The Brand Audit
The engines are already answering questions about your business, to your prospects, whether you've looked or not. This chapter shows you how to audit those answers for accuracy, completeness and framing, trace the errors to their sources, and fix them where they live.
Before you try to win new answers, find out what the engines already say when someone asks about you. This is the part of the audit most businesses skip and the part that produces the most uncomfortable findings, because the engines are already answering questions about your business, to your prospects, whether you've looked or not.
The questions to ask about yourself
Run these through each engine, alongside your panel: who is [business name]. What does [business name] do. Is [business name] reputable, and what do reviews say. What does [business name] charge. Who are the alternatives to [business name]. Each one is a question a real prospect asks in the final stretch before contacting you, often after a referral, and the answer they get is part of your sales process whether you wrote it or not.
What you're checking
Read the answers against three tests. Accuracy first: are the facts right? Wrong locations, retired services, old team members, and prices you stopped charging years ago all show up routinely. Completeness second: do the engines know what you do now, or are they describing the business you were five years ago? A business that expanded from one service to five is very often still described by the first. Framing third, and this is the subtle one: how are you characterised relative to competitors? "A small local provider" and "one of the leading firms in the region" can both be technically accurate. Only one of them wins the comparison question.
Where the errors come from
Remember corroboration from chapter one: engines trust claims that repeat across sources. That cuts both ways. If a stale directory listing, an old news article, and an outdated page on your own site all agree on something wrong, the wrong thing is now the corroborated fact, and your one corrected page is the outlier. Engines don't invent most errors about businesses. They faithfully synthesise the mess the web already holds about you.
Which tells you how to fix them: at the sources, in order of authority. Your own site first, because it's the source engines weight most heavily for facts about you. Make the About page state the basics plainly: who you are, what you do, where, since when, who runs it. Then your Google Business Profile, then LinkedIn, then the directories and profiles that mention you, all saying the same thing in the same words. Consistency is the mechanism. You're not asking the engines to update a record; there is no record. You're changing what they find the next time they look.
Audit the competition while you're there
Run the same brand questions for your three or four closest competitors. You're looking for two things. First, presence: in the category and comparison questions from your panel, who keeps appearing that shouldn't, and who's absent that you feared? The names the engines repeat are your real competitive set in this channel, and it frequently doesn't match the competitive set in your head. Second, sourcing: when a competitor is described well, check which pages the answer cites. Those citations are a map of the evidence that's working in your market, and Part III will have you building better versions of it.
One discipline before you move on: capture everything verbatim, with dates and engine names. Answers change between runs, and "I'm pretty sure it used to say something worse" is not a baseline. Screenshots or saved text, filed by date. The next chapter turns that raw capture into scores you can track and decisions you can make.