Common Questions

Yes. The 10-pillar automated analysis is free with no credit card required. You'll get scores across all ten pillars, your single most critical blind spot in full detail, an executive summary, and infrastructure verdict cards. Paid plans (Starter $39/mo and up) unlock the rest of the report — every blind spot, market intelligence, the full budget breakdown, action items, and PDF export — but the underlying analysis is the same. Nothing about the diagnostic itself changes when you pay. You're paying for visibility into more of what the run already produced.

Five to ten minutes end to end. The self-assessment portion takes about a minute — you rate your own marketing across the ten pillars. When you submit, the system kicks off the analysis (scraping public surfaces, querying multiple LLMs, checking technical signals across schema, DNS, robots.txt, social profiles, advertising signals, and the rest) and asks you to verify your email. The analysis runs in the background while you verify, and the report lands once both finish. The run itself can take five to seven minutes — it has grown longer than earlier versions as we added more signal providers and more complex prompting. No overnight queue, no waiting list.

No. The diagnostic operates entirely from public signals — your website, your social profiles, your DNS records, your sitemap, your robots.txt, what AI systems can find about you. We don't ask for analytics logins, ad account access, or CRM credentials. That's deliberate: the diagnostic is meant to be runnable on any business, including competitors, without their cooperation. If you later book an Infrastructure Audit (paid, separate engagement), that does involve granting read-only access to specific systems so we can confirm what the automated diagnostic surfaced from the outside. But the diagnostic itself requires nothing more than a URL.

The Diagnostic is the automated 10-pillar analysis — free, machine-run, five to ten minutes from your URL. It tells you what the system measured. The Strategic Assessment ($300 USD, ~3hr engagement: pre-research, 1hr live session, follow-up) is the human translation layer on top — we walk through the findings together, explain what each result means for your specific business, and build a prioritized action plan you can actually act on. The Diagnostic surfaces signal; the Assessment turns signal into decisions. Most people who book an Assessment do so after running a free Diagnostic — but the Assessment can be booked first if you'd rather skip self-service entirely.

Anyone responsible for, or adjacent to, marketing infrastructure that has grown beyond what one person can hold in their head. Clearest fits: founders and CMOs setting the marketing direction; marketing operations leads owning the tooling and tracking layer; CTOs and CIOs whose teams own the stack underneath the marketing work; IT and security leads responsible for the trust posture, consent, and tracking-pixel data flow; agencies running diagnostics on prospects or clients as part of discovery or quarterly review. The diagnostic works on any business with a public URL, but it's most valuable when the cost of being wrong about your own marketing is meaningful.

The diagnostic analyzes: Attribution (tracking accuracy and measurement gaps), Tech Stack (tool efficiency and redundancy), Conversion (forms, CTAs, checkout friction), Trust & Security (privacy, consent, legal disclosures), Brand (voice, sentiment and content quality across public surfaces), Marketing (CRM, email, social presence, automation), Advertising (ad platform detection and spend signals), Competitors (AI-powered research into positioning and market gaps), Product (offer clarity and pricing presentation), and Discoverability (Web, SEO, AEO, and GEO — Core Web Vitals, schema, AI-crawler access, indexation, and off-site consensus). Each pillar produces a score based on independent infrastructure analysis — compared against what you told us about your own marketing.

Your report is generated immediately — the system runs the full analysis regardless of your plan. The free report shows your 10-pillar perception vs. reality scores, your single most critical blind spot in full detail, an executive summary, and infrastructure verdict cards. Starter unlocks the complete picture: every blind spot, all priority optimisations, strengths to hone, market intelligence with competitor profiles, the full budget breakdown by pillar, and PDF export. Pro adds the investment roadmap with recommended spend per pillar, plus team sharing via org accounts. There's no automatic follow-up. The next move is yours.

No diagnostic is needed. If there's no existing infrastructure to audit, we go straight to a Blueprint Discovery session — a structured conversation that covers intent, constraints, technology decisions, and success criteria from scratch. This is the entry point for greenfield clients. It typically scopes directly into an Architect engagement. Reach out to discuss.

