Diagnose first, invest second

Most WordPress site owners I speak to have already spent money before they know what the actual problem is.

An audit. A plugin. A freelancer sprint. Sometimes the right call — but often it fixes the symptom, not the cause.

This week: two free checks you can run in under five minutes, before you spend anything.

Check 1 — How visible are you to AI?

Search is shifting. Google still matters, but buyers are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar tools before they click anything. If your site isn't showing up there, you're invisible to a growing slice of your audience.

The AI Visibility Score runs a 5-pillar check in roughly three minutes — structured data, content clarity, authority signals, technical health, and crawlability. It surfaces quick wins alongside the bigger gaps, so you leave with something actionable rather than just a number.

Run it first. It tells you whether your issue is structural (technical debt) or topical (content and authority). That answer changes what you should buy next.

Check 2 — What are your customers actually searching for?

DA and PA scores are benchmarks, not strategies. The more useful question is: what are real customers asking in your niche, right now?

Find The Ask pulls 30 Reddit-sourced questions from your market. Preview the first few in seconds, get the full list by email. It's the fastest way to spot whether your content is answering the questions people are actually typing — or the ones you assumed they'd ask.

If you want the benchmark context too, the DA/PA guide walks through a practical workflow for interpreting those numbers without over-reading them.

When do you escalate?

If both checks point to the same thing — say, weak structured data and no content matching real questions — that's when a proper audit earns its cost. The Website Audit is human-reviewed, prioritised, and delivered within 24 hours. It's built for exactly that moment: you know there's a real problem, and you want a ranked list of fixes rather than another tool to interpret.

But start with the two checks. Most of the time, one of them gives you a clear enough answer to act on without spending further.

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Past issues are in the archive — including a best-of collection if you're new here. And if you're curious about the packaged side of what I build, the plugins page shows the repeatable solutions alongside the service work.