Paid diagnosis
The enterprise SEO and AEO audit
The DemandBox enterprise SEO and AEO audit costs $9,137. It examines how your site is crawled, indexed, structured and cited, in classic search and in AI answers, and returns a written diagnosis with a ranked fix list. The full fee is credited back against your fees if you engage DemandBox for twelve months.
$9,137
Credited back in full against a twelve month engagement.
- Price
- $9,137
- Credited back
- In full, against a twelve month engagement
- Scope
- Classic search and AI answer engines
- Output
- Written diagnosis, ranked fix list, working session
Why the audit is paid
Free audits are a lead magnet, and they are priced accordingly: a crawl export, a slide of red warnings, and a sales call. A paid audit changes what gets produced. It buys the hours needed to read your actual pages, run your actual prompt set through the answer engines, and argue about which fixes are worth the engineering time. It also filters. Companies willing to pay for a diagnosis are companies willing to act on one.
The credit-back removes the only reasonable objection to paying for a diagnosis. If the audit convinces you to work with us for twelve months, the fee comes back off your fees in full. If it does not, you keep the work and owe nothing further.
What the audit examines
Two systems now decide whether a buyer ever sees you. Classic search still routes the commercial queries. Answer engines increasingly absorb the informational ones and cite a short list of sources. The audit covers both, because a site can be technically clean and still be invisible in the second one.
Classic search
- ✓Crawl and index coverage: what is discoverable, what is orphaned, what is being crawled but not indexed
- ✓Canonical and domain integrity: duplicate hosts, protocol and trailing-slash variants, parameter URLs, redirect chains
- ✓Site architecture and internal linking: whether relevance reaches the pages that are supposed to earn it
- ✓Template-level metadata: titles, descriptions and headings audited as systems rather than page by page
- ✓Core Web Vitals and rendering: what a crawler receives before JavaScript runs
- ✓Content coverage against real search demand, keyword by keyword, with the terms you cannot currently win named as such
Answer engines
- ✓Prompt set construction: the questions your buyers actually ask, written as prompts rather than keywords
- ✓Citation visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini for that prompt set
- ✓Which sources are cited instead of you, and what those pages do differently
- ✓Answer-first structure: whether your pages state a liftable answer or bury it under an introduction
- ✓Structured data coverage and correctness, including the schema types that carry entity and question meaning
- ✓Crawler access for AI agents: robots directives, llms.txt, and whether your content is readable without executing scripts
- ✓Third party surfaces that answer engines lean on: review sites, directories, and comparison pages
What you receive
- 1
A written diagnosis
A document, not a dashboard. Each finding states what is wrong, the evidence for it, and what it costs you. Findings without evidence are left out.
- 2
A ranked fix list
Every fix carries an owner type (engineering, content, or marketing), an effort estimate, and a reason it sits where it sits in the order. The list is built to be handed straight to the people who will do the work.
- 3
Your prompt set and baseline
The prompt set we built for your market, with the current citation picture for each prompt. This is the measurement baseline: without it, later claims about AI visibility are unfalsifiable.
- 4
A working session
A live session with your team to walk the findings, argue the order, and agree what happens first. Recorded, so people who missed it are not briefed second hand.
Who this is for
A good fit
- B2B companies with a real site, real content, and real search demand to compete for
- Teams that have engineering or content capacity to act on the findings this quarter
- Companies losing informational traffic to AI answers and unsure what to do about it
- Buyers who want an argued diagnosis they can challenge, not a scored report card
Not a fit
- Pre-launch sites with no content and no index history: there is nothing to diagnose yet
- Teams looking for a document to justify a decision already made
- Anyone who wants guaranteed rankings or guaranteed citations, which nobody can honestly sell
- Teams with no capacity to implement, where the audit becomes shelf-ware
Verdict: If you are not a fit, we will say so before taking the money rather than after.
The credit-back terms
- The audit fee is $9,137, payable in full before work begins.
- If you engage DemandBox on a twelve month agreement, the full audit fee is credited against your fees.
- The credit applies to fees, not to third party media spend or tooling.
- The credit is available for six months from the date the audit is delivered.
- The audit is yours either way: no clawback, no restriction on acting on it with another partner or in house.
Common questions
- How much does the audit cost?
- The enterprise SEO and AEO audit costs $9,137, payable in full before work begins. The fee is credited back against your fees if you engage DemandBox on a twelve month agreement within six months of delivery.
- Why should I pay for an SEO audit when free ones exist?
- Free audits are sales collateral, and are usually a crawl export with a call attached. A paid audit buys the hours needed to read your pages, build and run a real prompt set through the answer engines, and produce a ranked fix list your engineers can act on. It also means the diagnosis is the product rather than the pitch.
- What is the difference between an SEO audit and an AEO audit?
- An SEO audit asks whether search engines can crawl, index and rank your pages. An AEO audit asks whether answer engines retrieve and cite them when a buyer asks a question. The technical overlap is real but partial: a site can pass every classic check and still never be cited. This audit covers both in one pass.
- Do I get the fee back if I do not hire you?
- No. The fee is credited only against a twelve month engagement. If you do not engage us, you keep the audit, the prompt set and the fix list, and owe nothing further.
- Who does the work?
- The DemandBox team that would run the engagement, not a junior analyst and not an automated report generator. The same people are in the working session where you can challenge the findings.
- What do you need from us to start?
- Read access to analytics and Search Console, a list of the products and markets that matter, and one hour with someone who knows the site history. Anything else we can gather ourselves.
Read the thinking behind it
Not sure the audit is the right first step?
Tell us what you are spending and where the pipeline stalls. If the audit is not what you need, we will say so.