Brand audit
A brand audit is a structured review of how a brand is currently being expressed, compared against how it was defined. It examines published work, assets and written positioning for gaps, contradictions and out-of-date claims, and produces a ranked list of specific fixes rather than a single overall score.
Brand audit is not Rebrand.
An audit is diagnostic and its most common correct outcome is a short list of corrections, often to the written definition rather than to the visuals. A rebrand is a decision to change the identity itself, and commissioning an audit after that decision has already been taken usually produces evidence for it rather than findings.
In practice
An audit exists to close the gap between what you believe your brand is and what somebody encountering it would conclude. Those two things separate slowly and without warning, because nothing in a normal working week forces a comparison between them. The audit is that forced comparison, and its output should be a short list of specific corrections, not a verdict and not a mood.
The order of operations matters more than the tooling. Write down what you believe first, before looking at anything: who the work is for, what you claim, the voice, the visual rules, the offer as it stands today. Then gather a representative sample of what is actually published, ideally the last two or three months rather than your favourites. Only then read the sample against the written version, one dimension at a time, noting every place they disagree. Doing it in that order stops you reverse-engineering the definition out of your recent output, which is the most common reason an audit finds nothing wrong.
Score each dimension separately and resist rolling them into one figure. A single number cannot tell you what to do next, whereas a finding such as "the audience description is one line and names no concrete struggle" can. Then sort the disagreements into two piles: places where execution slipped, and places where the business genuinely moved and the definition is what has gone stale. The second pile is usually larger than expected and far more valuable, because the fix is a rewrite of one paragraph rather than a correction of a hundred posts.
Cadence beats depth. A shallow review every quarter catches drift while it is still cheap to fix; an exhaustive one every three years catches it long after it has been published. Where possible, have someone who did not make the work do the reading, or at minimum leave a week between writing the definition and reading the sample, because you cannot easily see the assumptions you have been operating inside.
Be clear about what software can and cannot do here. Repic's Quality Engine scores your brand profile component by component, flags fields that are thin or unspecific, and tracks which generated work has gone stale after a source field changed. That is an audit of the definition and the things derived from it, not an audit of your public presence: it does not read your website, your feed or a competitor's, and it is no substitute for sitting down with the last three months of work and looking at it honestly.