--- title: "I ran an AI SEO audit on my own site" description: "I ran an AI SEO audit on our website. It told me to rebuild three pillar pages that already existed. Here is the one signal that hid them." type: article version: 1 version_id: "3eee5ae0-f353-45f2-87a3-abe4f26fd6f0" generated_at: "2026-06-03T09:37:01.575Z" author: "Matt Wilkinson" date_published: "2026-06-03T08:15:00.000Z" date_modified: "2026-06-03T08:15:00.667Z" language: en-us reading_time: "10 min" word_count: 1877 keywords: ["I ran an AI SEO audit on my own site", "Strivenn Thinking"] url: "https://strivenn.com/thinking/i-ran-an-ai-seo-audit-on-my-own-site" --- # I ran an AI SEO audit on my own site > I ran an AI SEO audit on our website. It told me to rebuild three pillar pages that already existed. Here is the one signal that hid them. ## Key Takeaways - Strivenn Thinking - It told me to build pages I had already built. ## **Strivenn Thinking** #### Pull up a seat at our digital campfire where story, strategy, and AI spark new possibilities for sharper brands and smarter teams. 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Last week I ran the Claude Cowork SEO audit on our own website. The first thing it recommended was that I build three pillar pages. One on AI discoverability. One on synthetic customers. One on why static buyer personas fail in life sciences. All three already existed. I had written them, published them, and put them in the main navigation. The audit recommended building them anyway. That is the part worth your attention. A single configuration choice was enough to make three authority hubs read as throwaway landing pages, to the one audience that now decides whether anyone finds them. Here is what happened. ### The pages were not the problem Take the [AI discoverability hub](https://strivenn.com/ai-discoverability-for-life-science-brands-strivenn). It carries primary data from two of our own exhibitor surveys, ELRIG Drug Discovery 2025 (n=107) and SLAS 2026 (n=43), a series of deep articles, and three named frameworks: the **Unconsidered Set**, the **Programme Gap**, and **Citation Compression**. The [synthetic customer hub](https://strivenn.com/the-synthetic-customer-life-science-marketings-missing-intelligence-layer-strivenn) runs a Forbes Agency Council citation and a side-by-side breakdown of [where synthetic customers work and where they fail](https://strivenn.com/when-synthetic-customers-work-and-when-they-dont-strivenn) across thirteen commercial tasks. The [buyer persona page](https://strivenn.com/why-buyer-persona-research-fails-in-life-sciences-strivenn) grounds its argument in FDA, EMA and ISO 42001. That is regulation doing the work. These are the deepest commercial pages I have published. And an SEO audit looked straight at them and recommended I build them from scratch. ### Why the audit missed them The cause was the URL. Each pillar carried a "-strivenn" suffix on the slug. To a crawler that tail reads like a tactical landing page rather than an authority hub. The audit saw three slugs that looked like one-off campaign pages and treated them as exactly that. There was a smaller issue too. The pillars had Article and Speakable schema. They were missing FAQPage and BreadcrumbList, two tags that help an engine read the shape of a page and place it in a hierarchy. A small gap. The navigation was fine. The schema gap was minor. The URL convention was the one doing real work, and it was doing it quietly, across my most important pages. AI search does not grade your content the way you do. It reads signals: - Structure - Naming - Markup - Relationships between pages > ##### *When the signals say tactical, the content gets read as tactical, however good it is.* ### The slug objection You might be thinking a URL slug is housekeeping with no line to pipeline. For traditional search, that argument holds some weight. It seems AI engines changed the maths. They lift answers from pages they can classify cleanly and cite them by name. A hub that looks like a campaign page does not get classified as a hub, so it does not get cited as one. ### What I changed, and how fast The fixes were not hard. I updated the URLs to clean canonical URLs using 301 redirects (all handled by my HubSpot CMS), and I retired the "-strivenn" tail. FAQPage and BreadcrumbList schema added to the three pillars, completing the structured data the rest of the site already carried. The effort to fix it was minimal, but finding it was the hard part, and I only found it because I asked Claude to run an audit on the site. ### Run the audit for yourself Here is the part that matters for you. The Unconsidered Set framework I published applies to your brand more directly than you think. If an AI engine cannot classify your best work, you are not in the set of options a buyer is shown. You are absent from the shortlist before the shortlist exists. So run the test. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode. Ask each one to name the top three companies in your category. See whether you appear, and which page they point to. That gap is common. In our ELRIG and SLAS surveys, 62% of life science exhibitors had never once tested their AI visibility. They sit in the Unconsidered Set and do not know it. Over the same window the share of AI power users at those events nearly tripled, from 6.6% at ELRIG to 18.6% at SLAS. The buyers are already using these tools. Most brands are not checking what the tools say about them. Do not just run this test once a year. Run it every quarter or every time you make a significant upgrade to your site. ### The version AI can read The version of Strivenn.com that I'd been building for AI search was not being classified by the AI searchbots in the way I wanted it to be classified. An old school URL convention that used to work (yes I was hacking around with SEO in the early days of Google) did that, on the pages I was proudest of. The question I am so pleased I asked as soon as I did, is the one worth asking yourself: > ##### *"Is the version of your brand the AI bots can read, what you actually want it to find and share?"* Want to run a proper check on your own site? The six-phase AI discoverability framework I built is published in full: read [The AI Discoverability Audit for Life Science Brands](https://strivenn.com/ai-discoverability-for-life-science-brands-strivenn). If you would rather start with where your brand stands today, [book a 30-minute consultation](https://strivenn.com/meetings/strivenn/strivenn-meetings) and we will map your AI visibility position together. Topic: [**Marketing Strategy**](https://strivenn.com/thinking/tag/marketing-strategy) ### Are you Strivenn to Succeed? Book your growth consultation with the marketing doctor today [BOOK A GROWTH CONSULTATION](https://strivenn.com/contact) ### Related articles [ ##### Your buyer segmentation is two dimensional and that's a problem By Matt Wilkinson ](https://strivenn.com/thinking/your-buyer-segmentation-is-two-dimensional-and-thats-a-problem)[ ##### You won the room, but missed the buying committee. By Matt Wilkinson ](https://strivenn.com/thinking/you-won-the-room-but-missed-the-buying-committee) --- ## About This Content **Source:** [I ran an AI SEO audit on my own site](https://strivenn.com/thinking/i-ran-an-ai-seo-audit-on-my-own-site) **Author:** Matt Wilkinson **Published:** June 3, 2026 *This content is provided for informational purposes. Please visit the original source for the most up-to-date information.*