---
title: "We ran our own audit and scored a C. Here's the afternoon it took to get a B."
description: "SeeGeo audited itself: grade C, 78/100. What the engine caught, what an afternoon of fixes moved (entity clarity 66 → 92), and what code can't fix."
canonical: https://see-geo.com/blog/we-audited-ourselves
language: en
published: 2026-08-14
author: "SeeGeo Team"
publisher: SeeGeo
alternates:
  fr: https://see-geo.com/fr/blog/we-audited-ourselves
  de: https://see-geo.com/de/blog/we-audited-ourselves
---

# We ran our own audit and scored a C. Here's the afternoon it took to get a B.

> SeeGeo audited itself: grade C, 78/100. What the engine caught, what an afternoon of fixes moved (entity clarity 66 → 92), and what code can't fix.

**We pointed our own audit engine at see-geo.com and it gave us a C — 78/100. One afternoon of fixes later, a re-run scored B, 82/100, with entity clarity jumping from 66 to 92. This is the full report, unedited: what the engine caught, what moved, and the part every audit tool glosses over — the findings no code change can fix. We're publishing it because a visibility tool that won't show you its own visibility isn't one you should trust.**

Every number below comes from the same free audit that runs on our homepage, plus our visibility scanner. Same engine, same scoring, no house discount.

## What did our own engine catch us doing?

The first run returned grade **C (78/100)** — SEO 85, GEO 70 — with eleven findings. The category breakdown told the story at a glance:

| Category | Score |
|---|---|
| Crawlability & access | 100 |
| Technical foundation | 85 |
| Structured data | 92 |
| Content extractability | **59** |
| Off-site presence & mentions | **55** |
| Entity clarity | **66** |

The plumbing was fine. The three weak categories were all about *meaning* — and two findings were genuinely embarrassing for a company that sells this exact fix:

**"Only machines can see what you do."** Our JSON-LD described SeeGeo precisely. Our visible homepage never did. A human — or any AI reading rendered text instead of structured data — had to work out what the product was. We'd made the classic mistake of telling the machines and forgetting the people.

**No About page.** The engine calls this "a trust gap in both Google's quality guidelines and AI systems' source weighing." It probed /about, /about-us, and /company. All dead. We sell entity clarity and had no entity page.

**Six French articles orphaned.** In the sitemap, linked from nowhere. Crawlers deprioritize pages nothing points to; ours literally couldn't be found by following links.

Plus: no visible dates anywhere ("freshness: 0/100"), no question-shaped headings on pages that answer questions, and our services page scored 56/100 on "can an AI quote this?"

## What did one afternoon of fixes buy?

We did exactly what our own reports tell customers to do, in report order:

- **Built the About page** (English and French) — answer-first opening, question-shaped headings, a visible date, and only checkable claims. We drafted a location line, couldn't verify it against anything, and deleted it. If it's not checkable, it doesn't go on a trust page.
- **Put the one-sentence definition in visible prose** on both landing pages: what SeeGeo is, in the first screen, for humans and rendered-text readers alike.
- **Added honest "Updated August 2026" lines** — from a manually-bumped constant, not an auto-stamp. An automatic date would claim freshness the content might not have, which is precisely the kind of trick the audit exists to catch.
- **De-orphaned the French blog** with a recent-articles section on the French landing page.
- **Rephrased headings as questions** where the page genuinely answers one.

Re-run, same engine, same rules:

| | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| **Grade** | C (78) | **B (82)** |
| SEO | 85 | 89 |
| GEO | 70 | 75 |
| Entity clarity | 66 | **92** |
| Content extractability | 59 | 67 |
| Findings | 11 | 8 |

An afternoon. No redesign, no migration, no consultant. The single biggest mover — entity clarity, +26 — came from an About page and one visible sentence.

## What can't code fix?

Here's the section most tools won't write. Off-site presence scored 55 before the fixes and **55 after**, because no change to your own website makes other websites mention you.

The engine's top finding, before and after, was this: for our own category queries — things like "free tool to check if AI can see my website" — Gemini builds its answers from about ten specific pages, and **we appear on none of them**. It cites tools like searchscore.io, frase.io, and crawlercheck.com. We are, precisely, the problem we sell the fix for: reachable, readable, and absent from the answer.

The fix isn't code. It's getting named on the pages AI already trusts — directories, comparison posts, community threads. That's outreach work, it's slow, and our own engine hands us the exact target list. We'll report how it goes.

## The bigger lesson: being mentioned is not being read

While auditing ourselves, we ran a visibility scan on a brand at the other end of the spectrum — Linear, the issue tracker, a category leader. Twenty prompts, three runs each, live against Gemini:

- Mentioned in **59 of 60** answers (98%)
- Average position **1.4** when the answer was a ranked list
- Ahead of Jira on share of voice

Then we ran our citation probe, which records the web pages a search-grounded model actually retrieves while answering those same prompts. Across every answer that drew on live search, **linear.app appeared zero times**. What got read instead: comparison listicles (one project-management blog was read five separate times), YouTube, Reddit, and competitors' comparison pages.

Sit with that: the category leader is *in* nearly every AI answer, and the AI never once read the leader's own website to write them. The answers are assembled from third-party pages. Being the best product puts your *name* in the answer; being on the listicles is what puts your *pages* in the pipeline — and that's what you can lose, or win, without your product changing at all.

That asymmetry is the entire case for measuring this stuff instead of guessing.

## What happens next?

Our domain is days old, so search indexing is a waiting game — the honest accelerants are inbound links and time, not technical tricks. We'll keep working the target list our own audit produced, and we're building a public page that charts our own category visibility week by week, measured by our own scanner. When the line moves — either direction — you'll see it.

## Update — one week later: B 86

We re-ran the audit on August 16, a week after this article's C 78. The
score is now **B 86** — SEO 93, GEO 79 — and the findings list is down
from eleven to three. What moved it: entity clarity 66 → 92 (the About
page and visible definitions from the first pass), extractability 59 → 72
(answer-first landings now exist in all three languages), and structured
data at 92 with FAQ and HowTo markup across the blog.

Two honest footnotes. First, one "finding" from the earlier runs turned
out to be our engine's own false positive — it suggested FAQ markup on
the blog index, where the question-shaped headings are links to articles
rather than on-page answers. We fixed the engine, not the page: schema
that claims answers a page doesn't contain is exactly what we tell
customers not to publish. Second, everything still on the list is
off-site — the ten pages AI engines cite for our category where we don't
appear, and Wikipedia. (Wikidata: done — the item went up today and the
finding cleared within minutes.) Code can't fix those; outreach can. That's
the next chapter, and we'll publish it when the numbers move.

## Frequently asked questions

**Isn't publishing a C embarrassing?**
Less embarrassing than hiding it. The audit is deterministic — same site in, same score out — so the score was true whether we published it or not. A visibility company that curates its own visibility numbers is asking you to trust a mirror it won't look into.

**Why did the score only move 4 points if entity clarity jumped 26?**
Because the overall grade weighs six categories and the biggest remaining weakness — off-site presence — is immune to on-site fixes. That's honest scoring working as intended: an afternoon of edits shouldn't buy an A.

**Can I run the same audit on my site?**
Yes — it's the free audit on [our homepage](https://see-geo.com/#audit). Same engine, same scoring, usually under 30 seconds, first three audits free with no signup.