No. The automated 10-pillar analysis is always free — though the free report shows a focused subset of the findings (scores, top blind spot, executive summary, verdicts). Starter and Pro plans unlock progressively more depth: Starter adds all findings, market intelligence, and the full budget analysis; Pro adds the investment roadmap and team access. Reviewing any version of the report with us is a separate paid step — the Strategic Assessment ($300 USD) — and it's the entry point to the Audit stream. You can optionally add a deeper Competitive Report ($250 USD per competitor) or bundle an assessment with two competitor deep-dives at booking for $650 USD.

Yes. The Free plan includes 2 reports in your first month and 1 per month after that. Starter gives you 5 per month, Pro gives you 10, and Enterprise gives you 40. It's useful to re-run after significant changes to your stack, after a rebrand, or to track improvement over time. Each run produces a fresh report. And if you upgrade your plan, the full analysis is unlocked on all your existing reports instantly — no re-run needed.

We scope the work before quoting it. That means a brief conversation about your business, what the diagnostic found, and what you're trying to achieve — followed by a written scope and a fixed price. You know exactly what you're committing to before any work begins. Scope changes are discussed and approved, never billed silently.

The Strategic Assessment is $300 USD flat fee. The Competitive Report is $250 USD per competitor — you pick the ones that matter most. Bundle an assessment with two competitor deep-dives for $650 USD at booking. Architect engagements vary more widely — a Blueprint alone is a different scope to a full Build & Monitor engagement. We don't publish fixed Architect ranges because the diagnostic genuinely changes the answer. Reach out or run the diagnostic and we can talk specifics.

Not always — but usually. The diagnostic exists partly because we don't want to quote an Architect engagement without understanding your current infrastructure. It's how we write a good spec. If you already have a thorough picture of your current state, we can discuss starting at Blueprint. But the Audit almost always surfaces things that change the scope.

Yes. Hourly rates are quoted in USD. If you're based in Australia or Canada, we're happy to provide rough local-currency equivalents as a reference point — just ask. All rates are subject to market exchange rates at time of invoicing.

Both are ongoing engagements for clients who want their infrastructure kept healthy after an audit or build. Monitoring is observation and reporting — we re-run the diagnostic monthly, do targeted manual spot-checks on your priority pillars, and send a written report on what changed, what regressed, and what needs attention. You decide what to act on and your team executes. Orchestration adds light execution — small fixes handled directly (broken tracking pixels, consent configuration, schema errors, UTM corrections) plus coordination with your existing team. Anything larger than about two hours gets scoped and quoted separately. Pricing for both tiers is discussed at engagement start. Entry point is typically after a Strategic Assessment or Blueprint delivery.

Domain translation is the practice of making technical decisions legible to non-technical stakeholders — and vice versa. Every engagement includes it at no extra cost. In Assist, we explain the work we're doing. In Audit, we explain what findings mean for your business. In Architect, by the end of the engagement you'll understand the system well enough to make your own decisions going forward. No black boxes.

SDD is our methodology: nothing gets built without a specification you've reviewed and approved. Before any system component is built, we define intent (what it's supposed to do), context (the constraints and existing stack), and success criteria (how we'll know it's working). The Blueprint is the spec. The build executes against it. Deviations are discussed, not assumed.

Yes. The work is remote by default. We have direct experience across Australian, Singaporean, and UK markets, with compliance environments including ASIC and GDPR. Geography is not a constraint.

Any business with a digital marketing or operational infrastructure worth auditing. We have deep experience in regulated financial services (CFD and derivatives trading, ASIC compliance, GDPR) and in agency environments. If your business operates in a compliance-sensitive context — financial services, legal, healthcare — we're familiar with those constraints.

Yes — we offer tailored training for teams on topics including marketing technology, AI readiness, and digital infrastructure. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Yellowhead Digital is a marketing infrastructure intelligence platform. We diagnose the health of your marketing stack across ten pillars — attribution, tech stack, conversion, trust and security, brand, marketing, advertising, competitors, product, and discoverability (web, SEO, AEO, GEO) — and produce a perception-gap report comparing what you assume is working against what we independently detect. Three service streams (Audit, Architect, Assist) sit alongside the self-serve diagnostic to translate findings into action. The diagnostic itself is free.

