“Run every check, and state explicitly when a check was skipped and why.” — from the Suede SEO audit discipline
Everything so far has been one repair at a time. This chapter assembles the whole diagnosis into a single sitting: the founder’s edition of the audit I run professionally, reorganized so one non-technical person can complete it in an afternoon with a browser, a notes file, and the screenshots you have been collecting since Chapter 1.
Two rules from my professional discipline come with it. First, run every check; the audit’s value is completeness, because the checks you skip are statistically where the problem lives. Second, when you do skip one, write down that you skipped it and why. An audit with honest gaps is a document you can trust and rerun. An audit with silent gaps is a false clean bill of health, and false health is exactly the disease this book keeps diagnosing.
Score each lane the obvious way: pass, partial, or fail, with one line of evidence for the score. No twenty-point scales. You are building a punch list, not a dashboard.
Lane 1: The answers themselves
You have most of this from the chapter exercises. Now do it systematically. Build a prompt set of 10 to 20 questions covering your category from the angles buyers actually use: what is this category, best option for your specific customer, your company versus your main competitor, how to solve the underlying problem, and pricing. Run the set across the engines from Chapter 7. For every prompt, record: engine, date, whether you were named, who was named, and, where the engine shows sources, which pages were cited.
That grid is your visibility baseline. The score writes itself: how often are you present, and who owns the answers you are absent from? Pass is present in a majority of your money questions. Most first audits are not a pass. That is why you are here.
Lane 2: Access
Chapter 6, executed and written down per bot: GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, Google-Extended, Bingbot, and your verdict for each, allowed, blocked, or unverified with the reason. Robots.txt read block by block; the ten-second check at optimize.suedeai.ai; the raw-source test on your key pages, is your actual copy in the initial HTML; sitemap present and listing the pages that matter; no stray noindex or misaimed canonicals on money pages. Any fail in this lane outranks every finding in every other lane. Fix access first, always.
Lane 3: The money pages
Pick the three to five pages that should be earning citations: your product page, your category explainer, your comparison page, your pricing page. For each, run the Chapter 8 drill as a checklist. Definition in the first paragraph. Key claims pass the extraction test. Comparison table where the buying question calls for one. FAQ with answers-first phrasing. Headings that signpost real questions. Supported schema present, validated, and matching the visible content. Freshness visible, a real updated date, and true.
Partial credit is normal here. Score each page, then rank the fixes by one question: which page is closest to the money question you lose most often?
Lane 4: Evidence
Chapter 9, as a count. Onsite: claims versus receipts on the money pages, named authors versus anonymous sections, dated and sourced numbers versus floating adjectives, disclosures present where a skeptic would want them. Offsite: the Perplexity sources exercise, what third-party record exists, review platforms, comparison articles, community threads, and whether what it says is accurate. Score onsite and offsite separately. They fail independently and get fixed on different timescales: onsite in a week, offsite over quarters, which is exactly why offsite starts now.
Lane 5: Entity clarity
The Gemini lane. Is your company unambiguous to machines? One consistent organization name and description across your site and profiles. Organization and Person schema tying your people to your pages. Consistent presence on the surfaces that define entities: your domain, your professional profiles, the registries and directories of your industry. The quick test is Chapter 3’s: ask the engines what they know about your company, and grade the coherence of what comes back.
Reading the results: the severity order
You now have five scored lanes and a pile of findings. The order of operations is fixed, and it is the same order I use on paid engagements:
- Access blocks. Hours to fix, gates everything else.
- The single most-lost money question. Take the one prompt from Lane 1 whose answer most often names a competitor and not you, and aim Lanes 3 and 4 repairs at that page specifically: extraction rewrite, table, FAQ, schema, receipts. One question, fixed end to end, beats ten questions half-fixed.
- Entity basics. Schema and consistency, a day of unglamorous work.
- The evidence flywheel. Reviews, community, reference material. Start the asks this week precisely because they pay next quarter.
Then rerun the prompt set and compare against your baseline, which is Chapter 11’s whole subject: deltas, not vibes.
Do it yourself, or have it done
Everything above is genuinely doable by one founder in an afternoon, and the point of this book is that you can. It is also, fairly, several focused hours plus repairs, and some readers checked the price of having it done before finishing Part I.
So here is the plain version of what I sell, disclosed the way Chapter 9 says everything should be. At seo.suedeai.ai, the same five lanes run as an ongoing retainer, for a small number of companies, with PR, entity and reputation work beside them: the baseline measured for you, the repairs shipped as pull requests and CMS edits, and the re-measurement that keeps Chapter 11 running without you. Scope and price are quoted by reply, because both depend on the site. Nothing in it promises you a citation, because Chapter 1 told you what to think of anyone who does. The free ten-second access check at optimize.suedeai.ai stays free either way.
That is the whole pitch, and it is the only one in this book. The audit is yours now. Run it or hand it off, but get it run.
Check this yourself right now
Open your calendar and block the afternoon, this week, named “AI visibility audit.” Then create the notes file and paste in five headers: Answers, Access, Money Pages, Evidence, Entity. The screenshots from Chapters 1 through 9 already seed the first lane.
An audit that exists as a calendar block and a file with headers gets finished. One that exists as a good intention joins the silence this book has been teaching you to distrust.