Before you hire an SEO auditor, know what you’re paying for

SEO audits can tell you a lot about your website’s health and visibility in Google Search and AI Overviews. The problem is that many audits amount to little more than a crawler export or a generic list of recommendations.

A real SEO audit should explain what the tools can’t: which issues matter, why they exist, what’s intentional, and what could actually improve your results. It should account for technical debt, your audience, and your business goals before handing you a list of fixes.

Before you pay thousands of dollars for an SEO audit, make sure you know what you’re paying for and how to tell whether you’re getting it.

Why SEO audits still matter for AI search

SEO audits matter substantially for GEO, as LLMs ground (fact-check) their outputs using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and “trusted” search results.

Once they identify “trusted” websites, they scan those pages to determine whether you offer a relevant product or service and whether they should recommend it. This can include site: searches and web crawlers.

Most major LLMs don’t have their own indexes, so they rely on search engines that do. This is why an SEO audit should make sure your website can be crawled and indexed, your content is high-quality, you have the visibility your audience needs, and your website is built for conversions.

Know what you’re actually paying for

The biggest issue I’ve seen when hiring someone, a consultant, or a company to do an SEO audit is that many will only crawl the site and call it an audit. You likely don’t know better, so, in my opinion, you’re getting ripped off, as you could easily have crawled your own website yourself and saved thousands of dollars.

The next biggest issue is when the deliverable is a to-do list of things that don’t actually matter or could cause your website to lose SEO traffic and visibility. This could become more common as more people enter the space, thinking LLMs can audit a website.

Without experience doing the work, they may not know which parts of a crawl are helpful, which are necessary, what will move the needle, or how to match the findings to the client’s goals. Many won’t ask about or consider technical debt or realize certain things were done on purpose.

Spiders and LLMs won’t know this either, and that’s where a quality SEO audit comes in. My goal is to give you the tools you need to help make sure you get what you’re paying for.

This is the same info we’ve begun sending to leads that come in when we’re too busy to take on the project, or when peers ask for advice as they’re hiring someone else to do an audit.

Dig deeper: 10 technical SEO audit mistakes that lead to bad recommendations

Update your contract with a clause

Review your audit agreement and make sure there’s a clause requiring the company or consultant to do the actual work. For years, companies have gotten the audit, and it’s been nothing more than an export from a spider or crawler with minimal review. You could do this yourself, and without the actual work, you likely won’t benefit from it.

Add the following clauses to the audit contract:

• A full refund is provided if the information is from a crawler only and there’s zero discovery from manual review and auditing.
• A full refund if the deliverable is the same as an LLM output. This includes nothing found outside of the LLM report. The auditor needs the knowledge, skills, and experience to identify things LLMs can’t see. This is literally what you’re paying for.
• If nothing is discovered or found in the audit outside of a spider crawl, you’ll be alerted as soon as possible and given the option to change the scope of work or request a partial refund of whatever amount you feel is fair, since the auditor did spend some time and do some work.

The goal here is to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth. Many high-quality SEOs will have backgrounds in content, tech, web development, conversion optimization, email strategy, analytics, PR, etc. If the audit isn’t necessary, use their other skills to justify the cost and keep the relationship strong. You still benefit, and they still get paid.

Buy crawler tools or demo them

Having a clause built into your agreement is only good if you know what to look for. SEO audits can cost between $2,500 and $20,000+, depending on how good the salesperson is at convincing you to sign with them and how large the site is. Even at the tens of thousands of dollars level, I’ve seen exports of spiders and basically nothing of value.

Crawlers like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb cost a fraction of the audit cost, and many offer free trials. Try them out, or get a month of the software and then cancel, so you can scan your own site and become familiar with the output. This way, when you get the deliverable from the SEO audit, you’ll know if it’s a crawler export or if the consultant or company you hired did the actual work.

