Entry 00: Terms of the engagement
Fixed scope. Fixed price.
As little as two weeks from kickoff.
Entry 01: How it works
Three steps, two to three weeks.
I audit.
Technical crawl, content quality, site architecture, metadata and schema, and how you show up in AI search.
You get the report.
Prioritized findings, each tied to traffic or revenue impact, with specific fixes in plain language.
We check in.
A free 90-day check-in to make sure the fixes landed and the numbers moved.
Entry 02: What’s covered
The whole site, read like a reader and a search engine.
Technical foundation
Crawlability, indexation, sitemaps, robots directives, site speed, Core Web Vitals, and mobile rendering. Plus measurement integrity, whether your analytics tags are actually firing and your traffic numbers are real, and your ad stack: ads.txt, competing networks, and ad density.
Content quality
Thin pages, near-duplicates, stale archives, and the tag and taxonomy sprawl that dilutes crawl budget on older sites. Plus Google Discover readiness: images, freshness, and the signals that get your stories into the feed.
Editorial guidance
For every content issue, specific editorial direction: What to expand, consolidate, rewrite, or retire. Not SEO directives. Editorial judgment from 20 years of running newsrooms and content operations.
Site architecture
URL structure, category and tag logic, internal linking, and hub-and-spoke topic organization so authority flows to the pages that earn it.
Metadata and schema
Titles, meta descriptions, Open Graph, and structured data: Article, Review, Organization, Person, and BreadcrumbList. Plus alt text and heading structure, the parts of a page search engines read that nobody checks.
E-E-A-T and AI-search readiness
Author bylines and bios, credentials, sourcing, and the structured, quotable formats that get cited by AI Overviews instead of buried under them. Including whether AI crawlers can reach your content at all, and whether your data is trapped in images or block text instead of real tables.
Revenue paths
Paywalls, metering, age gates, and newsletter capture: whether the funnel your search traffic feeds is working, and whether any of it blocks crawlers or readers.
Entry 03: What you get
An answer, not a retainer pitch.
A prioritized findings report.
Every issue ranked by traffic and revenue impact, with the fix spelled out in plain language your developer or editor can act on.
A 30/60/90-day roadmap.
What to do first, what can wait, and what needs a decision from you. It covers editorial operations alongside technical fixes.
A walkthrough call.
A call to go through the report together.
A free 90-day check-in call.
A call to confirm the fixes landed.
Priced a little above the market, on purpose, and built to deliver more than the price difference. Every audit is human-read rather than machine-generated, bot-traffic analysis and AI-search readiness come standard instead of as upsells, and you get a free sample of the findings before you pay anything.
Entry 04: Case study
Hooniverse.com, relaunched November 9, 2026.
Seventeen years of automotive content, badly damaged by a botched refresh. The audit steered the relaunch: 207 categories collapsed into eight, 1,136 tag archives retired, a 216-row redirect map, meta description templates, schema markup in the new templates, and hosting sized on human traffic. Jason Siu of Bare Minimum Media Inc. did the design and migration against the audit roadmap.
Categories after the Hooniverse taxonomy rebuild.
Tag archives retired from the search index.
Rows in the redirect map for the relaunch.
“I can’t thank Jason and David enough, they accomplished exactly what I needed for Hooniverse. Honestly, it feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I can focus on trying to recapture a bit of what used to make this site great.”
Five weeks, from sample to launch. The audit sample went out October 2, 2026. The rebuilt site launched November 9, 2026, with 48-hour, two-week, and 90-day verification checks scheduled to measure what moved.
Entry 05: Pricing
Fixed-scope tiers from $1,500.
| Tier | What it covers | Fee |
|---|---|---|
| Sample | A short précis, 4 to 6 pages, from publicly accessible data, strengths, weaknesses, sample solutions, and a roadmap outline. |
Free |
| Standard | Smaller sites, typically under roughly 500 indexed pages. The full audit, a typically 15 to 25 page findings report, a roadmap, a 45-minute walkthrough call, and the free 90-day check-in. |
$1,500 |
| Enhanced | Mid-size sites, typically up to roughly 5,000 pages. Everything in Standard, deeper crawl coverage, competitor teardowns, a typically 30 to 50 page report, and a 60-minute walkthrough call. |
$3,000 |
| Large scale | Larger sites, typically 20,000+ pages, multi-site portfolios, migrations in flight. Scoped individually, with a commerce content review where needed and a stakeholder readout. |
Custom |
Every paid audit includes the free 90-day check-in (30-minute call, no written report). No retainers, no surprise line items.
Add-ons include commerce content review, competitor teardowns, content gap analysis, and implementation help, priced per project. Full pricing and add-ons.
Entry 06: Questions
Asked before you ask.
How is this different from an SEO agency audit?
Agencies sell retainers; I sell an answer. The audit is fixed-scope with a fixed price, and the report is written for a publisher by someone who has run editorial operations, not just crawlers. No pitch for monthly SEO at the end, just a list of specific fixes and what to do about them.
Will you try to upsell me implementation?
No. Implementation help is available if you want it, priced separately, and never bundled by default. The audit stands on its own.
My site is huge / my archive is a mess. Can you handle it?
That is the job. Archive bloat, tag sprawl, and 20,000 pages of history are the normal case, not the edge case. Large-scale sites get custom-scoped engagements.
Do you redesign sites too?
If the audit finds the theme is the problem, full redesigns are available through implementation partner Bare Minimum Media Inc., scoped from the audit findings, not sold separately as a design project.
What do you need from me to start?
Admin access to WordPress (or your CMS), Google Search Console and Google Analytics access, and an hour to talk through what is worrying you.
What if my traffic drop was a Google update?
Then the audit finds that out instead of guessing. Update-driven drops get diagnosed against the timeline and the affected page types, and the roadmap says what to fix versus what to wait out.
Entry 07: About the auditor
David Traver Adolphus.
I have spent 20+ years in editorial, most recently deploying a seven-figure content operation across McClatchy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning brands. I founded the Bargain Hunter commerce site and have managed contributor teams across five continents.
I get fluent in the work by doing it myself and working with the people who live it, then I build systems from everything I learned.
Authority Audit is the service version of that: I read publisher websites the way search engines and readers do, and tell you what is costing you traffic, in plain language, prioritized, with a roadmap.
More about me and the work behind the service is at proscriptus.com, my main site.
Entry 08: Start the conversation
Tell me what’s worrying you.
Tell me your site’s URL and what’s worrying you. A traffic drop, a redesign coming, an archive that’s a mess, or just a gut feeling. I’ll reply with whether an audit makes sense and which tier fits.