// SB Marketing · Website audit

A score tells you a number. We tell you what it missed.

A website audit for three audiences at once — search engines, answer boxes, and the AI assistants that quote sources. We check whether a crawler can reach you at all before we say a word about your content, because content advice given to a site that blocks crawlers is advice that cannot work.

Accesschecked first, always

Every pagenot a sample, not the homepage

Evidenceyour own server log, where we can

No scorefindings ordered by consequence

// Why the number lies

A tool graded this site 68 out of 100 while it was turning AI crawlers away.

In August 2026 we ran a free AI-visibility scanner on our own website. It returned 68/100 for AI-search readiness and a list of content suggestions. On the same day, our own server was refusing 530 crawler requests a week — including Google’s — because of a platform default nobody had chosen.

The scanner never looked at robots.txt. It graded our writing for an audience that had been told to go away. We removed the block, and refusals went from 428 in a week to zero within 24 hours.

That is the whole argument for this service, and we found it on ourselves before we sold it to anyone. Its real findings were genuine, by the way — unlabelled form fields, thin sourcing — and we fixed those too. We are not selling against the tools. We are selling the judgement they cannot contain.

// Three readers, one site

SEO, AEO and GEO are one job.

SEO — can it be found?

Every URL your sitemap advertises, fetched one by one. Canonicals that resolve. Pages nothing links to. Headings that say what the page is. The unglamorous half that decides whether anything else matters.

ii.

AEO — can it be the answer?

Whether a question gets answered plainly enough to be lifted into an answer box, and whether your structured data describes the business you are actually running rather than the one you were two years ago.

iii.

GEO — can it be quoted?

Whether citation crawlers can reach you, and whether there is anything on the page worth lifting. A named person saying something measured +41% over baseline in the study that defined this field. Keyword stuffing measured worse than doing nothing.

// The order never changes

Access, render, identity, quotable, weight, freshness.

Access first, every time. Can a citation crawler reach the site, and what does your server actually answer when one arrives? A file is a request; a firewall rule is a wall. We check both.

Then: does the page exist without JavaScript. Is the business one machine-readable entity or four spellings of one. Is there anything an engine can quote. What blocks the first paint. Can a reader — and a machine — tell when it was written.

And if your site is on Cloudflare, we can show you your own edge: which AI crawlers arrived, what you answered them, how many were refused. That is invisible from outside. A site turning crawlers away loads perfectly in a browser.

// What arrives

A document you could hand to a developer.

The report

Findings ordered by consequence — what blocks everything, what costs you something today, what is already right. Every line says how it was established, and a section states plainly what we could not check and why.

ii.

The questions

The most useful page is the one no tool produces: the things only you can answer. Are those testimonials real, and do you have permission? is usually worth more than everything a scanner found.

iii.

The proof, if you want it

Fixes are quoted separately, per finding, and never bundled. If you take them, we re-run the same audit afterwards and show what moved. A number that changed because of something we did beats any score.

// What it costs

Three ways in. All fixed scope.

The Reality Check — from $2,500

One domain. What you believe about your website that is not true. A report of 6–10 pages, no fixes. Deliberately small enough to be a decision rather than a procurement exercise.

ii.

The Full Audit — $4,500 to $9,000

Every page, all three ladders, plus a 60-minute working session. Priced on the size of the site. The session is where the fee is earned — a report cannot tell you whether a true statement is still true.

iii.

Audit, fix, prove — quoted per finding

We do the work, then re-run the same audit and show what moved. Quoted item by item, never bundled — bundling would make the audit look like a pretext, and it is not one.

Every engagement covers one domain. If two of your domains turn out to be the same entity in a search engine’s eyes, we will say so and charge for one. Estimated effort is quoted by a person — our tool leaves it blank on purpose, because a crawler cannot know whether a broken canonical is a one-line redirect or a fortnight of work.

// Stated up front

Four things we will not do.

We will not promise rankings, traffic or a timeline. Those are decided by search engines using signals no consultancy controls, and anyone promising them is selling you something else.

We will not give you a score. We will not sell you AI visibility monitoring — that is a subscription business and you should buy it from a firm whose whole product is running it. And we will not invent a finding to fill a section; if a page is already right, the report says so.

One audit covers one domain. If two of your domains turn out to be the same entity in a search engine’s eyes, we will tell you, and charge for one.

// Questions

Before you ask.

Is this SEO, or something new?+

It is SEO, extended. Google's own documentation puts it plainly: optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience, and thus still SEO. What changed is that a second and third audience now read your site — answer boxes and AI assistants — and they are far less forgiving about whether they can reach you at all.

Why do you not give a score?+

Because a score built from checks of very different importance is arithmetic dressed as judgement. A blocked crawler and a missing date tag cannot sit in the same average. Findings are ordered by consequence instead: what blocks everything, what costs you something today, and what is already right.

Do you guarantee better rankings?+

No, and be wary of anyone who does. We report what is measurably wrong and what we changed. Rankings are decided by search engines using signals no consultancy controls.

What can you see that a free scanner cannot?+

Whether the site is on Cloudflare decides this. If it is, we can read your own edge: which AI crawlers actually arrived, what your server answered them, and how many were refused. That is invisible from outside — a site turning crawlers away still loads perfectly in a browser.

Do you sell AI visibility monitoring?+

No. Checking daily whether an AI assistant mentions your brand is a subscription business priced per monitored prompt, and you are better served buying it from a firm whose whole product is running it. We do the thing that has to happen first: finding out why the answer is what it is, and fixing it.

What do you need from us?+

Read-only access to whatever you already have — Search Console, and an analytics token if you are on Cloudflare. You generate every credential and you can revoke it. We never ask for a password and never ask for admin.

Current as of August 2026.