Library
Everything we check, explained
Nine subject areas, from how crawling actually works through to reviews, third-party reputation and working out whether any of it paid off. Free, and as deep as you want to go.
A navigation page. Each section it links to carries its own grade.
Every check in the audit is explained here, free, in as much depth as you want.
Nine areas. Each one has an overview page, and under it a set of pages going into the specifics. Start wherever your problem is.
Where should I start?
Read the foundations first — the five things both Google and the AI engines reward. Then go to whichever section covers the part you're responsible for, and work down from its overview page.
The sections stand alone, but they all assume the foundations. If you're checking out a vendor rather than doing the work yourself, buying services is self-contained and you can read just that.
Search fundamentals
What happens between somebody asking a question and getting an answer, what changed when answers started replacing lists, and the tricks that have been penalized for twenty years and still get sold to people.
Technical SEO
Crawling, indexing, speed and structured data. None of it makes your content good. All of it decides whether anyone — or anything — ever sees the good content you already have.
On-page & content
Where your main term belongs, what titles and descriptions are actually for, and the one rule that beats every other rule here — clarity wins over keyword placement, every time.
Local SEO
A local search result has ads, a map with business listings, and ordinary results underneath. Three separate systems, ranked on different things. Treating them as one is the most expensive local mistake there is.
E-E-A-T & YMYL
E-E-A-T is a checklist Google hands the people it pays to grade search results. It isn't a ranking factor and it isn't a score. Once you know that, most of the advice about it stops making sense.
Reviews & reputation
What people say about you on Google, Yelp, Reddit, Glassdoor and everywhere else. It's the only evidence about your firm that you didn't write, which is exactly why it carries weight you can't manufacture.
AEO
Laying out a page so a machine can lift a correct, self-contained answer straight out of it. These techniques are years older than ChatGPT, which is the best evidence they aren't a fad.
GEO & entities
How a page ends up inside an AI answer. The fetching that makes it possible, why being in a model and being read by one are different things, and the dull name-and-address work that decides whether anything will say your name at all.
Measurement
Reporting built on sessions will undercount AI visibility, because the whole point of getting quoted is that the reader got their answer without clicking. Here's what to measure instead, and where it stops being honest.
Off-site authority
What other people say about you is the part of your reputation you don't control and can't fake. It's also the only corroboration there is, which is why it counts for so much.