A job post for a client project crossed my desk, and it was a small monument to how broken the audit-proposal economy has become. Please do not use content from ChatGPT, it began, as I will filter it out. I need a clear, short summary with a specific, actionable plan. Avoid generic recommendations, we already know about H1 tags and title optimisation. Go beyond pointing out issues from SEMrush or Ahrefs, we run those tools ourselves, plus Screaming Frog. The store: educational toys on Magento 2, Mageworx SEO plugin, Cloudflare and Nitropack, speed already performing well. And the final flourish: if you have read this entire post carefully, include the word AlphaMage at the beginning of your proposal.
Every line of that brief is a scar. This is a merchant who has been burned by template proposals, AI-padded audits, and tool exports dressed as expertise so many times that they now engineer filters into their job ads. The brief is not demanding. It is exhausted.
MageCloud Proposal Note
Their Filter, My Answer
WHAT THEY ASKED FOR
Proof of attention, not a document
No ChatGPT filler, no generic advice, no tool-export theatre. A codeword to catch the people who do not read.
WHAT I SENT
A Loom, one hour and ten minutes
A screen-recorded walk through their actual site: remove the old UA tag, check the Meta pixel, the banner click behaviour, pushing reviews into the Google SERP widget, a secure-content fix, and a redirect issue worth watching to the end.
THE PRINCIPLE
The recording is the proof
You cannot fake seventy minutes of your cursor on someone’s real store. That is the entire anti-AI, anti-template filter, passed by format alone.
Paul Ryazanov · MageCloud · save the fancy reports for people with time to waste
Why the Video Beats the Document
I have made this argument from several angles, the £3-5K PDF that describes problems without fixing them, the $49 video that catches what big teams miss, and this job post is the customer side of the same case. Everything the brief tried to filter out is structurally impossible in a Loom. Generic advice dies on contact with a real screen, because you are pointing at their actual banner, their actual redirect, their actual analytics tags. ChatGPT cannot record your cursor. And the AlphaMage trick is redundant when minute one of the video is their own homepage loading.
The economics are better too, in both directions. A fancy document takes days to produce, most of it formatting, and signals that you are expensive at assembling documents. A focused video takes the length of the video plus nothing, and signals you are fast at finding problems, which is the actual job. My recommendation to everyone in this industry, from the original post, stands word for word: stop wasting your life on fancy audit reports, use Loom as much as possible, and save the time for your family. Enjoy your weekend.
What Seventy Minutes of Looking Produced
For the record, the proposal was not a teaser reel. The numbered list under the video: remove the legacy UA tag and verify what replaced it, check the Meta pixel, two further tracking items, fix the click behaviour on the main banner, highlight more of what works, push the reviews into Google’s SERP widget where they earn stars instead of sitting on-page, fix the secure-content block, and watch to the end for a redirect issue that genuinely matters. A store already running Cloudflare, Nitropack, and a tuned Magento stack does not need a lecture on title tags, the brief was right about that. It needs the dozen specific things a fresh, experienced pair of eyes finds that the in-house view stopped seeing.
Notice what the brief got right and wrong about AI, while we are here. Right: AI-generated proposals are filler and deserve filtering. Wrong, slightly: the problem is not the tool, it is vendors using it to simulate attention instead of paying it. The merchant does not actually want AI-free text. They want evidence a human looked, the only currency that cold outreach cannot counterfeit.
Steal the Format, Whichever Side You Are On
If you sell expertise: your next proposal should be a recording of you finding real things on the prospect’s real property, with timestamps. Length matters less than specificity, ten genuine minutes beats forty templated pages. If you buy expertise: rewrite your briefs to demand exactly that. Ask for a short video of findings instead of a proposal document, and watch the template-senders evaporate from your inbox without any codeword tricks.
And if you want to see what seventy minutes of honest looking turns up on your store, get in touch. The deliverable will be a video. It always is.