AI Shortlist Audit
A two-week diagnostic measuring whether you have the information AI needs to discover and recommend your company when buyers build vendor shortlists.
What the AI Shortlist Audit Measures
Your agency can tell you whether AI mentions you. They track citations, visibility, share of voice.
That is not what this audit measures.
This marketing audit measures whether AI recommends you when a buyer describes their situation and asks AI to build a vendor shortlist.
Being cited is not the same as being recommended. You can show up in AI citations all day and still not make the shortlist when a buyer says:
“I am the COO of a $12M logistics company. We have about 150 employees and our IT is a mess. We have one internal IT guy who is overwhelmed and we keep having security scares. I need a managed services provider who understands mid-market companies and can handle our infrastructure and cybersecurity. Who should I be talking to?”
AI generates its own search phrases based on that conversation. In a recent audit, AI generated an average of twelve unique keyword searches from a single buyer prompt. Those phrases came from the buyer’s situation, not from a keyword research tool.
This Audit Answers Two Questions Buyers Ask in Their Journey
This is Job 1: discovery. When buyers describe their problem, AI generates search phrases, looks for matching vendor websites, checks listicles, and scans directories to build a list of potential vendors.
Most AI visibility services do not measure this. They measure whether AI mentions you in general conversations. They optimize for citations, not recommendations. And the advice you find online is generic: “add schema,” “structure content for LLMs,” “optimize for AI search.” None of it is based on what AI actually searches for when a real buyer describes a real problem in your market.
This audit is. The five buyer prompts are built from our discovery conversation. The keyword analysis shows you the actual phrases AI generated for your buyers, not a generic list from a keyword tool. You see which phrases matched your site, which ones did not, which listicles AI referenced, which directories it checked, and whether you showed up.
This is Job 2: shortlisting. Once AI finds potential vendors, it visits their websites and reads the content. AI reads text. That is it. Not images. Not videos. Not JavaScript-rendered content. If your best case study is a video or your methodology is an infographic, AI does not see it during evaluation. The audit shows you how AI evaluated you across six factors, which questions AI could not answer about you, and why you got ranked where you did.
For a detailed explanation of how AI reads your website, evaluates passages independently, and why your website is no longer a destination but a database, see What is AI Shortlisting.
What you get
The audit produces two deliverables: an executive summary for you and a structured reference document for your marketing team or agency.
Your Diagnosis
A named diagnosis from a 4x4 matrix that crosses your discovery status (Job 1) with your shortlisting status (Job 2). This produces sixteen distinct diagnosis types, each with different strategic implications for where to focus.
For example: an Invisible Expert means AI never finds you, but your content would win if it did. Fix discovery. A Visible but Weak means AI finds you consistently, but you perform poorly when evaluated. Fix content. Different diagnosis, different fix, different priority.
The diagnosis gives you the clear answer: what is broken, why it is broken, and what to fix first.
Executive Summary
The executive summary is your document. It contains:
Your diagnosis and what it means for your business
The root causes behind the diagnosis, whether the problem is architecture, content, visibility, or messaging
A prioritized action plan organized by impact and effort
The market context: which vendors AI found, how it found them, and where you were absent
This is the document you use to make decisions about where to allocate budget and effort. It tells you what is broken and why it matters. You do not need to be technical to act on it.
The Reference Document
The reference document is your marketing team’s working database. It contains every data point behind the findings in the executive summary.
What’s Inside the Reference Document
Scorecard. Your Job 1 and Job 2 scores with status ratings. The baseline for measuring improvement after changes are made.
Action Summary. A prioritized table of every fix identified in the audit, organized by priority level (critical, high, medium) with references to the detailed section where each issue is explained. Your team’s starting point. Work top to bottom.
Section 1: Discovery Analysis. Score breakdown by discovery channel. The full list of vendors AI discovered in your market, which came from AI training data versus earned web presence, and the complete inventory of source gaps where you are absent. This is where your team starts when planning listicle outreach or directory listings.
Section 2: Shortlisting Factors. The six factors with per-prompt scores and every evidence gap identified. Each gap includes a specific suggestion for what content to add and which page needs it.
