The Claudit Is Coming: Why You Should Run an AI Audit on Your Agency

You pay an agency to run your Meta and Google Ads, and you have a Claude subscription sitting open in another tab. Sooner or later you will wonder what happens if you export everything, hand it to Claude, and ask how the account is really doing.

Some of you already have. Good. I think you should, and I think your agency should be glad you did. Here’s how to use a Claudit to evaluate your marketing agency, and how to utilize the results to make better decisions.

What is a Claudit?

A Claudit is an AI-assisted audit of an agency’s or team’s work, run by the client using a model like Claude on their own account data.

The word comes from Rebecca Babicz, who runs her own growth marketing agency. In early September she posted on LinkedIn that her team had been “Claudited” by a client. The client had run their accounts through Claude and had shown up to a conversation with 25 pages covering Meta, Google, attribution, creative output, conversion tracking, search terms, unit economics, incrementality, and campaign settings. It was essentially a full paid media audit of the agency’s work, produced without the agency.

Babicz’s reaction is the part worth paying attention to: She said she kind of loved it. She also admitted a flicker of something else underneath: Wait, is Claude being treated as the expert here, and not us?

The flinch is honest, and it points the wrong way

That flicker is what most agency people would feel. Most would just keep it to themselves. Credit to Babicz for saying it out loud.

I understand the instinct: if a model can produce 25 pages on your account in an afternoon, it’s fair to ask what the monthly retainer buys. But an agency that gets defensive about a Claudit sends its client a clear signal that something in the account was never meant to be seen. If you bring AI findings to your agency and they bristle, pay attention to that.

If you worry that running a Claudit will feel like checking up on your partner, let that go. You are supposed to check. It’s your budget. The best partners want you looking closely.

Everyone is about to get Claudited

I have been telling our team for a while that this was coming. Clients will Claudit their agencies. CMOs will Claudit their VPs. Managers will Claudit their own teams’ work.

The adoption numbers make it hard to argue otherwise. McKinsey’s latest State of AI research found that almost nine in ten respondents report regular use of AI in at least one business function. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found marketing leaders putting an average of 15.3% of their budgets toward AI.

That Gartner sample leans toward billion-dollar companies; the tools, though, cost the same for a $5M challenger brand as they do for the category leader it is chasing.

Once the tools are this capable and this cheap, anyone who wants the full picture will run their own numbers, whether or not anyone hands over the raw data willingly.

I think that’s healthy: it’s an early look at where business is heading, and the agencies worth hiring will get better because of it.

How to evaluate your marketing agency with a Claudit

What made Babicz’s Claudit useful was how the partner who ran it chose to use those pages. In his words, according to her post: “I used this to get everything out of my head, pressure-test the data and figure out what questions I should be asking.”

The partner used the output to get organized and find sharper questions, then took those questions to the people who run the account.

Evaluating an agency you already pay is a different job from vetting one you’re considering hiring. (For that, start with our list of questions to ask before you hire an SEO agency.)

With a current partner, you already have the data. The work is reading it well. That is the whole difference between a Claudit that leads somewhere productive and one that wastes an afternoon. Harvard Business Review has a name for AI output that looks polished but pushes the real thinking onto whoever receives it: workslop. Researchers found each instance of workslop costs nearly two hours of rework, so a 25-page audit forwarded as a verdict is workslop at scale.

So before you act on anything you read in a Claudit, run the information through what we call the Claudit Triage: sort every finding into one of three buckets.

The Claudit Triage

1. Missing context. The model saw the numbers but not the story behind them. A campaign looks underfunded because you paused it during a product change; a keyword looks wasteful because it protects your brand name. Send these to your agency as questions: why is this set up this way?
2. A real new angle. Some findings will surface things nobody had considered, like a pattern in search terms or a creative trend the account team missed. Send these to your agency as tests for next month.
3. Flat wrong. Some of your Claudit results will be wrong, and those sections will sound just as confident as the rest. A model that does not know how your conversion tracking is set up can misread attribution badly. Note these, get the explanation, and drop them.

