits, scoped to one area:

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