Independent audit · prepared privately for Siteimprove

Six months of watching Siteimprove in AI search.

One running, independent audit of how AI engines find, read and cite Siteimprove — first delivered in May, re-run and cross-checked in September. This is the front door to every report in the engagement, and where things stand now.

Prepared for

Jen Jones
CMO, Siteimprove

Prepared by

Onur Büyüktezgel
Independent Website & SEO

Engagement

May 2026 → present
4 measurement passes

Status

Current as of
1 September 2026

01A note, six months on

Jen — we last spoke in May, around the first audit. There's no agenda behind this page.

The one finding that gated everything back then — Bing's and Microsoft's crawlers blocked at your firewall, so ChatGPT and Copilot couldn't see the site — has since been resolved. Enough else moved that I re-ran the full audit in September and had the numbers independently cross-checked. The headline is better than May's: on the fullest measure available, Siteimprove is now the most-cited accessibility vendor in AI answers — ahead of both Deque and Level Access.

Two things in the September reports are worth twenty minutes of your time — including one where an independent scanner graded Siteimprove wrong because of a small server bug. If you'd like to walk through them, I'm one reply away.

— Onur

02Where it stands now

200 OK Bing and MSN crawlers reach the site again — the May headline finding (HTTP 403 at the WAF) is resolved and confirmed on two passes.

#1 of 3 Most-cited accessibility vendor in AI answers: 3,419 citations vs Level Access 722 and Deque 430. The May "structurally absent" picture no longer holds.

1 afternoon separates the site from being read correctly by machines — a soft-404 rule, an out-of-date identity record, and the AEO page's missing schema. All low-effort.

03The reports in this engagement

Sep 2026 Executive read — September re-auditstart here The 10-minute picture: what changed since May, where Siteimprove stands in AI answers, and the four moves that matter, in order. → Sep 2026 Full technical workbook — September Every finding with its evidence: crawlability, schema, the entity record, delivery — plus an API-level teardown of the free AEO and SEO checkers, and a coverage table. → May 2026 Original audit — the baseline The first full audit: retrieval, brand memory, on-site structure and the AI-engine landscape, with a 30/60/90-day recovery plan. Everything since is measured against this. → 28 May 2026 Re-audit delta — 20 days on The first re-run: what had moved twenty days after delivery, and what hadn't. A shorter record kept for continuity. → Jul 2026 The free tools, tested from the outside A teardown of Siteimprove's own AEO and SEO checkers, tested to their raw APIs and placed next to the tools they compete with. Now folded into the September workbook. →

These reports were prepared for Siteimprove and kept private to it — not indexed, not linked publicly, and not shared elsewhere. If you reached this page, it was shared with you directly.