What I Check in an SEO Audit Now That Didn't Exist in 2023

My audit template grew a new tab this year. Two years ago it didn’t exist, and the things now sitting on it would have sounded like science fiction to a client in 2022. The old tabs are all still there, still doing their job. But I’ve started running the new one first, because it tells me something the old checklist can’t.

The old checklist didn’t retire

I want to be clear that the classic audit still runs, front to back. Can the site be crawled. Is it fast enough on a real phone. Are titles and headings sane. Is the internal linking coherent. Who links to it, and do those links mean anything. Is the content actually answering the query or just circling it. None of that got less important. A site that fails these still fails everything downstream, including the new stuff.

If anything, the fundamentals got more load-bearing, because the new layer sits on top of them and inherits their problems.

The new tab, in concrete terms

Here’s what I actually check now that I couldn’t have in 2023.

Whether an AI Overview shows up for the queries that matter to the business, and if it does, what it says and who it pulls from. A client can be ranking beautifully and still be invisible above the fold, because the answer box quoted three other sources and the human never scrolled.

Whether the brand gets named when I ask assistants the questions its customers ask. I’ll sit and query a few models like a curious buyer would (“best X in Bali,” “is Y worth it,” “who does Z near me”) and note whether my client appears, how they’re described, and whether the description is even accurate. Being cited wrongly is its own finding.

How the site reads as plain facts, not as design. I look at whether the core claims exist in text a machine can lift cleanly, or whether they’re trapped in images, sliders, and PDFs. If a model would have to guess the price or the location, that’s a problem I can now point at.

Whether other sources corroborate the important claims. A fact that only lives on the client’s own homepage is fragile now in a way it wasn’t when a human was doing the trusting.

Why I lead with it

Because it catches a failure the old audit is blind to: doing everything right and still not being the answer. A site can pass every technical check, rank on page one, and quietly lose the customer inside a chat window it was never measured against.

I’m honest with clients that this part is younger and messier than the classic work. The tools are rough, the results move, and I’m reading behaviour rather than a clean report. But leaving it off the audit now would be like checking the plumbing and ignoring that the front door moved to a different street.