We have run this audit enough times to know what we are going to find before we start. The same mistakes recur across industries, countries and company sizes. Here they are, roughly ordered by how much they cost against how easily they are fixed.
1. Never having looked
The most common one. Companies with sophisticated marketing operations who have never once asked an assistant what it says about them. You cannot manage what you have not measured, and this measurement takes thirty minutes.
2. A split or contradictory entity
Name variants, old addresses, stale directory records and profiles that disagree with each other. The engine is not sure you are one company, so it hedges. This is unglamorous to fix and frequently produces the fastest movement.
3. Claiming too much
Firms that list every service they can technically perform, hoping to match more queries. The effect is the opposite: the engine reads a generalist and recommends the specialist instead. Narrowing what you claim usually widens what you get named for.
4. Answers buried below the fold of the argument
Content that builds to its answer over eight hundred words of preamble, in the old style designed to hold attention. Engines quote the direct statement. Put it in the first two sentences and use the rest for the reasoning.
5. Facts locked inside PDFs and images
Capability statements, price lists, spec sheets and service tables that exist only as downloads or graphics. Everything a buyer needs, in a format engines cannot read. Moving this content into plain page text is often an afternoon's work with disproportionate effect.
6. No structured data, or worse, wrong structured data
Missing Organization markup, absent sameAs links, or markup describing things that are not on the page. The first is a missed opportunity. The third actively damages trust.
7. Treating reviews as a passive outcome
Waiting for reviews to happen rather than building a habit of asking. Review consensus is among the strongest signals an engine uses, and most companies leave it entirely to chance.
8. Volume publishing
Large quantities of thin content produced on a schedule, often now generated. It dilutes your entity, it gives models nothing worth quoting, and engines are visibly getting better at discounting it. One substantial piece with original data outperforms thirty filler posts, and costs less to produce.
9. Refusing to publish prices
The most consistently costly omission we see. Buyers ask about cost in nearly every category. Companies that publish honest ranges with the variables explained become the source engines answer with. Companies that do not get replaced by a competitor who did.
None of these are sophisticated problems. That is exactly why so few companies have fixed them.
The pattern behind the pattern
Almost every item on this list is a version of the same thing: being vague where you could be specific. Engines reward specificity because specificity is what lets them answer confidently. Most marketing instinct pushes the other way, toward keeping options open and claims broad.
If you only take one thing from this list, take that. Then go and ask an assistant about your company and see which of the nine you recognise.