Google update recovery audit

A Google update recovery audit is a fixed fee, from £4,500, agreed before work starts — and the fee includes the walkthrough and my support while the fixes ship, not just the documents. The exact price depends on how many pages are in scope: the fee covers most sites up to around 10,000 pages, assessed by page family, and larger or more complex sites are scoped individually. When there's been a drop, the diagnosis phase is part of that fixed fee, not a surcharge. If an audit isn't the right next step, I'll say so before you spend anything.

Two reads on every page, scored section by section: how good it is — accuracy, evidence, real expertise — and how well it serves the specific buyer it's for. The measures come from Google's published guidance and documentation, plus my own insight from years of doing this. Every page is scored across them, but I don't hand you a number — I hand you the improvements. The useful signal isn't either read on its own, it's the gap between them: a page that's useful but held below the bar is a cheap fix; a page that's polished but says nothing a buyer can use needs reworking. More on what "quality" actually means.

When there's been a drop, two documents. First the impact analysis: what was hit, what was spared, the alternatives ruled out in writing, and who took the visibility. Then the quality assessment itself: an executive summary with the traffic at stake, the quality read by page family, the priority matrix, worked findings with plain-English evidence, content and template briefs, a sequenced fix plan and a then-and-now wrap-up review once the recovery lands — plus a data sheet with every page's section-by-section findings. Regression guardrails and an ongoing impact tracker are optional add-ons. No drop? You get the assessment, with a baseline read where the diagnosis would sit.

A triage read, within days of getting access: does the drop track the update, an incident, or something else. Then phase 1 in full. Two rules protect the diagnosis: if the update is still rolling out, changes wait until it settles — mid-rollout edits can't be read and usually make things worse — and if the evidence points somewhere other than quality (technical, or the results page changing shape), you hear that instead of a rewrite plan. Announced update or not, the method is the same; the timeline evidence just works harder.

Sometimes — but not with a blanket sweep, and rarely by deleting. The audit gives every weak page a verdict: fix it, differentiate it, fold it into a stronger page, or retire it. Deleting pages that still earn traffic or links does more harm than the thin content did, and consolidating two near-identical pages almost always beats deleting either. The point is to decide page by page on the evidence, not to cut for the sake of a lower page count.

In substance, yes. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust run through the scoring — but E-E-A-T isn't a score you can buy or a checklist you can tick. It's evidence on pages: who stands behind the advice, whether claims are dated and sourced, whether the page shows first-hand knowledge. The audit names the missing evidence per page section, which is what makes it fixable.

I don't use AI-content detectors, and the question they answer isn't the one that matters. The standards judge usefulness and evidence, not authorship. A page a human paraphrased eighty times to fill a template fails the same way an AI-generated one does — thin, interchangeable, nothing a buyer can use — and a page with real expertise behind it passes however it was drafted. What the audit does catch is sameness at scale, AI-written or not: it measures how much of your content is interchangeable between pages, which is where most "low-quality AI content" problems show up.

No — an update hit isn't a penalty. But it usually signposts the same underlying problem: widespread quality issues, which is exactly what this audit finds and fixes. A manual action is a different thing — an actual penalty, with a notice in Search Console — and a specific job: fix the violation, document it, file the reconsideration request. Manual actions are rare, but if you've had a notice, I can help with that too.

No, and be careful with anyone who does. What I guarantee is a correct reading of the evidence: what was hit, what was spared, why, and the plan that follows. Most drops are recoverable when the diagnosis is right — and reassessments register when Google re-evaluates, which mostly means at later updates, so recovery is measured at those checkpoints rather than week to week. Core updates have historically landed every two to four months, so the first checkpoint usually falls within a quarter of the fixes shipping.

The SEO content audit is an inventory decision: it works through everything you have published and rules on each piece — keep, merge, refresh, retire or differentiate — based on how it performs. This quality audit answers a different question: why pages fail the quality bar, and which templates and systems keep producing pages that do. A big archive that has stopped earning usually needs the content audit; a template-built site, or one hit by an update, usually needs the quality audit. If it's unclear which fits, say so in the enquiry and I'll point you to the right one.

A Google update recovery audit usually completes in two to three weeks, depending on the size of the site and how quickly access is set up. When the diagnosis phase runs, its first read lands within days — the what-happened answer doesn't wait for the full document. The walkthrough call is booked as soon as everything is ready.