What a Free EntityGrid Audit Actually Reveals: A Walkthrough of the Michigan Law Firm Marketing Score

Most marketing audits come in two flavors: a free 'audit' that turns out to be a thinly disguised sales pitch, or a paid audit that delivers a 60-page PDF nobody reads. The EntityGrid audit was built to be neither. It is a structured analysis of how AI systems currently perceive a Michigan law firm — delivered as a one-page Marketing Score with specific, prioritized findings.

This article walks through what the audit actually analyzes, what the Marketing Score measures, and the kinds of findings it typically surfaces. The goal is transparency: if you understand the methodology, you can decide for yourself whether the audit is worth your time.

The EntityGrid audit was built around a simple premise: the firms AI systems can describe most confidently are the firms AI systems recommend most often. Confidence comes from coherent entity signals across the web. Most firms have meaningful gaps in those signals, and most firms have no visibility into where the gaps actually are. The audit closes that visibility gap.

The four scoring categories

The Michigan Law Firm Marketing Score breaks down into four equally weighted categories. The first category is Entity Foundation — the NAP+W consistency, Google Business Profile completeness, and directory citation health that determines whether AI systems treat the firm as one coherent entity. Most firms score lower in this category than they expect. Variance accumulates quietly over years, and the audit surfaces every specific inconsistency.

The second category is Schema and Structured Data — the technical layer that lets AI systems parse a firm's site as structured information rather than free-text marketing copy. The audit scans for Organization, LegalService, Attorney, Service, FAQPage, and Review schema across the firm's site and reports both presence and validity. Schema that exists but is malformed scores zero, the same as missing schema, which surprises firms whose developers added it years ago and never revisited the implementation.

The third category is Content Authority — practice-area depth, attorney bio completeness, current content cadence, and the presence of answer blocks and FAQ structures that AI systems can extract. The audit rates each practice area independently, since most firms have one or two well-developed areas and several others that effectively do not exist in AI search.

The fourth category is AI Search Visibility — the direct test of whether AI systems currently recommend the firm. We run the firm's core service queries against ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews and capture whether and how the firm is represented. This is the only category that measures outcome rather than input, and it is the category most firms find most useful because it is the only one tied directly to whether the firm is currently winning AI-driven prospects.

What the audit does not include

The audit does not score creative — design quality, brand aesthetic, or marketing tone are not part of the methodology. Those things matter, but they are not what AI systems evaluate. The audit also does not score paid search performance, because as documented in our recent testing, paid search does not influence AI recommendation. And the audit does not include a generic 'opportunity score' or a vendor-friendly recommendation to invest in services we happen to sell.

What the audit does include is specific, actionable findings — typically eight to fifteen discrete items, ranked by potential impact, with enough detail that the firm can address them either internally or with any qualified vendor. A firm could take the audit findings to a different agency, or to its in-house marketing team, and have a clear remediation roadmap. That is the test of whether an audit is genuine.

What firms typically discover

Across the Michigan law firm audits we have run, certain patterns recur. NAP+W variance shows up in about 85% of firms — usually across five to twelve directories. Schema markup is missing or malformed in approximately 70% of firm sites. Attorney bios are below the depth threshold AI systems require in roughly 60% of firms. And AI search visibility — the actual outcome metric — is weak or absent in over half of firms with otherwise strong traditional SEO performance.

The most common surprise is not the existence of gaps. It is the gap between perceived marketing strength and actual entity strength. Firms that score 80% or higher on traditional SEO audits routinely score 40% to 55% on the EntityGrid framework. The traditional audit measures what worked in 2020. The EntityGrid audit measures what works now.

Who should request an audit

The audit is built specifically for Michigan law firms with established practices — typically ten or more years of operation, multiple attorneys, and existing investment in their digital presence. Firms in earlier growth stages benefit, but the audit's value scales with the size of the gap between current investment and current outcome. If the firm has been paying for marketing and not seeing the results that level of investment should produce, the audit will explain why with unusual specificity.

The audit takes us about a week to complete and delivers as a one-page Marketing Score plus a ranked findings list. There is no follow-up sales sequence, no obligation to engage further, and no upsell built into the delivery. Firms can take the findings and implement them however they choose. We do it that way because the audit is more valuable to us as a credibility-building deliverable than it would be as a sales funnel.

How to request one

Call (231) 744-6475 or book a strategy session at cal.com/lynnlively. The conversation starts with a brief overview of your firm and goals, takes about twenty minutes, and ends with whether or not the audit is a fit. If it is not — if your situation calls for a different starting point — we will tell you, and recommend the right alternative.

The firms most at risk in the AI search era are the firms with the strongest false confidence in their digital position. They are not poorly marketed firms. They are well-marketed firms whose marketing was tuned for the previous era of search. The audit's value is the diagnostic — knowing exactly where the gap is between past investment and current performance. Closing the gap is the work that follows.