We ask for one thing before a Diligence Audit, and it surprises people: nothing.
No login. No analytics access. No NDA, no data room, no questionnaire about your marketing goals. The audit examines exactly what your counterparties can examine — the public layer — because that’s the entire point of the exercise. If we needed inside access to evaluate how you look from outside, we’d be doing it wrong. The one thing you provide is the same thing a screener starts with: your company’s name.
That design choice tells you most of what this article explains. But “free audit” is a phrase the marketing industry has spent twenty years poisoning — it usually means an automated scan, a PDF with two hundred red flags, and a salesperson calling before you’ve finished the executive summary. So here’s the actual walkthrough: what we do with your name, what comes back, and the three ways it ends.
Before anything gets examined, the audit answers the question that makes it worth doing: whose forty-five minutes are we simulating?
A Permian operator gets screened by PE analysts, A&D counterparties, and lenders at redetermination. A solar developer gets screened by offtake advisors, tax equity, and — for named projects — the host county. A service company gets screened by a supply chain coordinator and the engineer who’s about to vouch for them. A component supplier gets screened by a sourcing manager pricing counterfeit risk, and an estimator predicting submittal friction. Same mechanism everywhere; completely different checklists, vocabularies, and public records to check against.
This is the step that separates a Diligence Audit from the generic audit genre. An automated scanner doesn’t know a redetermination from a repowering, so it grades every site against the same universal rubric — which is how operators end up with reports scolding them about Instagram. We start from your actual counterparty map, because the audit is only as useful as the reader it impersonates.
Then we do what they do, the way we’ve documented counterparties actually doing it:
The name search, cold. What page one returns for your company — and whether it’s you, the similarly-named outfit two states over, a stale directory with a dead number, or nothing. Ambiguity gets logged as the screener would log it: as risk.
The site read, on their clock. Could a stranger with a checklist establish what you do, where, at what scale, and who runs it — in the minutes a screening pass actually allows? We read every page the way the analyst reads it: for completeness, for calibration, and for the claims that invite checking.
The cross-reference pass. The team page against LinkedIn, name by name. Public claims against the public record — queue positions, filings, dockets, county records, whatever your vertical’s checkable layer is. This is where most audits produce their most uncomfortable finding, because it’s the check owners never run on themselves: not is the site good, but does the site survive verification.
The AI layer. We ask the major assistants what they know about your company — because your counterparties now do, and the answer being assembled from your thin or contradictory footprint is part of your presence whether you’ve seen it or not. Most owners haven’t. It’s reliably the moment the audit stops being abstract.
The comparison set. The same passes, briefly, on the two or three companies you actually compete against for deals, capital, or bids — because screens are comparative, and “adequate” only means something next to what the shortlist’s other names return.
Throughout, the scoring frame is the one we’ve published: coherence, people, consistency under checking, signs of life — plus the AI answer. No proprietary mystery rubric. You can read the framework and run a rough version yourself this afternoon; several articles on this site walk you through it. The audit’s value isn’t secret criteria. It’s a trained outside eye running them without your attachments, against your actual competitors, with your vertical’s records open in the next tab.
The deliverable is a findings review — a conversation, roughly thirty minutes, with the specifics in writing. Its structure:
What we found, where. The concrete inventory: the search results as they stand, the claims that didn’t survive checking, the pages your screener’s checklist visits that don’t exist, the LinkedIn drift, what the AI assistants said verbatim. Screenshots, not summaries — you see what they see.
Sorted by level. Every finding lands as surface or structure — the fix-in-place problems versus the architectural ones — because that sorting is what turns a problem list into a decision. We’ve published the whole diagnostic framework; the audit is that framework, applied to you, with the verdict attached.
Prioritized by cost. Not effort-cost — screen-cost. Which findings are failing which counterparty’s pass right now, ranked by what they’re plausibly costing. A missing meta description and a team page contradicting LinkedIn are both findings; only one of them is repricing you in memos.
And sometimes: “you’re fine.” This outcome exists and we deliver it. Some audits come back as three small fixes and a genuine all-clear — and saying so, plainly, costs us a project and buys us the only thing worth more: being believed the next time we say something isn’t fine. If there’s nothing to fix, you’ll hear that in minute five, not after a tour of manufactured urgency.
The genre deserves its distinctions drawn sharply. This is not the automated crawl with two hundred flags weighted by nothing — flag-count audits exist to overwhelm you into a retainer, and their tell is that every company’s report looks equally dire. It’s not a design critique; your aesthetics are between you and this decade unless they’re contradicting your scale. It’s not a sales ambush wearing a clipboard — the findings review contains findings, and if a proposal is warranted it comes after, separately, only if you ask what fixing things would involve. And it’s not thirty minutes of us asking about your budget. We already told the internet what things cost.
Every audit resolves into one of three paths, and the design intends all of them:
You take the list and fix it yourself. Genuinely fine. The surface findings especially — the stale team page, the missing environmental answer — are frequently well within an owner’s Tuesday, and an audit that made your own two hours more precise did its job. Some of those companies come back a year later for the structural work. Some just tell other operators what happened. Both outcomes built exactly what we’re in business to build.
You ask us to scope specific work. The findings become the scope — which is why the audit doubles as the most precise estimate you’ll get from anyone: we’re not pricing a mystery, we’re pricing a list we wrote.
Nothing. Also fine, and honestly stated: the audit is free because it’s how we earn work and how we demonstrate the thinking — every audit either becomes a client, a referral, or a person in this industry who now knows precisely what we do and how we think. That’s the whole model. There’s no fourth path where a sequence of emails pursues you into next quarter.
The candid economics, since candor is the house product: the audit is our discovery process wearing a useful costume. Every question a normal agency asks on a sales call — who are your buyers, what’s your situation, where does it hurt — the audit answers by inspection instead of interrogation, which means when work does get scoped, it’s scoped against findings rather than guesses. You get a real diagnostic either way; we get the only sales conversation worth having: one about specifics. And because the whole thing runs on public information, the cost of finding out is exactly what the screeners pay to form their opinion of you: nothing but the time.
They’ve likely already spent it. The audit just shows you what they got.
Request a free Diligence Audit and we’ll run your counterparties’ screen — the search, the site read, the cross-reference, the AI layer, the comparison set — and hand you what came back, sorted and prioritized. Thirty minutes, no access needed, three ways it ends. All of them fine.
A free review of your digital presence — website, search, and AI visibility — scored the way your counterparties actually see it. No pricing games, no funnels.
Or call (713) 810-8080
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