The SEO Audit Service Built for AI Search

Your customers don’t just Google you anymore. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews, and those tools either find your business or they hand the enquiry to someone else.

Thinkroom’s AI Searchability Audit is a fixed-price SEO audit service for Australian business owners. One scored report covers your classic Google ranking signals, technical health, on-page content and local SEO, plus your visibility in AI search. The findings that drive your score are checked by hand by a senior strategist, and you get a 30-minute walkthrough call to go through it in plain English. No retainer, no lock-in.

Launch price $697 + GST until 31 October. $1,297 + GST from 1 November.

An SEO audit is a structured check of how well your website can rank in Google Search: a site audit of your technical foundations, your on-page content and everything else search engines weigh when they decide your search engine rankings. An AI SEO audit checks all of that and one thing more, whether AI search tools, Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot, can find your business, understand what you do, trust what they read, quote you, and recommend you to the person asking. You’ll also see it called an AI search visibility audit, an AI visibility audit, or just a modern website audit. Same job.

Think of it as a warrant of fitness for your website. Not a sales pitch dressed up as a report, a proper inspection: here’s what’s sound, here’s what’s worn, here’s what to fix first and what it’s costing you while it waits.

Both halves matter because they run on the same engine. Google’s own documentation says that to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, and that there are no additional technical requirements. So for Google at least, the foundations that rank you are the foundations that get you cited. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot run their own crawlers, which is why we test those separately. If your search engine optimisation has been done properly over the years, a lot of the groundwork is already done, and this audit will tell you that plainly. If it hasn’t, you’ll finally know exactly what’s holding your website back.

The audit scores your website out of 100 across the five things that decide whether AI search can do its job on your business, 20 points each:

• Findability. Can search engines and AI crawlers actually reach and index your site?
• Understandability. Do your pages state plainly who you are, what you do and where you do it?
• Trust. Do your expertise signals, reviews and business details hold up and agree with each other across the web?
• Citeability. Does your content answer questions cleanly enough for an AI to quote it?
• Recommendability. When someone asks “who should I use for this near me”, does your name come up?

Every score comes with the evidence behind it and a confidence label. Where something genuinely couldn’t be measured, the report says so in its own section rather than papering over it. We’d rather tell you than guess.

What the SEO audit covers, from technical SEO to on-page SEO

This is a comprehensive audit, not a surface scan. It covers the technical SEO audit basics (crawling and indexing, site speed and page speed, mobile user experience), an on-page SEO audit (your content, headings, keyword targeting, internal linking, site structure, duplicate content), your local SEO signals, and the AI visibility checks no standard SEO analysis includes. What lands on your desk is an audit report built for a business owner rather than a developer:

• The score out of 100 across the five dimensions above.
• A measured AI crawler access matrix. We test whether GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and Bingbot can actually reach your site. Tested against your live site, not assumed from a checklist. For some businesses this single test is the most valuable finding in the report, because a firewall rule quietly blocking AI crawlers can mean an entire AI tool never reads a word you’ve published, and nothing on any dashboard tells you.
• Your audit findings in priority order, each with severity, the evidence, and the exact pages and URLs affected. Technical issues first when they’re the blocker, content when it’s not.
• A fixes and experiments table. Fixes are the sure things, the technical SEO fixes and content changes worth doing without debate. Experiments are worth testing, each with a success measure agreed before you start. Every audit result is actionable or it doesn’t make the report.
• A 30/60/90 day roadmap so the work has an order, not just a list.
• A 30-minute readout call with a senior strategist who walks you through it in plain English and answers your questions.

Nothing in the report pitches you anything. If there’s ever a conversation about us helping with the fixes, it happens on the call, and only if you raise it.

An automated audit is only as good as the access it gets. If a firewall or a bot rule blocks the crawler, the report can end up describing a site the tool never really read. We know because it happened on our own tooling. In July 2026 an automated scan of a real business returned two findings that were flatly wrong, because the site was serving bots a 44-word stub while humans saw the full page. We caught it because a human looked. That is the whole reason this audit works the way it does.

