Free SEO audit: the Visibility Audit, in plain language

What does the free SEO audit check?

Two layers. The scan above reads five machine-readability signals off your site in about a minute. The Visibility Audit then adds the human half: your whole site, your Google Business Profile and listings, your competitors, and what AI engines say when customers ask.

The order is deliberate. The scan is the disqualifier check: if AI crawlers are turned away, or your pages render nothing a machine can read, then no amount of content or reputation work reaches the engines and there is no point starting anywhere else. Everything the scan cannot see, which is most of what decides whether an engine picks you rather than merely reads you, is what the human pass covers.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a structured review of everything that affects how your website ranks and converts: technical health, content quality, on-page structure, local listings, reviews, backlinks, and (now) AI search visibility. The output is a prioritized fix list with the reasoning behind each item, not a 90-page PDF of screenshots.

The difference between a useful audit and an expensive doorstop is prioritization. Anyone can export a crawl report with four hundred "errors"; the work is knowing which six items are costing you customers and which three hundred are noise. Every finding in our audit is ranked by impact and effort, tied to the specific pages or listings involved, and written so a non-technical owner can follow the argument. If you can only fix five things this quarter, the audit tells you which five.

What does a website SEO audit include?

Five areas, and the table below breaks each one down. Technical health (crawl, speed, indexing), on-page content and structure, your Google Business Profile and local listings, a competitor gap analysis for your market, and an AI visibility test of what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot currently say about your business.

Why does website readiness matter so much?

Because AI visibility is brutally selective. The SOCi 2026 Local Visibility Index (about 350,000 business locations analyzed) found ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of local businesses, Perplexity 7.4%, and Gemini 11%. Readable, structured sites are the entry ticket to that shortlist.

The same study puts the contrast in one line: brands appeared in Google's local three-pack 35.9% of the time, making AI visibility three to thirty times harder to achieve than traditional local ranking. That gap is the opportunity (almost nobody in your market has done this work yet) and the risk, because the engines that recommend so few businesses cannot recommend one they cannot read. The scan above tells you in a minute whether you have already disqualified yourself on technicalities.

How do you audit AI search visibility?

We build a panel of real buyer questions, put each one to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot, and record which businesses get named, linked, and described correctly. Published frameworks like QeWebby's AI visibility audit recommend 10–30 such "money prompts" scored against a 100-point rubric, the approach we follow.

The scoring covers technical AI readiness, structured data, content citability, and entity trust. Under frameworks like QeWebby's, a score below 60 signals a high risk of AI invisibility. What makes this part of the audit valuable is that it is repeatable: the same question panel re-run in three months shows movement you can attribute to the work, engine by engine. It becomes the baseline for the AI half of your reporting if you continue past the audit.

How much does an SEO audit cost?

Ours costs nothing. In the wider Canadian market a standard audit for a growing local business runs about $800 to $2,000 CAD, per BizStori's Toronto pricing guide, with enterprise scopes at $2,000 to $5,000 and up. Everything we do charge for is on the pricing page.

That range is corroborated across the industry: AgencyAnalytics puts typical audit fees at $500 to $2,000. So the fair question is what the free one leaves out, and the honest answer is the manual half. The free scan is five automated checks on one page. The full diagnosis, covering listings, competitors, backlinks, AI visibility and a prioritized roadmap, is the first month of the program, and that is what the fees above are for. When a quote for an audit lands far outside the published range, ask what specifically justifies the difference, because usually the answer is either genuine enterprise scope or padding.

Will AI-generated content on my site hurt me?

It can, if it is mass-produced filler. Google's spam policies name "scaled content abuse" (including using generative AI tools to churn out many pages without adding value) and warn that violating sites "may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all."

So the Visibility Audit reads your content the way Google's policy does: not "was this written by AI?" but "does this page add value a searcher can use?" Fifty near-identical city pages with swapped place names are a liability whoever wrote them. Pages that answer real questions with real facts are an asset, same rule. Where we find scaled filler we recommend consolidation or rewrites, and we practice the standard on our own site: every claim here traces to a named source.

What happens after the audit?

The free scan gives you five results and what each one means, immediately, on screen. From there it is your call: fix them yourself, hand the technical ones to our technical SEO team, or bring us in to run the whole program, which opens with the full diagnosis and the roadmap.

Running the scan means we keep the URL you submit, and your email if you give us one, so we can follow up. We do not sell your information, and we do not publish your results or pass them on without asking. Our privacy policy says that plainly, and it names the analytics and booking providers we use.

What doesn't the audit cover?

Execution. The audit tells you what is wrong, in what order, and why. It does not ship the fixes, write the content, or manage your listings month to month. That work is the ongoing program, scoped separately and priced in public.

It also does not promise a ranking or a citation, a limit worth stating out loud because plenty of audits are sold on the implication of one. What you get instead is a baseline you can re-test against and a ranked list of what to change. If you want the reasoning behind the AI half of it before you book, the answer engine optimization guide explains why engines cite some businesses and not others, and what a site has to do to be one of them.

Competitors and map visibility are the parts that depend most on where you trade, so the market pages are worth reading alongside this one: SEO in Ottawa and SEO in Gatineau.