The Search Visibility Audit · SEO, AEO, GEO

A lot of people are asking about your business without ever visiting your site.

They ask an assistant instead. It answers from whatever it can find and understand about you, and then it either says your name or it says somebody else's. You do not get to see that conversation and you cannot check it in an analytics dashboard.

This audit looks at what a crawler sees, what a language model can extract, whether the story about your business holds together across every place it appears, and where the traffic actually goes once it lands. Findings are sequenced, same as every audit we do, because a schema fix on a page nobody can crawl is wasted work.

$2,500Standalone, or run alongside a Business Systems Audit.
Full technical crawl and index review
Structured data checked against what the page actually says
Live prompt testing across the major assistants
Every place your business is described, compared for consistency
Conversion path from arrival to a real conversation
Findings sequenced, with what has to happen first marked
Why it is not sold aloneHalf of what fails on a website fails because of something behind it. The form is short because the CRM was never set up. The service page is vague because nobody has decided what the business sells. Diagnosing one side without the other produces a list you cannot act on.
Start here

SEO, AEO, and GEO, without the vocabulary problem.

Three acronyms get sold as three products by people who deliver roughly the same work. They are not the same thing, but they are also not three separate budgets. Here is the short version, and there is a longer plain-language one behind each link.

SEO · search engine optimization

Getting found in a list of links

The original one. Can a search engine crawl your site, understand what each page is about, and decide you belong on the results page for something people search. Still the foundation, and everything below depends on it working.

AEO · answer engine optimization

Getting used in an answer

When the result is a written answer rather than ten blue links, something has to be able to lift a clean, correct statement out of your page. Pages written as one long block of prose with a decorative heading are hard to lift from.

GEO · generative engine optimization

Getting described correctly

What a model says about your business is assembled from your site plus your listings, profiles, directories, and anywhere else you are mentioned. When those disagree, the model hedges or picks a competitor it is more confident about.

The honest part

Mostly one job

Be findable, be clear about what you do, say the same thing everywhere, and make the page easy to quote. Anyone selling these as three retainers is billing you three times for overlapping work.

Longer explainers in The Automation Files: What is AEO · What is GEO · How SEO changed

UsThe most convenient example we have, and not a flattering one

Ask Google's AI Overview about Onizuka Studio right now and it will tell you we are a DNN web development shop. That was true for a long time. It stopped being the main thing we do a while ago, and the model has no idea, because the description it assembled came from a decade of pages, profiles, and directory listings that all still say the old thing.

Nothing is broken. The site works, the rankings are fine, and the traffic arrives. The business is simply being described as something it no longer is, to people who will never see the correction. That is the failure this audit is built to catch, and we are currently our own case study for it.

The examination

Four layers, in the order they have to be fixed.

Findings come back sequenced rather than as a checklist, because there is no point rewriting a page that a crawler cannot reach and no point building consistency across directories while your own site still describes you three different ways.

01
Can it be reachedCrawl access, robots and sitemap accuracy, indexation against what should be indexed, redirect chains, page speed, mobile rendering, broken and orphaned pages, and anything blocking AI crawlers specifically.
02
Can it be understoodHeading structure that reflects the content rather than the design, structured data that matches what the page says, entity clarity, internal linking, and whether related pages are grouped or scattered.
03
Can it be quotedWhether a direct answer sits near the question it answers, whether claims are stated in a liftable form, and live prompt testing across the major assistants to see what they currently say about you and who they name instead.
04
Does it agree with itselfYour site against your listings, profiles, directories, review platforms, and anywhere else the business is described. Name, category, service area, and what you actually sell.
05
Does the visit go anywhereThe path from landing to conversation, what the forms capture, where the submission goes, how long a lead waits, and whether anything is measured well enough to tell.

What comes back

A sequenced roadmap in the same shape as every other audit we produce. Each finding traces to something we observed, states plainly whether it is something you can do, something your team can do, or something that needs a developer, and shows what it blocks and what it unblocks.

Findings on the external side are marked as observed rather than reported, because we checked them ourselves instead of asking you. That distinction matters and we keep it visible on the page.

A two hundred item checklist with no order is why most audits get read once and filed.

You can implement it yourself, hand it to whoever maintains your site, or bring it back to us. It is written to be useful in all three cases.

Pricing

Where this sits.

The search visibility work is one half of a picture. It is priced as part of the audit rather than as a standalone product, for the reason in the box at the top of this page.

EngagementWhat it coversPrice
Operations Audit Self-service. Your operations, your systems, your sequencing. Does not include the external side. $995
Business Systems Audit Internal only. Verified rather than self-reported, architect-led throughout. $4,500
Search Visibility Audit Standalone. The four layers above, sequenced. Runs alongside a Business Systems Audit if you want both sides. +$2,500
Full Systems Audit Both audits in one engagement, with the dependencies running across the seam. Less than buying them separately. $6,500

Implementation is scoped separately from the findings and the audit fee credits toward it.

Honest limits

What this is not.

Not a rankings guarantee

Nobody controls what a search engine or a model decides to show, and anyone who says otherwise is describing something they cannot deliver. We can make you findable, extractable, and consistent. The rest is not in anyone's hands.

Not a retainer in disguise

The audit is a fixed fee with a deliverable at the end. The findings do not expire if you decline it.

Not a crawler export

Running a site through a tool takes four minutes and produces a spreadsheet of two hundred undifferentiated issues. That is a data source for this audit, not the audit.

Not content marketing

This tells you what is structurally wrong and what to write. It does not come with a writer, and publishing forty articles is rarely the first thing that should happen anyway.

Why that changed →

Find out what is being said about your business when you are not in the room.

The free scan covers the operations side and takes a few minutes. The search visibility work starts from a real audit engagement, and we will tell you before you book whether we think you need it.

Before you decide.

What is a search visibility audit?

An audit covering four layers: what a search crawler can reach and index, what a language model can extract and attribute, whether the description of the business is consistent everywhere it appears, and what happens to a visitor between arriving and starting a conversation.

What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?

SEO is about ranking in a list of links. AEO is about being the source an answer engine quotes when it responds directly. GEO is about whether a generative model has enough consistent, extractable information about a business to name it at all.

Why does AI search visibility matter?

People increasingly ask an assistant rather than searching and clicking. The assistant answers from whatever it can find and understand, then names a business or names a competitor.

How much does it cost?

$2,500 standalone. It can run alongside a Business Systems Audit, and the two together are less than buying them separately.

Is fixing structured data enough?

No. Schema on a page a crawler cannot reach is wasted work, and a well-optimised page that sends leads into an unmonitored inbox does not produce revenue.