01 Executive Brief
Executive Summary & Risk Map
Two pages for stakeholders: the core risks, what each one is costing, and the recovery timeline.
SEO Audit that goes past the checklist
Broken links and missing tags rarely explain why traffic fell. This SEO audit service finds the issues underneath, the ones no crawler flags.
7 moduleswhich of these is actually hurting us
Problem → Cause → Impact → Fixhow every finding is written up
0 generic recommendationsevery finding names a URL you can open
- Vector & Entity Analysis
- Link Devaluation Detection
- Information Gain Analysis
- Rendering Efficiency
- AI Visibility Tracking
- Powered by Algorithm
The diagnostics a checklist doesn't run
Core Capabilities
Missing tags rarely explain a drop. We map how buyers search against how Google reads your site. Every finding points to a report, a query set or a URL you can open.
Update Loss Forensics
Which update, which section, which pattern
Information Gain
Content uniqueness & semantic distance
Entity Alignment
Knowledge Graph & Schema architecture
Technical Engineering
Green CWV, but the bot never reaches your deep pages
Link Equity Audit
Discounted or toxic backlinks, with the evidence
SXO & Intent Satisfaction
Post-click UX: pogo-sticking & conversion paths
AI Visibility
Brand citations in AI Overviews & ChatGPT
Algorithmic Risks
Why sites tank after an update Search Console won't explain
None of these show up in an automated crawl. That's why we built our own diagnostics.
01
Silent Link Discounting
Symptom
Traffic drops with zero manual penalties in Search Console.
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01
Business Impact
The link budget keeps going out and the equity stops arriving.
What We Check
Which parts of the backlink profile carry the signals Google discounts: paid-post hubs, network fingerprints, off-niche donors.
02
Information Gain Deficit
Symptom
Expert content steadily loses visibility after Core Updates.
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02
Business Impact
Content spend keeps rising and the pages it buys don't move.
What We Check
Semantic distance of your content against the top 10: what it adds beyond the sources already ranking.
03
Entity & Context Drift
Symptom
Rankings decline across whole categories over several update cycles, with no single page to blame.
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03
Business Impact
Competitors with a cleaner entity structure take the top-3 positions that convert.
What We Check
Schema markup integrity, internal linking, and your brand's footprint in the Knowledge Graph.
04
Rendering & Hydration Bottlenecks
Symptom
Green Core Web Vitals, but Googlebot fails to index deep pages.
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04
Business Impact
New product or landing pages take weeks to appear in search.
What We Check
Crawlability and rendering: how much of your JS the bot executes before it gives up, and which templates it never reaches.
05
Internal Intent Cannibalization
Symptom
New pages push legacy, high-converting pages down instead of growing traffic.
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05
Business Impact
New content takes rankings from the pages that were already earning, and the revenue attached to them.
What We Check
Intent collisions inside your topical clusters, page pair by page pair.
06
AI Overview & LLM Citation Loss
Symptom
Rankings look stable, but high-intent traffic drops as engines stop citing your brand in AI answers.
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06
Business Impact
Competitors get named in AI answers while your brand vanishes from the decision.
What We Check
How often your brand is cited across AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity, and what the cited pages have that yours don't.
07
Sitewide Quality Dilution
Symptom
Flagship pages keep improving, yet the whole domain sinks. The site seems capped regardless of page quality.
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07
Business Impact
Every new page inherits the domain-level problem, so content spend makes it worse.
What We Check
The share of thin and duplicate content across the site, and which sections drag the rest down.
Proprietary Diagnostics
The checks a crawler doesn't run, on your own login
We run the audit on our own engine, with Screaming Frog, Search Console and logs feeding it, and you get the SEO audit report as PDF, Excel and Word like anywhere else. The difference is platform access: every number in the report is one you can open and check yourself.
Link Equity & Toxicity
DR inflates easily. The off-page audit isolates the authority a link carries, with the evidence behind every flag.
What you see
- Which links work, and which only look the part. Every referring domain ranked: carries authority, or carries the signals Google discounts: paid-post hubs, PBN infrastructure, off-niche filler. Evidence per flag.
- Where your anchor profile stopped looking natural. Anchor distribution against the over-optimization line, money-keyword spikes by date, and a disavow file reasoned per domain.
