Running Brand Audits

What a brand audit is

A StretchBAS brand audit answers a specific, defensible question: how well does your own indexed content cover a given subject? It is a content-evidence audit — it reads the evidence that StretchSearch has indexed for a subject and produces a score, a set of findings, and concrete recommendations, with every finding traceable back to the source it came from.

Unlike generation, an audit is deterministic: it uses no AI and no live network calls, so the same inputs always produce the same audit. That makes audits reproducible and defensible — ideal for reporting to a client or stakeholder.

Each audit spends 1 credit and is refunded automatically if it fails.

What the audit measures

For the subject you enter, the audit blends two signals into an overall score:

• Coverage — how many distinct owned sources cover the subject (coverage saturates once you have around eight solid sources).
• Confidence — the strength of the evidence package returned by the StretchSearch bridge.

A subject with no owned coverage always scores zero — a stray confidence value can never inflate a subject you simply don't cover. The result is an easy-to-read score plus a breakdown you can act on.

Running an audit step by step

1. Open StretchBAS → Audit.
2. Enter a subject — a topic, service, product, or brand term you want to check your coverage for (for example "accountability coaching").
3. (Optional) Scope it to a StretchSearch project so it audits a specific set of pages.
4. Run the audit. It reads your indexed evidence, scores coverage and confidence, and saves the result. This spends 1 credit.
5. Open the audit to read its findings and recommendations.

Reading the results

An audit returns a structured, evidence-linked report:

• Coverage finding — how many owned sources cover the subject (or a high-severity gap finding if none do).
• Strength findings — your top sources for the subject, each linked to the evidence it came from.
• Quality finding — whether your top sources use curated (human-approved) summaries or derived ones. Curated summaries raise the trust of AI-grounded answers about the subject.
• Knowledge-gap findings — gaps surfaced by the evidence bridge itself.
• Recommendations — practical next steps, such as create owned content for an uncovered subject, deepen coverage when it's thin, maintain coverage when it's solid, or add curated summaries to your top sources.

Example

Beau audits the subject "accountability coaching" for Payne Coaching. StretchBAS finds five owned sources, returns a mid-high score, flags that all five use derived (not curated) summaries, and recommends adding curated summaries to the top three pages. Beau also audits "corporate wellness workshops" and gets a score of zero with a high-severity gap finding — a clear signal that Payne has no content covering a service it actually offers, and a prompt to publish some.

Audit vs. consistency score

These sound similar but answer different questions:

• A brand audit measures whether your indexed content covers a subject — a content/SEO coverage question.
• A consistency score measures whether a specific piece of content sounds on-brand against a fingerprint — a voice question.

See Choosing the Right Tool: Audit vs Score vs Refresh for a decision guide.

Tips

• Crawl before you audit. Audits read indexed evidence, so make sure StretchSearch has crawled the relevant pages first.
• Audit the subjects you sell. Running audits for your core services quickly reveals which offerings have thin or missing content.
• Act on the recommendations. A zero-coverage subject is a content opportunity; a "derived summaries" flag is a quick win — add curated summaries to your best pages.
• Re-audit after publishing. Because audits are deterministic, re-running one after you add content gives you a clean before/after comparison.

Troubleshooting

• "subject is required." Enter a subject to audit.
• The audit scored 0. No owned indexed content covers that subject. Either the subject is genuinely uncovered (publish and crawl content for it), or the relevant pages aren't indexed yet — crawl them in StretchSearch and re-audit.
• I can't see an audit I expected. Audits are workspace-scoped. You'll only see audits owned by your current workspace; switch to the workspace that ran it.