As a bonus, you’ll see the explanations and reasoning behind the tools’ recommendations. While I do use similar explanations, I’ve seen some audits where the explanation is almost word-for-word. A quality audit will share the explanation and list of URLs when needed.

If it’s within the auditor’s skill set, they’ll also share examples of how to address it. They’ll tailor those recommendations to your website and company’s needs and provide more detail than the generic guidance in the tools’ documentation.

For me, I can’t rewrite an .htaccess file (mostly because I don’t trust myself with it), so the example of how to rewrite it wouldn’t be in my audit. The information on what needs to be done and why it matters will be included if it’s an issue. I may also recommend developers who can do it if the client doesn’t have this in-house. This way, I still did the work, and they have a full solution.

Dig deeper: SEO/GEO audits with AI fail without these 3 essentials

Use LLMs as a second opinion

LLMs only know what they’re trained on and what they trust. Chances are they’ll find some things that will work and make sense, and plenty of things that won’t move the needle, are irrelevant, or could cause damage. This is because an LLM can be trained on irrelevant data that is published on authoritative or trusted platforms.

Even with the right prompts, like “this is an SEO audit for an ecommerce website based on (insert platform) and not a lead gen website based on (insert platform),” the information provided won’t include the reasoning behind why certain things are the way they are on the website. 

You may have specific folders and pages blocked in robots.txt or rendering done in a certain way. The LLM may flag this, and if you change it, you could be worse off. The same goes for intentionally thin or orphaned pages that are never meant to get SEO traffic.

These things that are done on purpose may not actually be impacting SEO. By listening to the LLM that doesn’t process these, you could wind up causing damage to multiple channels, including PPC, remarketing, email, and affiliate.

A quality SEO auditor will learn and ask about these before or during the audit, and sometimes in the call to go over the findings. During the follow-up call, the auditor can likely say, “No problem, makes sense, and keep going,” or they can give you an alternative if it’s something that matters.

Here’s a basic prompt to start with: “Please audit my website (insert URL) and tell me what I can do to improve my SEO results. I would like to know about site structure, crawling issues, schema, what content might be thin, where I have competing content, and please also crawl my analytics and Google Search Console to verify data.”

Other things you can add include:

• My site is in five languages: Spanish, English, French, Italian, and German.
• The site is an ecommerce site that uses the blog for lead generation. The blog can be found in this folder (insert folder here).
• Create lists and follow-ups of to-do items with why they’re important, and share where I can read more.
• Prioritize the action items with reasons why and impact so I have a plan for where to begin.
• Perform a content gap analysis as part of this process.

You’re paying for experience and expertise. LLMs can draw on data that’s flawed or irrelevant, which is why the audit needs to be customized specifically to your website and audience. An experienced SEO focuses on meeting your audience’s needs by creating the right experience for both search engines and AI systems.

Get the deliverable expectations in writing

Finally, get the auditing company to give you a list of what can and should be expected in the deliverable. This is where it needs to be specified that if the document is 30 pages long, but 25 pages are just images and charts, that is something you’re comfortable with.

This is where you have the opportunity to ask for clarity by asking, “This sounds like something from a spider and crawl, not an actual full SEO audit. Will you be willing to mark what is from a spider and what is the actual audit?”

One big thing to note is that even if their audits are typically 50 pages, some sites are in really good shape and only need 10 pages. The rest would be fluff and use resources that could be spent elsewhere. I had this exact conversation with a current client when they asked. I told them I can increase my prices and add service, but it won’t move the needle, and we’re still seeing steady growth.

By setting clear expectations from the start and making it clear to the auditor that you know what you’re looking for, there’s a lower chance of things going wrong or of you getting a subpar deliverable.

Before you hire someone to do an SEO audit, make sure you:

• Have access to major crawler tools.
• Use an LLM or two to run your own SEO audit.
• Add clauses to your contract that set expectations before you sign.

This puts you in a better position to hire someone who can deliver results that align with your goals. You may even scare off the scammers once they realize you know your stuff.