- Your link network, mapped. Domains sharing hosting, ad or analytics IDs, or ownership, one operator voting for you many times, named with the shared fingerprint.
Shared ad and analytics IDs are listed per domain, so a seller can't dispute the flag.
Semantic Site Map & Page Intent
Standard audits compare URLs and titles. We map every page as a vector of meaning: what competes with what, what should link to what, and whether each page is the type Google ranks for its query.
What you see
- Pages competing for one query, down to the duplicated section. Two articles, or an article and a service page, that Google can't choose between. Paired, with the call: merge, differentiate or link.
- Core pages starved of internal links, with their donors. The pages at the centre of your topics sitting at the bottom of internal authority, each with the strong pages that should link to them, and the anchor.
- Wrong page type for the query. If the top is guides and yours is a landing page, no on-page work fixes it. Format and intent mismatches listed with the page type that wins.
Most “content problems” turn out to be structure problems: the wrong page, or two pages, on one query.
Content Authenticity & E-E-A-T
AI search engines attribute facts. The audit measures the citability, first-hand experience and proof signals that word count misses.
What you see
- Your citability against the pages that outrank you. Independent ideas, self-contained passages, named sources, attributed quotes, counted on your page and on theirs. These are what AI answers lift.
- Every claim on your service pages matched to its proof, or flagged. “Experts”, “15 years”, “trusted by”, paired with the passage that backs it, or listed as unsupported. Plus the anonymous team blocks.
- AI-written share and staleness, page by page. Which pages read machine-written, which haven't been touched in years, which lack a dated author, ranked by fix order.
The same check runs on the pages that outrank you, so the bar is visible next to your score.
Full Coverage
Before any diagnosis, the whole domain on one screen: organic traffic and positions, competitors, backlinks and history, pulled fresh when you ask, with the raw data under every number.
What you see
- Where your rankings sit, and where they're moving. Keywords split by position band (top 3, 4–10, 11–20, beyond) with monthly history and the new / up / down / lost movement; intent and SERP features per query.
- Who is taking your organic traffic. Competitor analysis with the generic giants filtered out: rivals ranked by keyword overlap, the keyword gap against your closest one, traffic share and which of them is growing.
- The signals other tools skip. Traffic concentration, reachable traffic at positions 4–20, Link Risk from your live backlink profile, share of queries with AI Overviews, and the domain's past life from the Wayback Archive.
The export sits under every number, one click away.
AI Visibility Diagnostics
AI engines quote what they can attribute. The audit tracks where you're cited across six engines, and whether your pages give them a reason to.
What you see
- Where you're cited across six AI engines, and who is when you're not. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok and Google AI Mode, per query, with the competitor holding your slot named.
- Recommendations separated from luck. Each query run three to five times: 5/5 is a recommendation, 1/5 is noise. You act on the stable ones.
- The pages AI cites, checked against yours. The sources engines pull from on your queries, run through the same citability check as your page.
Each engine is asked in the buyer's phrasing: “best X for”, “X alternatives”, “X vs Y”.
More in the platform
Engineering tools for the scenarios where a mistake costs traffic: migrations, JS-heavy apps, post-update drops, due diligence.
Internal Link Analyzer
Orphan pages, click depth, broken links, redirects, noindex and canonical mismatches across up to 5,000 URLs. Content links and navigation links are counted separately, because a link in the body and a link in the footer don't carry the same weight.
Pre-Migration
Complex Web Apps
JS-Rendered Crawl & Technical Check
Headless-Chrome crawl for React, Next.js and Vue sites, so you see links and content as Googlebot renders them on mobile. Per URL: indexability, Core Web Vitals and page speed, structured data, hreflang, AI-crawler access.
Complex Web Apps
Redirect Chain & Loop Inspector
Bulk detection of multi-hop redirect chains, loops and canonical conflicts across the URL map, up to 500 URLs per run.
Pre-Migration
M&A Due Diligence
Indexation Coverage Check
Indexed or not, URL by URL across the sitemap, in Google and Bing. The first thing to read after a drop.
Post-Update Drops
Schema Validation & Generator
Structured data validated per URL, and valid JSON-LD generated for 15 types with required and recommended properties checked as you type.
