Best SEO audit services compared: what to require in the deliverable before you pay

Three different things are sold under the words SEO audit, at three very different prices, and the quotes you are comparing are probably not for the same thing. The first is a tool report with a cover page, which takes an hour to produce. The second is a technical audit, where somebody crawls the site, reads the findings and writes a prioritised ticket list. The third is a strategic audit, which adds the competitive and commercial question of which pages should exist at all.

This page does not rank named agencies, and the reason is the criterion it uses: judge the deliverable, not the firm. Agency quality varies more between two people at the same firm than between two firms, so the only thing a buyer can actually compare in advance is what will be handed over. Below is what to require.

The three products, and what each is worth

The eight items to require in the brief

Put these in writing before the engagement starts and the audit becomes judgeable rather than impressive.

One, a ticket list with a URL on every line, in priority order. Two, the crawl data itself, exported, so you own it after the engagement. Three, read only access confirmed to Search Console rather than a request for admin. Four, the names of the people doing the work. Five, the issues separated into blocking, important and cosmetic, with the blocking list no longer than ten items. Six, a comparison with three named competitors on at least page coverage and internal structure. Seven, an explicit statement of what was NOT examined, which is the single best indicator of an honest audit. Eight, a walkthrough call rather than a document sent by email.

How to read what an agency shows you

Three signals are worth more than a pitch deck. Does the agency show work on a site you can visit and check? Does it describe what it would measure rather than what it would achieve? And does it decline to promise a position, which anybody serious will, because results on a search engine are not in a supplier's gift and a firm offering a guaranteed ranking is telling you something about itself.

Directory ratings are weaker evidence than they look, and there is a practical reason to be careful with them: on 21 October 2026, g2.com, capterra.com, trustradius.com and trustpilot.com all returned 403 to an ordinary desktop browser request from this machine. A rating you cannot open and read on the day you need it is not evidence you can rely on in a decision, whatever the number beside it says. Ask instead for two clients in your own situation and call them.

What to do yourself before you brief anybody

Half an hour of your own work makes every quote you receive easier to read. Open Search Console and read the page indexing report. Check manual actions and security issues are empty. Open your robots.txt and sitemap in a browser. Run a free crawl and sort by status code. You will walk into the conversation knowing roughly what is wrong, which changes it from a sales meeting into a scoping meeting.

The measurement to hold an audit to that almost no audit includes

Ask any firm quoting for an audit one extra question: when a buyer asks an assistant who to use for this, which businesses get named, and where are we in that answer? Most audits will not have looked, because it is not in the standard crawl and it is not in Search Console.

We are not an agency and we do not sell audits or retainers. AI Knows Us sells the measurement that question needs: the buyer questions you nominate, asked across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, with the named businesses recorded. Our pricing page publishes what that costs in credits, where one credit is one buyer question on one app once and a Claude check is three because Claude costs more to run, and it publishes a free scan on your own domain. Use it as the thing an agency has to report against, or run the question by hand yourself first, which costs nothing and takes five minutes. If you want the audit work itself done, hire one of the firms you shortlisted; that is their job and not ours.

Agency shortlists are often drawn from published industry lists, and knowing how one of those lists is built changes how much weight you give it: how the Adweek fastest growing agencies list is built, and how to use it to pick an agency. On 21 October 2026 we counted durable inbound links across 1,655 tracked pages here and 696 had none at all; that page was one of them.

What buyers ask when hiring an SEO audit

How long should an SEO audit take?

A technical audit on a normal site is days of work, not weeks. If a quote implies a month, ask what is being examined that takes a month, and the answer will tell you whether you are buying a strategic audit or waiting in a queue.

Should the audit come from the agency that will do the work?

It is efficient and it is also a conflict, because the audit scopes the retainer. Either accept that openly, or buy the audit from somebody who is not bidding for the implementation and hand the ticket list to whoever wins.

What access does an auditor legitimately need?

Read only Search Console and Analytics, and a crawl of the public site. Admin access to your CMS or your DNS is an implementation requirement, not an audit requirement, and the distinction is worth holding.

Is a free audit worth taking?

As a sample of how somebody thinks, yes. As an audit, it is usually a tool report, and the way to use it is to read the first three findings and see whether they are specific to your site or could have been written about anybody's.

What should the audit say about AI answers?

At minimum, which questions were asked, in which apps, on what date, and which businesses were named in each answer. Anything less specific than that is an opinion about the subject rather than a measurement of your position in it.