Today we're launching ClearGrade publicly.
If you've been on the beta list for the last few months, you've already seen the audit reports land in your inbox. If not, the short version is this: ClearGrade is an AI-powered marketing audit and visibility platform built for small businesses. We grade your marketing across 6 dimensions. We ship the schema markup and FAQ content that closes the citation gaps in Google search, Google Maps, and AI search. We re-measure weekly to prove the lift.
This post is the why and the what. If you'd rather just run an audit on your own business, start here - 24 hours, no credit card.
Why we built it
The first ClearGrade audits were free favors for friends running small businesses. A coffee roaster, a yoga studio, a sports rehab clinic.
Each had paid an agency at some point. Each had a 60-page PDF in a Google Drive folder. Each had the same complaint: the report had recommendations but nobody had shipped any of them. The agency had moved on. The score was on paper. The lift never happened.
So we wrote audits that started with the answer instead of the appendix. Three quick wins ranked by impact-to-effort. Paste-ready schema markup. FAQ content targeted at the queries the business wasn't getting cited on. A re-measurement 30 days later that showed the work had paid off.
The audits worked. The schema shipped. The numbers moved.
Then customers started asking the obvious follow-up: can you keep doing this every week?
That became the platform.
What ships today
The free 6-dimension audit. Enter your name, email, and website at cleargradeai.com. 24 hours later, you get a graded score across content, conversion, SEO, competitive, brand, and growth - plus the top 3 quick wins ranked by impact-to-effort. No credit card. The first 3 quick wins are yours whether you upgrade or not.
The $49.99 full audit. Marketing + SEO + competitor reports. Per-dimension before/after analysis. 5 quick wins plus 5-7 strategic recommendations. Vertical-specific - we have playbooks for healthcare, legal, home services, restaurants, e-commerce, SaaS, and a generic fallback. Executive PDF + a 30-minute consult.
The $99/mo platform. This is where we close the loop:
- Weekly tracking across Google search rankings, Google Maps geo-grid (5×5 cells across your service area), and AI Visibility (Perplexity, Google AI Overview, ChatGPT, Gemini), each graded A through F.
- Auto-syncing schema embed - you paste a single
<script>tag, the schema lives on our infrastructure, and updates whenever your business info changes. - FAQ generation for citation gaps - every week we identify queries your business isn't cited on, draft a 100-word FAQ block, and put it in your queue for approval.
- Alerts when a regression hits. Not at the end of the month. The morning it happens.
Same price for a 1-person bakery and a 25-person clinic. No agency contract. Cancel anytime.
Why now
AI search is roughly 13-15% of total search volume by some 2026 estimates, and the share is climbing fast. Most small businesses have zero visibility into whether they're cited on Perplexity, Google AI Overview, ChatGPT Search, or Gemini. The tools that do track AI surfaces tend to ignore the part that closes the gap - they don't deploy schema markup and they don't generate FAQ content for uncited queries.
ClearGrade is the first audit tool to track all 4 AI surfaces with letter grades, and the only one I'm aware of where the platform deliverable is the actual fix - not just the report.
If you've been waiting for someone to build the version of an SEO platform that's calibrated for the owner-operator (not for an agency or a 200-person enterprise team), this is the one.
The wedge in one line
Most tools stop at the score. ClearGrade ships the fix.
That's the difference. Semrush hands you data. BrightLocal hands you a citation builder. Sistrix hands you a visibility index. They're all great research tools, and we use them. But they don't write the JSON-LD that goes in your <head> block, they don't draft the FAQ content targeted at queries you're missing, and they don't re-measure to prove the work earned the lift.
We do all three. Every week. Until you cancel or the numbers stop moving.
Where to start
If you run a small business with a website and a presence on Google, run the free audit. It takes 90 seconds to submit. The report lands in 24 hours. You'll either find something worth fixing or you'll have a baseline grade to compare against later.
If you've been on the fence about an SEO tool because they all felt built for someone else's company - read how it works and the pricing page. We made both of those for you specifically.
If you're a fellow founder, an SMB owner, or someone who's tried 3 SEO tools and given up on the category - I'd love to hear from you. Honest feedback wins. david@cleargradeai.com goes straight to my inbox.
Thanks to everyone who beta-tested over the last several months. The launch is just the start.
See you in the audit reports.
- David