Complex Web Apps
Pre-Migration
Content Audit & AI-Footprint Scan
Every article graded on depth, E-E-A-T signals and genre fit; AI-generated share per page; keyword cannibalization and freshness across the whole blog. Keep, rewrite or delete, as a named list.
M&A Due Diligence
Post-Update Drops
Deliverables
What you get, and your team can ship
Three things leave the audit with you: a two-page brief with the reasoning written out, an Excel engineering backlog as the prioritized action plan, and platform access to check every finding yourself.
02 Dev Tickets
Engineering Backlog
Tickets a developer can pick up as written, with the affected URLs, prioritised High / Med / Low by impact.
03 Real-Time Platform
Algorithm Platform Access
Live dashboard for indexing, entity status and rankings, yours during the audit and after handoff.
04 7-Day Async Support
Implementation Guarantee
Seven days of written engineering support after handoff, with direct Q&A with our Lead Architect as your team ships the backlog.
The Difference
How this differs from the audit you're used to
Regular Automated Audit
Neon Systemic SEO Audit
FocusSuperficial HTML notices & broken links
FocusCore Update drops & architectural flaws
ScopeTechnical, on-page and off-page as three separate checklists
ScopeThe same three, read together, because the drop usually sits where they overlap
ToolsRaw exports from third-party crawlers
ToolsGSC, Screaming Frog & logs, unified in our Algorithm platform
Output100-page PDF with unprioritized tasks
OutputEngineering backlog prioritised by impact, ticket by ticket
DeliveryAccount manager passing PDFs
Delivery7 days of async engineering support with Lead Architect
Workflow
Three weeks from kickoff to a clear picture of what's wrong
Fixed scope. Fixed three-week timeline. Engagements start at $1,500.
Week 1
Data Integration & Baseline
Search Console and GA4 connected, server logs pulled where you have them, a full crawl of the website in Algorithm. This is the baseline everything gets compared against.
Week 2
Algorithmic Risk Diagnostics
Semantic map of the site, JS rendering checked as Googlebot sees it, entity and schema audit, backlink profile filtered for discounted donors. Each finding tied to the pages and queries it affects.
Week 3
Delivery & Handover
The backlog handed over as tickets, the two-page brief to stakeholders, and seven days of written support open for your engineers.
Audits We Run
One SEO auditing method, tuned to how your site sells
Frequently Asked Questions
Before You Ask
Most agency audits are repackaged crawler exports. Send it over. If it already covers systemic diagnostics, we'll tell you, and you'll save the budget.
You should, and you'll get the checklist layer. What a crawler can't see is discounted links, information gain against the top 10, and entity drift. That's the layer we built Algorithm for.
A person. Algorithm runs the scans, but the reading of them is done by Roman and one senior specialist per engagement, and every finding comes with the reasoning written out. Nothing in the report is a tool's verdict passed on unread.
All three. Technical SEO: crawlability, indexing, JS rendering, Core Web Vitals and page speed, schema markup. On-page: content quality, intent match, internal linking, keyword cannibalization and information gain against the top 10. Off-page: the backlink profile, toxic and discounted links, anchor distribution. What we don't do is hand them over as three separate checklists. A search engine optimization audit earns its fee where the three overlap, and that's usually where the drop sits.
Engagements start at $1,500 and are quoted as a fixed scope once we've seen the site. That sits at the low end of what agencies charge for a manual audit, and the reason is not a smaller scope: Algorithm does the data collection, so the budget goes to the two people reading it.
Then you get a documented confirmation that the architecture is sound, which is what you want in hand before a migration, relaunch or acquisition.
Read-only Google Search Console and analytics. Server logs help but aren't required. No code access needed for the diagnostic phase.
Sometimes the honest answer is that patching costs more than rebuilding. If the audit shows that, we say so and show the numbers. Design, development and SEO all sit in-house, so we can take the rebuild from architecture to launch ourselves.
You talk to the people doing the work, not an account manager
Direct Contact
Lead at Neon. Runs its SEO audit services and built Algorithm, our in-house analytics platform. 10+ years in search & digital design.
Roman Makuev
Not sure if your website needs a full SEO audit?
Send us your URL. We'll take a first look and tell you whether an audit makes sense for where the site is now. If it doesn't, we'll say that too.