Market audit: sixty-four B2B suppliers scored

Independent market audit

Every supplier relationship starts the same way. Someone writes down a company name at a stand, in a meeting, on a tender list — and looks it up afterwards. We ran that search for an entire hall of exhibitors and scored what a buyer would actually find.

Nobody commissioned it. We wanted to know whether the problem we kept describing was real, and how large it was.

The method

Scoring what a buyer finds, not what a company says

We built a repeatable index across five axes — discoverability, identity consistency, technical substance, credential visibility and ongoing activity — and applied it identically to every exhibitor.

Each domain also went through a live technical sweep: DNS records, redirect chains, page titles, specification signals, and whether an enquiry could reach a person at all. Twenty exhibitors were re-scored when the sweep contradicted the first reading, and every change is logged.

The finding

A mean score of 42.5 out of 100

Twenty‑six of sixty‑four were invisible or fragmented: a buyer either could not find them, or found contradictions. Thirty‑three published nothing an engineer could specify a part from. Thirty‑eight ran no organic content operation of any kind.

One reached commercial grade. It was the only listed company in the room.

The pattern

The proof exists. It just is not published.

Sixteen held credentials that would settle a qualification decision on their own — Tier‑1 supply to national rail, IATF 16949, ISO certification held since the 1970s — and published none of it anywhere a buyer would look.

Fifty carried a fractured identity: multiple domains, legacy names never retired, third‑party listings that outranked and contradicted their own site. The work itself was rarely the problem.

What it produced

A register, a scorecard, and decisions to make

Seven sheets: company master, the scorecard with live formulas, population summary, priority targets, systemic findings, and the raw research — sixty‑one search queries recorded verbatim, including the ones that found nothing.

It was presented as a set of decisions to make, not slides to admire.

Why it matters

The argument the rest of our work rests on

This is why we build one system rather than sixteen separate deliverables. Fragmented assets are not a design problem. They are the reason a business that makes good products cannot be found, cannot be checked, and does not get chosen.

The full register is available on request.