The audit is the discovery phase you used to pay for

The one thing

Most agency relationships open with a paid discovery phase. A few weeks, a deck, a list of findings, and then the retainer starts. The findings are useful. Paying for them before you know whether the agency is the right fit is the part worth questioning.

Before you sign the next statement of work, you should already know four things: whether your site converts the traffic it gets, whether you show up in search and in AI answers for the questions buyers ask, whether your ad spend is going where it earns, and whether leads get a reply. If you walk into the pitch with those answers, the conversation changes. You are buying a plan against known gaps, not paying someone to find them.

In search

Treat AI-answer visibility as part of the same read as classic search, not a side project. Take the ten questions your sales team hears most, ask them in the assistants your buyers use, and note whether you are named and which page is cited. Then check the same questions in Search Console.

Where you rank but are not cited, the page usually buries the answer. Where you are cited but not ranked, you have a page worth building links and internal links toward. Either way, you now have a short list rather than a vague worry.

In paid

The first question in any spend review is who owns the accounts. If your Google Ads or Meta account sits under an agency login, fix that before anything else. Your history, audiences and conversion data should stay with you whoever runs the work.

Once ownership is settled, read spend efficiency by campaign against the pipeline it produced, not just against cost per lead. A cheap lead that never reaches a sales conversation is not cheap.

In pipeline

Follow-through is the read most teams skip, because it is uncomfortable. Pull every inbound lead from the last quarter and mark which ones got a reply, from whom, and how long it took. If nobody can answer that from the CRM, that is the finding.

Fixing follow-up rarely needs more budget. It needs an owner per lead, a written definition of stalled, and a weekly list someone is accountable for.

From the crew

The free audit is live at /free-audit. Enter your site and it runs the same four reads covered above: site conversion, search and AI-answer visibility, spend efficiency, and lead follow-through. The results carry into your workspace, so the crew starts from what the audit found. Under the hood, the audit engine covers 23 analysis types, all 10 Nielsen usability heuristics and 13 technical SEO checks.

We also published /replace-your-agency. It lists the deliverables a full-service agency package usually includes, names the agent that runs each one, states the three things agents do not do, and lays out a four-step plan for switching without a gap in the work.

Team pricing changed on 26 August: Web $67, SEO/GEO $137, Ads $297 and Pipeline $597 per month, with the same discounts for quarterly, six-month and yearly terms.

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