> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.surfais.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Reading your audit report

> A section-by-section guide to your audit, ending with your 30-day playbook.

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.

## The hero: score and meta

At the top of every audit is your brand name, when the audit ran, which [framework version](/audits/running-your-first-audit#framework-versioning) it used, and a confidence badge. Below that sits the **Readiness Score decomposition** — the six weighted categories from [What audits check](/audits/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.

<Warning>
  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.
</Warning>

## The report body

Below the score, the report itself runs through a fixed set of sections. In order:

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="Executive summary">
    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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Grounded data snapshot">
    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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Readiness Score decomposition">
    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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Branded vs non-branded diagnosis">
    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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Citation quality">
    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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Platform coverage">
    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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Brand identity audit">
    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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Competitive gap">
    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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Content opportunities">
    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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Technical AI-readiness">
    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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="GSC coverage gap analysis (if connected)">
    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](/search-console/connecting-gsc).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Visibility loss attribution (if applicable)">
    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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Confidence & data deficiencies">
    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.
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## 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](/metrics/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](/audits/what-audits-check#recommendations-are-filtered-to-what-you-can-actually-do)).

<Tip>
  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.
</Tip>

## 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.

## Related pages

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="What audits check" href="/audits/what-audits-check">
    The six categories this report scores you against.
  </Card>

  <Card title="AIS Score vs Readiness Score" href="/metrics/ais-vs-readiness">
    Why the two numbers can disagree, and which to act on.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Running your first audit" href="/audits/running-your-first-audit">
    Warm-up, allowances, and how to start.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Why scores move" href="/metrics/why-scores-move">
    How your AIS Score responds once you act on a playbook item.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>