A social media audit of what the platforms think you're about
Plate Lunch Collective is an AI SEO agency that gets brands named when buyers ask, in search, on social, and in AI. Social platforms decide what you're an authority on and whether you show up when people search. The Social Search Legibility Diagnostic shows you what they concluded, whether it's right, and where it helps or hurts you.
Why it matters
Social platforms are search engines now
Social platforms are search engines now
People search inside TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit the way they once searched Google. TikTok's own description of its recommendation system lists captions, sounds and hashtags as the video information it reads, and search inside the app draws on the same understanding of what an account is about. When someone searches a topic, that understanding decides whether you surface.
Authority and interest determine visibility
The systems decide what you're an authority on and who's interested in it. That decision determines whether you show up. Get it right and you surface for your topic. Get it wrong and you surface for the wrong things, or nothing at all.
Whether your authority is legible
Social platforms can only surface you for a topic if they're confident what you're an authority on. If your content is scattered or unclear, they can't categorize you, and you don't surface for anything. The diagnostic shows you whether your authority is clear enough to be sorted, and for which topics.
How the diagnostic runs
Four steps, read by a person
The outputs of AI systems are probabilistic and personalized, so a human who understands retrieval does the reading, under the rules in our measurement framework.
- 1
Map where you show up
Where and how the account appears when people search inside TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit, and in what those platforms recommend, for a set list of searches: the labels each platform gives it, the autocomplete and related-topic suggestions, and how AI search features cite or sum up the account's content. We ask the major models the same questions several times under the same conditions and report what holds across runs.
- 2
Compare machine understanding to your expertise
Our practitioners review that map against your expertise, product or category brief, and identify where the systems over-index on the wrong themes and under-represent your core strengths.
- 3
Score authority by topic and adjacency
A topic-by-topic judgment: clear authority, emerging authority, not yet credible, or off-topic risk. For brand engagements, we overlay your target category and call out where the creator extends or dilutes perceived authority.
- 4
Deliver a human-read, evidence-backed report
Practitioner commentary plus selective evidence, query results, snippet examples, and recommended moves a creator or an executive can act on.
Who this is for
A social media audit for creators and brands
Creators: prove your authority
You know what you're an expert in. The question is whether the systems that decide who gets found agree with you. You walk away with a human-reviewed map of your authority: what you're trusted to talk about, what's unclear, and what's pulling your categorization in the wrong direction.
Creators: find your adjacent categories
We assess how far your topical credibility realistically extends into adjacent categories you could credibly move into. You can put the map in front of a brand to show exactly where your authority sits and where a partnership would land.
Brands: vet a partnership
Your team evaluates creators on audience size, engagement, and brand fit. None of that tells you whether a partnership will register where buyers now search. We answer one question: will partnering with this person extend your category authority, or just add reach the systems won't connect to your category?
Brands: evidence for leadership
How the creator is categorized in the systems that matter, whether their authority sits inside your category, is adjacent to it, or is unrelated to it. A creator with a huge audience in the wrong cluster brings reach without authority. We tell you which one you're buying.
A person does the reading
Monitoring tools tell you how often you're mentioned. This tells you what the systems believe about you and whether it's accurate. The outputs of AI systems are probabilistic and personalized, so a human who understands retrieval does the reading. That's the work.
The diagnosis comes before the work
The diagnostic stops at diagnosis and recommendation. The ongoing work of restructuring your social presence so the systems read you correctly is Social Search Optimization. This gives you the map before you invest in that work.
What have the platforms concluded about you?
Tell us about the account or the creator you are vetting, and Hayden or Ben will come back within one business day.
FAQ
Questions creators and brands ask about social search
What does the algorithm think my account is about, and how do I fix it if it's wrong?
The platforms build a topic profile of your account from your captions, transcribed audio, on-screen text, and the content of your video frames. That profile decides what you surface for. If it's wrong, you're being shown to the wrong people and missed by the right ones. The diagnostic shows you the topic profile the platforms and AI search systems have built for you, where it's accurate, and where it's off. Fixing it means giving the systems clearer, more consistent signals about what you're an authority on, which is the optimization work that follows the diagnosis.
Does mixing topics confuse the platforms about what my account is about?
Yes. When your content spreads across unrelated topics, the systems can't form a confident view of what you're an authority on, so they hedge, and you surface weakly for everything instead of strongly for one thing. Topic consistency is what lets a platform categorize you cleanly and push you to the people searching that topic. The diagnostic shows you how coherent your topic profile reads to the systems right now and whether your range is helping you or scattering your signal.
How can I tell if a creator is really in our category or just posts about it occasionally?
This is the core question the brand version of the diagnostic answers. We assess what topics the platforms and AI search systems associate the creator with, whatever the media kit claims. A creator who posts about your category occasionally, as a prop in content that's really about something else, reads to the systems as belonging to that other category. The diagnostic tells you whether your category sits at the center of the creator's authority, adjacent to it, or just passing through.
How do I know if a creator partnership will extend our authority or confuse our positioning?
A partnership extends your authority when the creator's established topic clusters overlap with or sit close to your category, so their content about you lands in the right neighborhood for AI search and social discovery. It confuses your positioning when the creator is known for something unrelated, because the systems read the content through the profile the creator already has. The diagnostic gives you a clear read on which one a specific partnership would be, with the evidence behind the judgment, before you commit budget.
Do hashtags still matter, or do other signals matter more now?
Hashtags are a minor signal now. The platforms moved to understanding content directly: reading captions, transcribing audio, analyzing video frames, and matching all of that against what users search and the interest categories they follow. That shift is why being legible to the systems matters more than tagging. The diagnostic looks at the signals driving categorization today.
Will AI assistants pull my social content into answers?
Sometimes, and unevenly by platform. YouTube content gets cited more because it is crawlable and carries a text layer; short video on TikTok and Instagram is cited less often. The Social Search Optimization page carries the citation data by platform. The more durable path is that clear, consistent social authority shapes how the systems understand you overall, which influences whether they recommend you when someone asks. The diagnostic shows what the AI search layer currently understands about your authority and where the gaps are.
Social Search OptimizationHow is this different from a social media audit or influencer analytics report?
A social media audit looks at your posting, engagement, and growth. An analytics report counts followers, reach, and engagement rate. Both measure performance. This measures something different: what the platforms and AI search systems believe you're an authority on, whether that's accurate, and where it places you. It reads how you are understood, which is what determines whether you surface for the right topics.
What do I get back, and how does it help me show up for the right topics?
A human-reviewed report. It maps the topic clusters the systems associate with you, flags where their understanding is accurate, inaccurate, or fabricated, identifies the adjacent categories your authority could credibly extend into, and gives you specific recommendations. For brands, it adds a verdict on whether a creator partnership extends or dilutes your category authority. You walk away knowing exactly where you stand in the systems that decide who gets found, and what to do about it.
Find out what the platforms think you're about
The diagnostic is the fixed-scope read that comes before the ongoing Social Search Optimization work. Tell us about your account or the creator you are vetting, and Hayden or Ben will come back within one business day.