Case study

Found Clearly audits Found Clearly: our visibility baseline

By Found ClearlyJuly 22, 20267 min read

On July 22, 2026, the Found Clearly public pages we tested were technically reachable and the preferred HTTPS homepage returned 200, while HTTP and www variants redirected to it. That establishes crawl eligibility, not search visibility. We found weak sitemap dates and incomplete page-level service markup, corrected those issues in this release, and are publishing the baseline before Google, Bing, AI mentions, or leads can show an outcome.

A company selling visibility work should be willing to show its own unfinished baseline. This is ours. It is a self-audit, not an independent endorsement, and it starts before there is a flattering traffic chart to display.

Baseline date: July 22, 2026. This page records technical observations and changes. It does not claim that Found Clearly ranks, is indexed everywhere, receives AI citations, or has gained customers from organic search.

What we checked

We requested the production homepage, four core audit pages, the Texas page, the Insights hub, robots.txt, and the XML sitemap from outside the application. We inspected response status and redirects, then checked the rendered website visibility audit page for its canonical URL, indexing directives, metadata, and JSON-LD types.

Canonical host and redirects

  • https://foundclearly.com/ returned 200 without a redirect.
  • http://foundclearly.com/ returned a permanent 308 redirect to the HTTPS apex homepage.
  • https://www.foundclearly.com/ returned a permanent 308 redirect to the HTTPS apex homepage.
  • Each tested canonical marketing page returned 200 directly.
  • The website visibility audit declared its own final HTTPS URL as canonical and did not emit a noindex meta directive.

Crawler access and sitemap

The published robots.txt allowed crawling of the public site and declared the sitemap. It separately disallowed crawling of account, admin, API, tokenized report, and preview paths. That is intentional: private application routes are not search landing pages.

The baseline sitemap returned 200 and listed 31 public URLs. It also gave every URL the same July 11 modification date, even though the pages had changed on different days. That made lastmod less useful than it should have been.

Structured information

The tested audit page emitted Organization, FAQPage, and BreadcrumbList JSON-LD. The organization logo still referenced an older icon, general service coverage included a synthetic 'Worldwide (remote)' place, and the four audit pages did not yet describe their own consulting service with page-level Service markup.

What we changed from the baseline

  • Replaced the organization logo reference with a stable 512-by-512 ImageObject.
  • Added WebSite markup for the Found Clearly site name, domain alternate name, canonical URL, and publisher relationship.
  • Added stable, page-specific Service markup to the website visibility, local SEO, AI search visibility, and website clarity audit pages.
  • Removed the synthetic worldwide place from general service-area structured data.
  • Changed the sitemap to use explicit editorial dates for static and industry pages and each article's own dateModified value.
  • Kept private routes out of the sitemap and disallowed them in robots.txt.

What this does not prove

  • A 200 response does not prove that Google or Bing indexed the URL.
  • Sitemap inclusion does not force crawling, indexing, ranking, or traffic.
  • Valid structured data does not guarantee a rich result or an AI recommendation.
  • A self-audit is first-party evidence; it is not independent authority.
  • We did not have verified Search Console, Bing performance, conversion, or client-outcome data in this public baseline.

The honest status is technical eligibility, not search success. We will add outcomes only when a dated first-party company record or a verifiable independent source supports them.

How this record will be updated

We will preserve this baseline and add dated follow-ups rather than rewriting the starting point. The review schedule is day 14 for crawl and indexing status, day 45 for impressions and independent mentions, and day 90 for qualified traffic, AI-referral observations, and leads where attribution is available. A missing result will be recorded as missing, not turned into a success claim.

Primary sources

FAQ

Related questions

Is this an independent case study?

No. Found Clearly performed and published the audit of its own website. The page is useful as a transparent first-party baseline, but it is not independent validation or a substitute for client results.

Does a 200 response mean the page is indexed?

No. It means the server returned the page successfully. A search engine still decides whether to crawl, index, and rank it. URL Inspection and search-performance data are needed for stronger conclusions.

Why publish before there are ranking results?

Publishing the starting evidence prevents hindsight from replacing the baseline. It also makes limitations visible and creates a dated record against which later indexing, impressions, mentions, and leads can be compared.