What to Provide Before Running a Brand Health Audit

To run a Brand Health Audit, you only need to supply publicly accessible information: your primary production domain, your official brand name, your primary market or sector, and up to three direct competitor domains. You do not need to install tracking scripts, grant administrative access to your content management system (CMS), or share private analytics data.

The Brand Health Audit is an automated evaluation platform created by The Branded Agency that assesses how your brand is perceived, discovered, and interpreted across modern digital touchpoints. Because the platform analyses your brand from the perspective of an external buyer, a search engine crawler, and an AI retrieval model, it strictly requires the assets and endpoints that a public user or machine agent can access.

Required inputs: What you must supply

Setting up an evaluation takes less than two minutes. When initiating a scan through the platform, you will be prompted for four foundational inputs:

1. Primary production URL: The live domain of your website (for example, https://example.com). This must be the resolved, canonical address rather than a redirecting alias or an unlaunched staging site.
2. Exact brand entity name: The formal trading name of your business. This allows our entity recognition models to search for knowledge graph nodes, verify Organization schema markup, and measure brand sentiment across external sources.
3. Primary market and industry category: The operating sector of your business (such as B2B SaaS, Professional Services, or Industrial Manufacturing). This contextualises the scoring weights applied to trust signals and content depth.
4. Competitor URLs (1 to 3 domains): Live URLs of your direct market rivals. These enable comparative scoring across messaging differentiation, share of search, and generative engine visibility.

Input field	Accepted format	Why the platform requires it	Common setup mistake
Primary Domain	Fully qualified URL (https://...)	Root target for UX, technical, and messaging crawl	Submitting a password-protected staging URL
Brand Name	Text string (e.g., "Acme Corp")	Used to measure entity extraction and brand mentions	Including legal suffixes not used in public branding (e.g., "LLC Series 4")
Industry	Select from standard taxonomy	Calibrates baseline benchmarks for conversion patterns	Choosing an overly broad category
Competitors	1–3 live domain URLs	Contextualises differentiation and answer engine overlap	Listing massive global conglomerates instead of direct market peers

Optional inputs for deeper diagnostic accuracy

While the four items above represent the minimum operational baseline, providing supplementary public URLs helps the platform run a more thorough audit across multi-channel touchpoints:

• Primary social and corporate profiles: Links to your active LinkedIn company page, YouTube channel, or primary social account. The crawler checks these against the Open Graph protocol metadata on your site to ensure visual and narrative alignment.
• Key landing page URLs: If your high-value conversion funnels or core product pages sit deep within the site structure, listing up to three specific paths ensures they are included in the initial high-priority scan queue.
• Target positioning statement: A single paragraph describing your core value proposition. The platform compares this stated intent against the actual semantic meaning extracted from your live homepage copy and heading structures.

What you do not need to provide

Many marketing teams assume a comprehensive brand and digital audit requires deep internal clearance. The Brand Health Audit intentionally avoids internal integrations to reflect genuine external reality. You will never be asked for:

• CMS or server credentials: We do not require WordPress, Webflow, or Shopify administrative access.
• Analytics or Google Search Console access: We evaluate discoverability, structured data, and performance via independent inspection rather than internal traffic metrics.
• Proprietary brand decks or internal memos: Unless you choose to test your internal positioning statement against live copy, our algorithms evaluate only what your market actually sees.
• Tracking pixels or JavaScript snippets: No code is installed on your web servers.

Evaluating a site strictly from the outside avoids "observer bias." If an external machine reader or a prospective buyer cannot find your proof points, structured data, or value proposition without private access, those assets are functionally invisible to the market.

Pre-audit verification: Avoiding common scan failures

Before submitting your domain at /audit, running a few quick technical checks prevents incomplete scans or skewed baseline scores.

1. Confirm robots.txt and firewall permissions

Ensure your site does not block public automated user agents. If your engineering team has deployed aggressive Cloudflare rules or restricted access via standard directives documented in the Introduction to robots.txt, our crawlers may receive a 403 Forbidden response. Check your robots.txt file to ensure root pages and core assets remain accessible to standard web spiders.

2. Verify URL canonicalisation and protocol handling

Double-check how your domain resolves. If typing http://example.com fails to redirect cleanly to https://www.example.com (or vice versa), the scanner may flag unnecessary redirect chains. Ensuring clean canonical tags as outlined in Google Search Central's guidance to consolidate duplicate URLs helps our technical engine audit your site accurately.

3. Ensure public availability of key proof assets

Case studies, white papers, and product specification sheets behind hard registration forms or private subdomains cannot be indexed. If your strongest proof points require a customer login, our conversion and trust signal scanners will evaluate the site as lacking visible corroboration.

Limitations: What this setup does not capture

Understanding the boundaries of an automated scan prevents misinterpreting the final report:

• Gated customer portals: The audit cannot evaluate the user experience of software dashboards, client portals, or member-only areas.
• Internal sales conversations: The platform measures your public web narrative; it cannot verify whether your sales representatives use matching messaging on live calls.
• Private financial impact: While the report identifies conversion friction and brand ambiguity, it does not connect directly to your revenue ledgers or customer lifetime value metrics.

Review our breakdown on how the audit works to see the full scope of checks performed during each run, or explore a sample report to review the exact metrics generated.

To generate a full assessment of your brand positioning, technical discoverability, and conversion architecture, submit your domain to the Brand Health Audit today.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a Brand Health Audit take to complete?

Most automated scans process within 10 to 15 minutes of submission, depending on domain size and server response speed. You will receive an email notification with a direct link to your interactive dashboard once processing finishes.

Can I audit a staging or development website before launch?

Only if the staging environment is publicly accessible via a standard URL without password protection or IP whitelisting. If your staging environment requires HTTP Basic Authentication or blocks search crawlers, the platform will be unable to retrieve and parse the pages.

Will running the audit affect our website server performance?

No. The platform crawler applies conservative rate limiting designed to mirror normal user browsing behaviour. It makes lightweight requests and will not degrade your site's server capacity or disrupt visitor traffic.

Why do I need to supply competitor URLs?

Competitor domains establish a contextual baseline for your sector. The platform compares your entity prominence, structured markup completeness, and content differentiation against these specific rivals rather than arbitrary generic averages.

What should I do if my audit fails due to an access block?

If a firewall or security layer halts the scan, consult our guide to troubleshooting audit failures to identify which user agents to permit, or verify that your domain's DNS records and SSL certificates resolve correctly.

Sources

• Introduction to robots.txt — Google Search Central. Explains how search crawlers interpret access permissions and technical crawling directives.
• Organization schema definition — Schema.org. Outlines the standard structured data format used to define brand entities and official properties.
• Consolidate duplicate URLs with canonicals — Google Search Central. Explains how canonical links resolve domain variations and redirect chains.
• The Open Graph protocol — Open Graph. Details standard metadata integration across web assets and external distribution networks.

Editor notes

• Confirmed: No references to internal analytics or CMS logins are suggested as requirements; all requirements reflect the platform's public crawl architecture.
• Checked: All links adhere strictly to the allowed external source catalogue and internal URL paths.
• The distinction between mandatory inputs (4 items) and optional enrichments (3 items) matches platform ingestion capabilities.