Busy Season Marketing · The Self-Audit

We ran our own audit — here's the honest score.

We sell a five-check AI-visibility audit to local businesses. It would be easy to sell it and never take it. So we ran the exact same five checks against ourselves — real searches, real code inspection, real dates — and published everything, including the parts we failed. If we hide our own bad scores, why would you trust the report we hand you?

Baseline recorded 2026-08-20 — watch this page improve.

Our score today: 5 out of 10.

We have audited 27 local businesses to date, and all 27 failed at least one check. So did we. The difference is what happens next — every fix below is dated, and this page gets re-scored as they land.

The five checks, scored for real

1 · FOUND Fail · 0/2

The question: when someone searches for what we do, do we come up?

The honest answer: no. Not yet.

Evidence (searches run 2026-08-20): "AI visibility marketing High Desert" — a Victorville competitor and national tool-makers came up; we did not. "Local marketing Apple Valley" — directory lists and other agencies came up; we did not. Even "busy season marketing" returned articles about seasonal marketing tips — not us, on our own name. Our domain is one week old and we have zero business listings, so this is exactly what the checklist predicts. It is still a fail, and we're writing it down.

2 · CORRECT Partial · 1/2

The question: are the name, phone, address, and hours right and consistent everywhere?

The honest answer: nothing we publish is wrong — but the two facts customers need most don't exist yet. We have no phone number anywhere (we checked every page: zero), and no Google Business Profile, no Yelp page, no Bing or Apple Maps listing. You can't be inconsistent when you're mostly absent — that's not a pass.

Evidence (2026-08-20): code inspection of every live page found no phone link and no phone digits; the only contact paths are email and the homepage form. No business listing exists on any major platform to check our facts against.

3 · READABLE Partial · 1/2

The question: can a machine read our services and prices as real text?

The honest answer: mostly yes — our site is plain server-rendered text with structured data, and our Answers Page lists every fact in plain English. But the audit caught two real defects: our homepage's structured data still carried an old website price from before our current pricing, and the Answers Page had no machine-readable Q&A markup at all.

Evidence (2026-08-20): all structured-data blocks on the homepage parsed cleanly, but one price inside them did not match our published price list. Both defects were fixed the same night; this check re-scores at the next audit, not before.

4 · ACTIONABLE Partial · 1/2

The question: can an AI — or a person in a hurry — actually book us or reach us in one step?

The honest answer: halfway. The homepage form works and email works. But there is no booking link on any page, and no phone number to call. An assistant that wants to schedule us hits a dead end — the same dead end we flag in other businesses' audits.

Evidence (2026-08-20): no booking platform is connected; contact paths on the live site are one email address and the homepage audit-request form, both verified working.

5 · OWNED Pass · 2/2

The question: who owns our answer — us, or aggregators and clones?

The honest answer: we do. The domain busyseasonmarketing.com is registered to us through August 2027, the site and every fact page on it are ours, every page declares its one true address, and no copycat or scraper page claims to be us.

Evidence (2026-08-20): public domain records show registration 2026-08-13, paid through 2027-08-13. Canonical address tags verified on every main page. No clone pages found in search.

What we're fixing next

  1. A real local phone number on every page — moves CORRECT and ACTIONABLE.
  2. A verified Google Business Profile — the single biggest input to FOUND.
  3. Bing Places and Apple Business Connect listings — the pipes ChatGPT and Siri actually read.
  4. A claimed Yelp page — a top source AI assistants quote for local businesses.
  5. A one-tap booking link wired into the site and every profile — moves ACTIONABLE to a full pass.
  6. Done already (same night as the audit): fixed the stale price in our homepage's structured data and added machine-readable Q&A markup to the Answers Page.

Why publish our own fails?

Because the audit is the product. Every report we hand an owner quotes real searches word-for-word and includes the ugly parts. The only way to prove the report you'd get is honest is to show you ours — fails first, fixes dated. When the scores above move, the old scores stay visible right here.

Want the same five checks run on your business — free, one page, no obligation? See what we do and what everything costs, or start at the homepage.

Method, in plain terms: real web searches run on 2026-08-20 and quoted honestly; code inspection of our own live pages; public domain records. We did not individually test every AI assistant — we test the sources they read, and we say so on every audit we sell, including this one. Baseline recorded 2026-08-20. Facts page: answers.html.