Four things I look at in the first sixty seconds of a digital diligence engagement, before any data has been pulled or any spreadsheet opened. Each, individually, isn't diagnostic. Together they give me a fast read on whether the underlying asset is healthy or whether the next two weeks will be spent finding the bodies.
In the order I check them.
1. The queries portfolio composition
Open Search Console (or Ahrefs if SC isn't available), pull the top 50 queries by impressions, and look at the shape. Three things I'm looking for:
How concentrated is the traffic across queries? If the top three queries account for more than 50% of organic clicks, the asset has concentration risk. The volatility of trailing organic numbers is much higher than the trailing numbers suggest. One ranking change on one query can move 30% of the organic line.
What proportion is brand vs non-brand? Brand traffic is good but it's not the same as the ability to acquire customers. If the asset's organic line is 70% brand, it's mostly capturing demand, not generating it. The acquisition story is much weaker than the headline organic number.
How AI-exposed are the queries? Informational queries — "what is X", "how to Y", "best Z" — are the most AI-exposed. If the queries are heavily informational, the trailing organic numbers are at structural risk.
This takes about 90 seconds in Search Console and tells you most of what you need to know about the durability of the organic line.
2. The backlink profile shape
Open Ahrefs (or Majestic, or Semrush — whichever the deal team's stack runs on) and look at the referring domains chart over five years. Three patterns to look for:
A steady upward curve is what you want. Linear growth in referring domains over time, with no major dips or unexplained spikes.
A spike followed by a plateau is a yellow flag. Either the asset bought links at some point and Google has caught up, or there was a campaign that worked once and never repeated. Either way, the link profile isn't a flywheel — it's a one-time event.
A spike followed by a drop is a red flag. Penalties, link removal, or a major site restructure that lost the previous link equity. Investigation required.
Same chart for organic traffic. If the traffic line has dips not explained by the link line, you're looking at algorithm exposure or a Google penalty. If the link line has growth not reflected in the traffic line, you're looking at links that aren't doing any work.
3. The team page and recent hire profile
Open the careers section and the team page. Two things I want to see.
Senior hires made in the last twelve months. Who's joined? Are they joining a growing operation or being recruited as the previous senior layer leaves? In a healthy digital business at the size most deals happen, you can usually tell from LinkedIn who arrived recently and who left.
A steady stream of mid-senior hires across functions is good. Senior hires only in marketing or only in technology is fine but tells you where the resource constraints are. A pattern where senior hires arrived, lasted 12–18 months, and left — repeated across multiple functions — is a culture or operational issue. That's the single biggest predictor of post-deal value destruction I've seen in this work.
This takes five minutes on LinkedIn and tells you a lot about whether the team you're acquiring is the team you'll have in twelve months.
4. The content recency check
Open the blog or content section. When was the last post published? When was the post before that? When was the one before that?
Three patterns matter.
Steady cadence — a post every week or two for the last twelve months. Suggests the content engine is running. The asset has internal capability or a working agency relationship.
Burst then silence — a flurry of activity in 2023, nothing since. Suggests the previous owner ran a programme that ended. The asset is coasting on past content investment, and the gap is going to start showing in organic numbers.
Recent burst — sudden activity in the last 90 days that wasn't there before. Often means the asset is being prepared for sale. Investigate. Sellers preparing assets for transaction sometimes try to manufacture momentum that won't survive due diligence and won't survive the deal.
Putting it together
Sixty seconds — really, more like five minutes done thoroughly — and you've answered four questions:
How structurally durable is the organic traffic? How earned is the link profile? Is the team stable and growing, or churning? Is content investment ongoing, or has it stopped?
None of these are the full diligence. None are sufficient to make a yes-or-no decision. But the four answers together give you a remarkably accurate prior on what the next two weeks of detailed work is going to find. If three of the four answers are good, the deal is probably worth doing the proper work on (and watching for the five red flags that show up in real audits). If three of the four are bad, you know what the diligence is going to prove — and you know the price needs to come down before you start.
The reason I do this check first, before opening anything else, is that the answer often shapes how the diligence is scoped. A deal where the queries portfolio looks healthy and the team is stable can have the standard scope. A deal where the queries are AI-exposed and the team is churning needs deeper work in those specific areas, sometimes at the expense of other sections.
Sixty seconds isn't long. Skipping these checks is one of the more reliable ways I've seen buyers go into a deal expensively under-prepared.