So this audit runs the other way around. AI does the hours of legwork, the crawling, the testing, the comparing. Then one of our senior SEO experts verifies the significant findings by hand, in a real browser, before anything reaches you. Anything the machine got wrong gets struck out, not footnoted. That’s the difference between this and a $0 scanner report, and it’s the reason the audit costs money.

This audit is built for owners of established Australian service businesses, roughly $1M to $10M turnover: tradies, builders, clinics, gyms, professional services firms. The businesses that live on enquiries, and mostly don’t have anyone in-house watching this.

We’re based in Noosa on the Sunshine Coast, and the audit is delivered remotely Australia-wide, same scope, same senior eyes, one business day from payment once we can reach your site.

Already have an agency? Then you’ve probably wondered, quietly, whether they’re on top of the AI shift. The audit answers that with evidence instead of a feeling. If it comes back strong, you’ve bought certainty, and your agency deserves the pat on the back. If it doesn’t, you’ll know precisely what to raise with them. Either way you’re no longer guessing, and the report is yours to use however you like.

For a local service business, being invisible in the map pack costs real jobs, and AI search leans on the same local signals. So the audit includes a local SEO audit as standard: your Google Business Profile, your citations and directory listings, your reviews, and whether your name, address and phone number agree with each other everywhere they appear. When an AI is asked “who should I use in your suburb”, those consistency signals are a big part of how it decides. If they contradict each other, you’ll see exactly where.

Most owners we meet don’t want a 60-page technical dump about how search engines ranked their website, and they’ve usually had one before: an SEO health check that arrived by email, made them feel vaguely guilty, and died in a folder.

This is the opposite. A website health check written in plain English, scored so you can see your SEO performance at a glance, prioritised so you know which SEO problems matter first, and walked through with you on a call by the senior strategist who checked it. You’ll understand every finding or we haven’t done our job. That’s also why the report never leaves without human verification: a health check you can’t trust isn’t a health check.

AI search optimisation (you’ll also hear AEO, answer engine optimisation) is the work of making your business the answer AI tools give: being findable, being plainly understood, being trustworthy enough to cite. It’s the new frontier of online visibility, and there’s a gold rush of agencies selling it as a dark art. Google’s own guidance is blunter. In its words, “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” The same foundations that earn your search engine rankings get you cited.

Which is exactly why the audit exists. Before anyone sells you an AI search optimisation package, or you spend another dollar on SEO strategies, it’s worth knowing where you actually stand. The audit measures it, scores it, and tells you what’s worth doing, what’s worth testing, and what would be snake oil for a business like yours. Our SEO services for Sunshine Coast businesses work on the same principle, and if the audit says your foundations are solid, the report will say that too.

Launch price $697 + GST until 31 October. $1,297 + GST from 1 November. That’s $766.70 including GST today, and $1,426.70 from November.

We looked at the Australian agencies ranking for this service in August 2026. Most of them won’t tell you what an audit costs until you’ve booked a call. A few publish a number. We’d rather you knew ours before you gave us your email address.

The scope, equally upfront:

• One website, up to 40 crawled pages. Bigger site? We’ll scope and quote it before you pay, not partway through.
• Delivered one business day from payment. If an AI crawler turns out to be blocked at your end, we tell you on day one and the clock starts once it’s cleared, because a report built on a broken test would be worthless. That block is a finding in itself, and you’d never have known.
• The full audit fee comes off your first invoice, GST included, if you engage us on any paid service within 60 days of your report being delivered. The credit applies to one invoice. If that invoice is $766.70 or more, the audit has cost you nothing. If you don’t engage us, you keep the report and we part as friends.

The report lands, we walk through it together, and then the order is yours to run. Some owners hand the fixes straight to their web person or their current agency. Some knock off the quick wins themselves and park the rest. And some ask us to handle it, which is where the fee credit kicks in: engage us on any paid service within 60 days of your report being delivered and the full audit fee, GST included, comes straight off your first invoice. The audit doesn’t push you anywhere. It just replaces guessing with a list.