No tools, no accounts, no jargon. Five things to look at, ordered so the expensive problems show up first.
Because it is the page that gets fetched, summarised and quoted most often, and it is usually the page nobody has read critically since launch. Every check below is something a stranger can run in a browser in about two minutes each.
Open your homepage and read only the first two sentences. Cover the rest of the page.
You are looking for a plain statement of what you sell and who buys it. Not a slogan, not a mission statement. If a person who had never heard of you could not repeat it back, nothing further down the page will fix it.
What good looks like: "We do X for Y businesses, usually at Z price." Unfashionable and immediately useful to any machine or person trying to place you.
Right-click, view page source, and search for your price.
If the number only appears after the page finishes running scripts, then anything fetching your page — a search crawler, an assistant summarising it — receives a page with no offer in it. This is extremely common on modern sites, and almost nobody checks.
What good looks like: prices and product names present in the source. Hidden behind a "contact us for pricing" is a decision; missing from the markup is an accident.
Look at the browser tab, or the title line in a search result.
It should contain the words a customer would use, not your internal product names. "Solutions provider" is a phrase your industry invented; people search for what they want to do.
What good looks like: the category term a stranger would type, plus what you specifically do with it. Roughly 50–60 characters, with the important words early.
Try to find a page on your own site that answers "who does what you do, for whom?" If the only answer is your homepage, you have a gap.
Assistants build shortlists from pages that answer that question explicitly. A homepage that talks about your values instead leaves them nothing to work with, so they name somebody whose site says it plainly.
What good looks like: a service or category page stating what you do, who for, the area you cover and the price range — in the first screen, not the last.
Open it on mobile data, not office wifi, and watch what happens.
A large video at the top, a rotating carousel, or a hero image that arrives slowly will cost you visitors before they read anything. Carousels are especially expensive: they cost load time and most people never see beyond the first panel.
What good looks like: the headline, the explanation and the button all visible on the first screen, loading fast enough that you are not waiting. If something has to be sacrificed, sacrifice the video.
Rank what you found by what it costs you, not by how easy it is to fix. A missing category page is usually more expensive than a slow image, even though the image is quicker to deal with.
Then fix one thing. The common failure with self-audits is producing a list of twenty and doing none — which is the same reason a forty-item consultant report changes nothing.
It finds structural problems, and it will find the expensive ones. It cannot tell you whether an AI assistant mentions you, who holds the answer box for your queries, or where you rank. Those need asking — repeatedly, because the answers move.
Three fixes a month, prioritised by what they cost you. Written by a person, sent by email.