Then, out of your 25 or so pages, pick three findings in the Claudit that will change what you do next week. Everything else is reference material.

Anyone who has spent serious time inside an ad account or a CRM knows this pattern already, because it is what you get from a sharp junior analyst’s first pass. The value shows up in what happens after someone with context reads it.

It’s the same principle Shannon Zastrow laid out in From Human in the Loop to Human at the Center: let AI do the research and organizing, but keep a person with real context in the decision-making seat. His previous warning about misreading marketing data applies here, too.

What is an agency for when everyone has the same model?

When everyone has the same models and the same raw data, being the first to produce findings stops being worth much, and the differentiator moves somewhere else. What is worth paying for now is the ability to explain why a campaign is configured the way it is, and to tell you when the data is pointing at something real. After that comes the hardest part: knowing which three findings out of 25 pages should change next week’s plan.

That part is what an agency gets paid for. Claude cannot do it for you.

It is also the harder skill to fake, because anyone can generate 25 pages of reasonable findings now. Some of that output will be wrong in ways you would only catch if you knew the account, the business, and the handful of things that changed last quarter and never made it into a dashboard.

A good account team is supposed to carry that context around so the model does not have to guess. It is the same reason AI-generated content keeps falling flat when nobody with real experience is steering it.

We have been building for this moment instead of bracing for it. We run AI sprints with our clients so our team is fluent in the same tools our clients are picking up. Internally, I have been building a Claude skill library for how Rocketship operates, so the judgment we bring to an account does not sit in just one person’s head where it can walk out the door.

That is how we approach paid ads management and HubSpot CRM enablement alike. The setup should hold up when a client looks under the hood. More of them are about to.

Bring us your Claudit

Where I land: When a client sends over their own AI audit, we will treat it the way Babicz’s partner did. We’ll view it as the fastest way past the small talk and into the conversation that matters.

Run the audit. Bring us what it surfaced. We will walk you through the why, tell you which parts are worth acting on, and turn the ones that hold up into a plan.

Gatekeeping the data was never much of a value proposition, and AI has finished that practice off anyway. Reading the data better than a model can, and telling you what to do about it, is the job now.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Claudit?

A Claudit is an AI-assisted audit of an agency’s or team’s work, usually run by the client using Claude on their own exported account data. Growth marketing agency operator Rebecca Babicz put the term on the map in a LinkedIn post in September 2026.

Is it okay to run an AI audit on my marketing agency?

Yes. It is your budget and your data, and evaluating your marketing agency is part of your job. A good agency should welcome the findings and walk you through them. Use the audit to get organized and sharpen your questions before you act on any of it.

Can I use Claude to audit my Meta and Google Ads?

Yes. Export performance data from Meta Ads Manager and Google Ads, then ask Claude to review settings, spend, search terms, and creative. Treat what comes back as a first pass, sort the findings with the Claudit Triage, and bring them to whoever runs the account.

How accurate is an AI audit of my ad accounts?

Some of it will be useful, some will be missing context, and some will be wrong. Sort every finding into those three buckets before you act. A model sees the numbers without the business history behind them, like a paused campaign or a change to conversion tracking.

Will AI replace my need for a marketing agency?

AI now produces the findings. It does not know your business or what changed last quarter, so it cannot tell you which three findings matter most. That judgment is what you should be paying an agency for, and a Claudit is a good way to see whether you are getting it.

What good looks like

Picture the version where this goes right. You run the Claudit on a Tuesday, sort it with the Claudit Triage, and walk into your agency meeting with three questions and one test. You leave with a plan and a clear read on whether your partner really knows your account.

The version where it goes wrong looks like 25 pages forwarded with a terse note, a defensive reply, and two weeks lost arguing over findings nobody sorted. Both versions start with the same tool and the same data, and the one that goes right has someone bringing judgment to the discussion and an agency willing to show its work. If you want a partner who will, see how we work with challenger brands.

Already ran a Claudit? Book a Claudit working session with Scott and bring your findings. We will walk through the why, flag what is worth acting on, and leave you with your three decisions.