How to Audit Your Marketing Stack Before Going AI-First

Don't buy any new AI tools until you've done this audit. Otherwise you'll just stack new spend on top of old spend, and the original problem (a fragmented, expensive vendor stack) gets worse.

This is the audit we run on day one of every engagement. It feeds directly into the 90-day playbook from agency dependency to AI independence.

Step 1 — Pull every recurring invoice (Day 1–2)

Open your accounting system, filter for recurring vendors, export the last 12 months. You're looking for anything tagged marketing, web, content, advertising, SEO, design, automation, or "professional services."

Step 2 — Categorize ruthlessly (Day 3)

Sort each line item into one of five buckets:

1. Owned infrastructure — domain, hosting, email. Almost always keep.
2. Vendor doing creative work — design, video, brand. Often keep, sometimes replace.
3. Vendor doing repeatable work — content, SEO reporting, social posting, basic web updates. Almost always replaceable with AI.
4. Software you don't use — every SMB has 3–7 of these. Cancel today.
5. Strategic advisory — fractional CMO, consultants. Keep, but renegotiate scope.

Step 3 — Time-box what your team actually does (Day 4)

Quick survey to your team: "What's the most time-consuming part of your week that feels repetitive?" The answers map directly to AI workflows you can build later. (We use NotebookLM for these surveys — see NotebookLM for business.)

Step 4 — Score each vendor (Day 5)

For each line item, score 1–5 on:

• Strategic value — does this directly drive revenue?
• Replaceability — could AI tools + 5 hours/week of internal time do this?
• Switching cost — what does it cost to leave?

Anything scoring 2+ on strategic value but 4+ on replaceability is your first migration target.

Step 5 — Build the migration plan (Day 6–7)

You're not going to cancel everything at once. Pick the top three vendors to replace in the next quarter, and write down what tool replaces each. Most clients land on something like:

• Web agency → Replit + AI agents (why Replit)
• Content agency → Gemini + house style guide in NotebookLM
• SEO agency → Programmatic SEO built once, owned forever

The output

By end of week you should have one spreadsheet that lists: every vendor, monthly cost, replaceability score, replacement plan, and target cancel date. That spreadsheet is the entire business case. See typical numbers here.

Want us to run the audit with you?

The first call is free. We'll walk through your invoices and tell you what's replaceable. Book a call or look at our AI Transformation Consulting service if you want us to do the migration too.