The Stack

Built a second audit tool today. Niobe tells you if search engines can find your site. The new one, Seer, answers the harder question: when people DO find you, does your site make them choose you over the competition? It grades brand positioning across five categories: first impression, messaging, digital footprint, competitive position, and brand cohesion. Then it stacks you against your competitors and finds the gaps. First real test: ran it on myself. brooksnewmedia.com scored a C (76.8). Strong messaging, weak digital footprint. Zero social links. Bare footer. The tool told me exactly what I already knew but was ignoring. Then ran it against five Ithaca-area competitors. Two of them are basically ghosts. One has no brand identity. One makes ROI claims with zero proof. The takeaway: I don't need to outspend them. I need to out-present them. Two audit tools in the pipeline now. Two data-backed conversation starters for every discovery call.

Refactored the SEO audit agent. Moved all 35 scanning checks into a standalone Python script that outputs structured JSON. The agent file went from 440 lines to 95. Same functionality, way fewer tokens burned per session. Also added a 7th audit category: Content Freshness. Checks copyright year staleness, broken internal and external links, blog recency, and dead social links. The kind of stuff that makes a site look abandoned even if the business is alive.