AEO is the practice of getting your content extracted and cited INSIDE the answers AI systems generate — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews. When a user asks an AI assistant a question that would historically have produced a search results page, the AI synthesises an answer from its training data and live retrieval. AEO is the 'get into the answer' work: structured data is in place, content is citation-friendly and directly answerable, and AI crawlers can read you. AEO is one of the four sub-scores in our Discoverability pillar (Web, SEO, AEO, GEO). It is distinct from GEO, which is about getting named and recommended — see the next question.

GEO is the practice of getting AI systems to NAME and RECOMMEND your business — the 'get recommended' axis, distinct from AEO's 'get into the answer.' Where AEO is mostly on-site (structured data, AI-crawler access, answer-first content), GEO is driven OFF-site: third-party mentions, earned media and trade-press coverage, analyst and industry citations, and presence in authoritative reference sources like Wikipedia and Crunchbase. It's the AI-era equivalent of authority and reputation. Our diagnostic measures GEO as one of the four sub-scores in the Discoverability pillar (Web, SEO, AEO, GEO). The deeper-read resource page is /resources/seo-aeo-geo.

Traditional SEO optimises for search results pages — keywords, backlinks, technical health, content depth, all measured against a ranking position in Google. AEO optimises for AI synthesis — whether the AI includes you when generating an answer to a relevant prompt. The two share infrastructure (structured data, content quality) but diverge in measurement: SEO measures rankings, AEO measures citation frequency inside AI answers. Our diagnostic covers both — along with GEO (off-site recommendation) and Web (loadability) — as four distinct sub-scores inside the Discoverability pillar.

The diagnostic surfaces what's blocking citation. Common findings: AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) are not explicitly addressed in robots.txt; the site has no llms.txt; FAQPage and Article schema are missing or malformed; the business's Wikipedia / Wikidata entity is thin or absent; press mentions exist but are not surfaced with appropriate schema; key pages lack semantic structure that retrieval systems index. The report names each finding, scores severity, and produces action items per pillar. The Strategic Assessment turns findings into a sequenced plan if you want human translation.

Those tools are AEO pure-plays — they focus on a slice of marketing visibility (citation tracking, content optimisation, GEO content workflows). Yellowhead is broader: AEO is one of ten pillars we audit. We measure attribution health, tech stack coherence, trust and security posture, brand consistency, and the perception gap between what operators believe is happening and what we independently detect — alongside AEO. If you're shopping for an AEO tracker specifically, those tools will go deeper on that one surface. If you're trying to understand the health of your marketing infrastructure as a system, that's our scope.

Yes — the ten pillars apply broadly because they measure infrastructure surfaces, not industry-specific tactics. The system adapts: for a SaaS company, the Product pillar measures pricing-page clarity and offer specificity; for an e-commerce site, it weighs PDP structure and checkout friction; for an agency, it scores how clearly the service ladder is communicated. The Tech Stack pillar detects whatever's actually in the stack (HubSpot, Shopify, Salesforce, custom rolls), so the analysis fits the business shape rather than forcing it into a template.

It should. Our Tech Stack pillar covers tool inventory and efficiency, and AI tool usage is part of that picture. Beyond tool selection, we're interested in whether your AI usage is governed — do you have documented intent for AI-assisted workflows, or are you prompting ad hoc? The latter is manageable at small scale but creates significant risk in production systems.

Most businesses have accumulated marketing infrastructure — tools, automations, tracking setups, content systems — that runs in the background without anyone actively piloting it. "Operating what you own" means having someone who understands the systems well enough to make decisions about them, not just use them. AI has made this more urgent: the tools are more capable, but undirected capability creates more noise, not less signal. Our Audit and Architect streams are both built around this — the goal isn't just to fix what's broken, it's to get you to a position where you're making deliberate decisions about your infrastructure rather than inheriting whatever accumulated by default.

Most AI tools are stateless — every session starts from zero. A persistent knowledge system is the infrastructure that fixes this: a database-backed, agent-readable layer that stores your context, decisions, and institutional knowledge so AI tools can access it across sessions and tools. For businesses integrating AI into their operations, this is foundational infrastructure. We build it as part of Architect engagements where AI workflows are in scope.