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A completed audit is a long, structured report. This page walks through it in the order it appears, so you know what each section is for and where to look first.

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The hero: score and meta

At the top of every audit is your brand name, when the audit ran, which framework version it used, and a confidence badge. Below that sits the Readiness Score decomposition — the six weighted categories from What audits check, each shown as a bar with its own percentage and weight, summing to your overall Readiness Score out of 100. A sticky panel alongside the score gives you Download PDF and Email me this audit, plus a running count of how many of the report’s action items you’ve marked complete.
If your confidence badge shows low, a card explains exactly what data was thin — usually limited scan history or a data source that isn’t connected yet. Treat the recommendations as directionally right but worth re-confirming once more data has accumulated; connecting more sources or running more scans and re-auditing will sharpen it.

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The report body

Below the score, the report itself runs through a fixed set of sections. In order:
A short, direct summary: your current position, and the single highest-priority action to take first. If your score has declined since a previous audit, this section names the specific cause rather than describing a drop in the abstract.
Your raw Surfais data as pulled for this audit — citations by platform, your AIS trajectory, branded vs non-branded query share, top competitor mentions, alias coverage. This section is deliberately literal: numbers, not interpretation, so you can verify the audit is reasoning from real data.
The same six-category breakdown shown in the hero, with prose diagnosing which one or two categories are dragging your score down most, and which specific signals inside them are weakest.
Compares your actual branded-to-non-branded query mix against a working benchmark for your industry, and names whether your gap looks like “under-discovered brand” or “no category capture” — two different problems with different fixes.
Groups your citations by source type — earned editorial, Wikipedia, owned domain, forums, social, directories — and flags imbalances, like too much reliance on your own site (an echo chamber) or too much low-trust social content.
A per-platform read of where you’re cited across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, and what’s driving the gap on platforms where you’re thin.
Checks your alias coverage (the name variants Surfais tracks for you) and flags gaps, plus a look at your owned-domain authority as a foundation for topical credibility.
Your top three competitors, where they’re cited that you’re not, what content type is driving that gap, and — critically — how realistically copyable it is inside a quarter, ranked by feasibility rather than raw gap size.
Specific, page-level rewrite briefs: which of your pages bury the answer to a query you should be winning, and what an answer-first rewrite of that page would look like.
A checklist of crawler access, rendering behaviour, and schema markup findings, with severity per item — this is the deep-dive behind the Technical AI-Readiness category score.
Only appears if you’ve connected Google Search Console. Compares your top real-world search queries against what Surfais tracks and what AI platforms surface for them, surfacing genuine demand with zero AI presence. See Connecting Search Console.
Only appears if a prompt that used to mention your brand stopped doing so between two measurement windows. Names the exact prompt, the platform, and who’s being cited instead — so a declining score always comes with a named cause, not just a downward number.
A transparent list of what would have made this specific audit stronger — thin data areas, inferred rather than confirmed brand-profile fields, anything that lowers confidence in a particular section even if the overall flag is high.

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Your 30-day playbook

The report ends with two tables that turn everything above into action. Next 30 days lists the highest-priority items you can realistically finish inside one cadence period — things like fixing crawler access, adding missing schema properties, or publishing an answer-first rewrite. Strategic priorities lists the higher-effort, higher-impact levers that genuinely take longer than a month — earned editorial coverage, original research, building out entity presence — kept visible on their own track rather than buried in a bucket that never gets revisited. Every item in both tables carries an owner suggestion (in-house, agency, developer, or content), an expected AIS delta — the estimated effect on your actual AIS Score if you follow through — and a viability note explaining why it’s recommended for your brand specifically, including whether it replaced something that was filtered out (see How recommendations are filtered).
The playbook closes with a single 30-day AIS target range rather than a vague “improve by N points” claim — treat that range as the number your next audit checks you against.

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Tracking action items

Every recommendation in the playbook becomes a trackable action item underneath the report, grouped into Open, In progress, Completed, and Dismissed. Click into any item to change its status or leave yourself a note — useful if you’re assigning work to a developer or an agency and want a record of what’s already underway versus what hasn’t been started. This tracker is yours to manage between audits. It doesn’t feed back into future audit scoring automatically — each new audit reassesses your current state fresh, based on what’s actually changed in your data — but it’s the most direct way to keep a team accountable to the plan an audit lays out.

What audits check

The six categories this report scores you against.

AIS Score vs Readiness Score

Why the two numbers can disagree, and which to act on.

Running your first audit

Warm-up, allowances, and how to start.

Why scores move

How your AIS Score responds once you act on a playbook item.