What a Geo Audit is — and is not

A Geo Audit is a diagnostic. Two to four weeks. Fee £2,500–£5,000 plus VAT. You leave with a written pack and a working session — not a login, not a content calendar, not a promise that you will be named next month.

The unit of work is a locked prompt set for your category. We write the questions a serious buyer types when they do not already know your name — the job, not the brand. For some firms that means category prompts about accountancy, tax, or FD support; for others it is a different service line entirely. The prompts stay fixed for the Audit so the baseline can be re-run later without rewriting the question mid-stream.

Against that set we run the engines we can actually score that week. Not a tour of every product on the market. Not a dashboard walkthrough. A baseline: for each prompt, who is named, in what order, and whether your firm appears at all. The output that matters is who is named instead of you — by prompt, not by vibe — and a prioritised order of work that would change it.

That is the pack. The working session is where partners walk the findings: where you are absent, which firms occupy the slot, and which gaps are entity clarity, extractable claims, or corroborating sources. You can take the pack and act internally with your existing marketing partner. Nothing in the Audit requires you to buy the next product.

Monitor and Programme exist later if you want the same prompt set on cadence, or a named strategist running the work. Neither is required to have bought a useful Audit. The Audit stands alone as the measurement of whether you are named when the buyer asks the category question.

What it is not matters as much as what it is. It is not a dashboard tour. It is not a content burst — we do not write twenty pages and call the absence fixed. It is not a software handover. It is not a guarantee you will be named. It is not traditional SEO with a new label. Rankings and generative naming are related surfaces; the Audit measures the second without pretending the first is obsolete.

Most UK mid-market firms that already invest in being found already have service pages, content, and a marketing partner. Those assets were built for pages and rankings. The Audit asks a narrower question: when a buyer asks an engine who to hire, does your practice show up, or does someone else? Until that is written down against a locked set, partner meetings run on screenshots and anecdote. Both can be true in the same firm in the same week: strong rankings on the terms you care about, and silence when the prompt is the category.

The conversation before the Audit is thirty minutes. No pitch deck. We talk through whether a baseline for your category would be useful. If it would not, we stop there. If it would, the scope, fee band, and timeline are clear before anything starts.

You get a decision, not a theatre of tools: where you are absent, who occupies the slot, and what to fix first.