What an AI Search audit actually looks like for a Series A

An AI Search audit at a Series A is not the same audit a 500-page enterprise gets. The scope is smaller, the speed has to be higher, and the deliverable has to land with a founder who already has too many tabs open. Here's what it actually looks like, the four weeks, the artefacts, and the decisions that come out the other side.

What the audit is, in one sentence

A 4-week diagnostic that tells you, with evidence, where you stand in AI answer engines and Google today, what's costing you visibility, and the prioritised list of moves that will get you cited and ranked in the next quarter.

It's not a 90-page PDF nobody reads. It's a working document and a 60-minute walkthrough with your team.

Week 1, Baseline and entity audit

The first week is forensic. I take your top 20 commercial queries, the ones that, if a buyer typed them, you'd want to be the answer, and I check three things:

• Where you rank in classic Google search
• Whether you're cited inside Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini for those queries
• How AI engines describe your company when asked directly ("What is X?", "What does X do?", "Best X for Y?")

For a typical Series A, two patterns show up. You're either ranking decently in Google but invisible in AI Overviews (the most common pattern), or you're inconsistently described in AI engines, half saying you do one thing, half saying another. Both are fixable. Both have to be measured before you can argue you've fixed them.

The same week I audit your entity signals, Person schema, Organization schema, the consistency of your name, address, phone, and core "what we do" sentence across LinkedIn, Crunchbase, G2, AngelList, and your own site. AI engines build their understanding of you from this graph. If it's fragmented, they hedge.

Week 2, Content and technical

Week two is the SEO half of the audit, but framed through AI search.

I crawl your site and look for the things that hurt both Google and AI engines:

• Pages that bury the answer below 200 words of throat-clearing intro
• Pages without clear definitions of what they're about in the first paragraph
• Missing or generic title tags and meta descriptions
• Broken structured data, or structured data that contradicts the visible content
• Pages competing with each other for the same query (cannibalization)
• Pages that should exist but don't, because nobody in your team has time to write them

For a Series A, the audit usually finds 15-30 specific page-level issues. Each one is logged with the page, the issue, the fix, and the priority.

Week 3, Topic and entity strategy

Week three is the strategic half. Now that I know what's wrong, I work out what to build.

This is a topic map: what you should be known for, what cluster of related questions you should own, what existing pages should be merged or split, and what posts don't exist yet but need to. It's the answer to "what should we write next?" and "what's our point of view?", grounded in your actual category and the queries your buyers actually ask.

The output is a prioritised backlog. Not a Trello board with 80 cards, a single page with the eight to twelve moves that, executed in order, change the picture.

Week 4, Roadmap and handoff

The final week, I write the roadmap and walk your team through it.

The roadmap is structured in three horizons:

• Next 30 days: the things to ship this month that move the needle quickly
• Next 90 days: the structural work that compounds
• Next 6 months: the topic clusters and authority moves that make you the obvious answer

I'll also tell you, honestly, what isn't worth doing. Half the value of a senior outside brain is the things they tell you not to spend time on.

The handoff is a 60-minute working session, your team, the roadmap, questions. You leave able to execute, with the artefacts in your own tools (Notion, Linear, whatever you already use). No proprietary dashboard you have to pay to keep accessing.

What it costs and what comes next

A Series A audit runs four weeks and is priced as a fixed scope, not a retainer. After the handoff, some companies execute on their own with the roadmap and check in quarterly. Others continue on a senior advisory retainer for the next two quarters, where I'm in the room for the weekly review. Both work.

If you've read this and recognised your own situation, visible in Google, invisible in AI, the next step is a free 30-minute call. We'll talk through whether an audit is actually the right thing for you right now, or whether something simpler would work better.

The audits I'm proudest of are the ones where I tell a founder "you don't need this yet, here are three things to do yourself, talk to me in six months." Wrong-fitting an engagement helps nobody.

Book a call here, or send an enquiry if email is faster.