Section 3: Navigation Structure. An inventory of your site navigation with classifications for every label and specific recommendations for restructuring. Which pages to promote, which labels to rename, which containers are hiding critical content.
Section 4: Technical SEO. Per-page breakdown of missing H1 tags, meta descriptions, and structured data. A checklist your developer works through page by page.
Section 5: Listicles and Directories. The full inventory of every listicle and directory AI found during the audit, with URLs and which buyer prompts surfaced each one. Multi-prompt listicles are the highest-impact outreach targets. This section is a ready-made outreach list, sorted by priority.
Section 6: Off-Site Presence. Where AI found evidence about you outside your own website, verified with actual URLs. Your current off-site footprint and platforms worth pursuing based on competitor evidence patterns.
Section 7: Keyword Analysis. Every keyword phrase AI generated when researching your market, classified by category. Phrases found on your site and which pages contain them. Phrases missing from your site, sorted by frequency. Your team cross-references this section when rewriting any page.
How to Use the AI Shortlist Audit
The executive summary tells you where to focus. The reference document tells your team what to do.
Recommendations are organized by priority (critical, high, medium), which factors they improve, effort level, and who should own each fix. Your team works top to bottom.
This is not a report that sits on a shelf. It is not a sales tool that ends with a retainer proposal. The diagnosis tells your team where to focus. The recommendations tell them what to do. You decide who does it: your internal team, your current agency, or specialists you bring in.
How it works
The audit takes two weeks and requires three hours of your time: a two-hour discovery conversation at the start and a one-hour delivery meeting at the end.
Week 1: Discovery Conversation
We start with a two-hour conversation where I document who your buyers actually are, what specific problems you solve, and why clients choose you over alternatives.
This matters because the information AI needs to find you and recommend you is usually in your head, not on your website. Your website was probably written by marketing. It talks about your company, your awards, your capabilities. It does not describe buyer problems the way buyers describe them. When AI evaluates your site, it is looking for answers to six specific questions: do you understand my problem, do you have a methodology, can you prove results, do you serve companies like mine, what are your credentials, and how do you actually work. If your website does not answer those questions in language the buyer would use, AI cannot match you to the buyer’s situation. That is the gap.
Then I build five custom buyer prompts based on what I learned. These simulate what your actual B2B buyers would ask AI when researching vendors. Not keyword searches. Detailed conversations that mirror how buyers actually use AI: explaining their situation, describing their problem, laying out their requirements. These are built from your buyers and your market, not generic templates.
Week 2: Analysis, Testing, and Delivery
I run the five buyer prompts through AI and analyze your presence across both jobs, discovery and shortlisting.
At the end of week two, I walk you through everything in a one-hour meeting. You leave with your diagnosis, the full analysis, and a document you can hand to your marketing team so they know exactly what to do.
Why It’s Different
Most AI visibility strategies are brand-centric. They start with your brand and ask how to make sure AI represents you accurately.
This audit is buyer-centric. It starts with your buyer’s situation and asks whether AI can match your capabilities to their requirements.
That is a fundamentally different starting point, and it produces a fundamentally different set of recommendations.
This is not an automated tool that crawls your website and spits out a generic scorecard. It is not a discovery project from an agency looking to sell you a retainer. It is a pure diagnostic.
I am an independent B2B marketing consultant. I do not do implementation work and have no retainers to sell. The audit stands alone.
After delivery, you decide how to move forward. Use your internal team, work with your current agency, or ask me for specialist referrals based on what you need.
Fees
The audit fee is $10,000.
Timeline is two weeks from discovery to delivery.
Your time commitment is three hours: a two-hour discovery conversation and a one-hour delivery meeting.
This marketing audit is designed for $5M to $15M B2B companies in SaaS, manufacturing, professional services, or technology services where the CEO or owner is directly involved in go-to-market decisions.
Learn how AI shortlisting works →
See the 3 Buyer Jobs Framework →
Learn why most AI visibility strategies miss the real problem →
Schedule your AI Shortlist Audit.
Time: Two weeks
Fee: $10,000
Your Time: Three hours