Content Authority Audit

Content Authority Audit · Clifton Creative

Your Content Is Publishing.
It Isn’t Building Authority.

A diagnostic audit of your content operation’s authority infrastructure — E-E-A-T signals, AI citation position, schema implementation, and the organizational gaps making all of it worse. Delivered as a written report and a sixty-minute debrief.

Book Your Audit →
$899 · Delivered within ten business days
You have been publishing consistently. You have an SEO vendor, or a content team, or both. The blog has posts. Some of them rank. None of this has translated into the kind of authority that compounds — the kind where your content starts getting cited in AI-generated answers, where your brand becomes the recognized source on your topic, where the content operation starts to feel like an asset rather than an expense.
The reason is usually not a missing tactic. It is a structural problem in how your content is built, attributed, and organized. The E-E-A-T signals that build authority — named expertise, demonstrated experience, external recognition, trust infrastructure — are either absent or present in a form the algorithm doesn’t recognize as meaningful.
This audit finds where the problems are, names them specifically, and gives you a prioritized path out.

What the Audit Covers

  • E-E-A-T Signal AssessmentA review of your authorship infrastructure, expertise signals, experience markers, and trust architecture. What’s working, what’s absent, and what’s actively undercutting your credibility with search engines.
  • AI Citation & AEO PositionHow your content performs in answer engine environments — Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and similar — and where your competitors are getting citations you should be earning.
  • Schema & Structured Data AuditWhat schema is implemented, what’s missing, what’s misconfigured. Author, FAQ, Article, Organization schema — and which gaps are costing you machine-readable authority signals.
  • Organizational Accountability ReviewWho in your organization owns these decisions? This review identifies the function gaps that no tool can close.
  • Competitive Authority Gap AnalysisA comparison against two to three direct competitors, with specific identification of where they are outperforming you and which gaps are closeable in the near term.

Right For You?

Right fit

  • Active content operation publishing for at least a year
  • Want to understand specifically what’s wrong, not a general overview
  • Making decisions at the leadership level
  • Open to an honest assessment, including organizational findings
  • Want a written deliverable you can act on independently

Not right fit

  • Launching a new site with no existing content archive
  • Need keyword research or a full content strategy — this is a diagnostic, not a roadmap
  • Looking for validation of a decision already made
  • Want the audit to be a sales process for ongoing work

What You Get

  • Written Audit ReportA full written assessment with specific findings. Not a template. An analysis of your actual content operation.
  • Prioritized Action ListEvery finding rated by effort and impact. You will know exactly what to fix first and what can wait.
  • Sixty-Minute Debrief CallA working session to walk through findings and discuss the path forward given your specific constraints.
  • Delivered Within Ten Business DaysFrom the intake call to the written report in your inbox.

The debrief is a working session, not a sales call. If an ongoing engagement makes sense after the audit, we can discuss it.

This audit is conducted by Jacob Clifton, fractional editorial director and content strategist. Fourteen years as flagship staff writer at Television Without Pity, where the site reached one million weekly readers. Senior editorial roles at Gawker Media and Tribune Media. Bylines at Vulture, BuzzFeed, and the Austin Chronicle.

Not sure if you need the full audit? Take the five-minute diagnostic first →

Find out what’s
actually wrong.

Book Your Audit →
$899 · Written report + sixty-minute debrief · Delivered within ten business days