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Self-audit — we ran IA on our own marketing site

We audited ourselves. Our own tool found 19 structural failures.

We sell structural authority architecture. We tell prospects their site is flat, missing pillars, leaking authority. So we ran our own product on our own marketing site to see what it would say. It said the same things back to us.

What our own diagnosis returned

The IA Page Rehabilitation planner flagged 19 pages across four failure categories. We did not prompt the engine, edit the output, or filter the findings. This is the raw diagnosis our own tool ships to every customer who runs an audit.

Issue categoryCountExamples
Missing or duplicate H1s15/, /case-study-fixing-100-pages-cannibalisation, /seo-audit-tool, /governance-api, /data-responsibility
Orphan pages (no inbound links)2/website-not-ranking, /page-roles-explained
Missing canonical URL1/seo-case-studies
Thin content1/google-ignores-most-websites

But the surface flags were not the actual finding

The 19 page-level issues were real and we fixed them. But walking the diagnosis through to the Perfect Structure view returned an architecture diagram that revealed the real gap: our site did not have the structural shape we were prescribing to other people.

Our own tool said we should have:

  • 4 pillar money pages — we had 1
  • 5 cluster pages under each pillar — we had 0 cluster-wired pages
  • Trust layer (About / Process / Reviews / Case Studies / FAQ Hub) — we had 0
  • Conversion layer (Pricing / Contact / Free Audit) — we had a /signup and not much else
  • Working internal link graph routing authority cluster → pillar → conversion — we had a flat collection of 23 unmoored essays

We were selling authority architecture from a site that didn’t have any.

Two paths

Path A

Silent fix

Quietly fix the 19 surface flags. Never mention the structural gap. Hope nobody notices we were selling architecture from a site without one.

Path B

Rebuild in public

Document the entire finding, rebuild the site using our own product’s recommendations, ship the rebuild as the case study itself.

← We picked this one.

What we shipped — one sitting, ~2,400 lines

We took the architecture from the IA plan and the brand voice from the existing site (the engine’s suggested pillar names were SEO-keyword-driven; the voice on our existing pages was category-defining). Nine new pages went live in a single sitting:

URLRoleWhy
/how-it-worksConversion bridgeThe 5-step pipeline narrative — the single most load-bearing page on the new site
/authority-architecturePillar 1Category-defining concept
/structural-cannibalisationPillar 2The viral hook concept
/internal-authority-flowPillar 3Technical depth
/repair-wordpress-elementorPillar 4Use-case capture — ties directly to the v0.4.1 plugin
/aboutTrustWhy we built IA, what we will and will not do
/our-processTrustThe five gates, what each delivers, the safety guarantees between them
/faqTrustTen honest answers to the questions buyers actually ask
/case-studiesHubWhere this case study (and every other) lives

The honest reflection

We sat with the “our own site doesn’t pass our own test” finding for about 20 minutes before deciding what to do about it. The first instinct was quiet remediation. The second, better, instinct was to document the gap publicly and let the rebuild itself be the proof.

If you are reading this on the rebuilt site, every claim in this case study is traceable to a commit in our git history — see docs/self-audit-2026-06/. The rebuild itself was diagnosed, planned, written, and shipped in the same kind of focused one-sitting work the IA pipeline is designed to produce for any customer.

Three things this proves:

Product works on itself

Our own diagnosis was correct, even when it surfaced an embarrassing finding. The architecture we built is the architecture our engine recommended.

Plan is deterministic

Same site, same plan, every time. The engine produced a structural recommendation no LLM hallucinated.

One sitting, not a project

9 high-quality pages, full sitemap restructure, metadata cleanup, published case study — shipped in one afternoon. The speed advantage of the pipeline is real.

Verifiable

Full rebuild documentation lives in this repository at:

docs/self-audit-2026-06/CASE_STUDY.md

The commit that built this case study is timestamped. The code behind every claim is in the same repo. If a number on this page does not match what the IA tool reports when you run it on our site today, the discrepancy is a bug — please tell us.

Run the audit on your site.

You will see what we saw. Then you decide whether to silently fix it — or rebuild it in public.

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