SEO Reporting.

SEO reporting should answer a simple question: is the work worthwhile? That requires figures connected to the business. The most important source is Google Search Console with clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position per page and query. Added to that are enquiries and calls from website analytics, for local businesses the figures from the Google Business Profile and, increasingly, presence in AI answers.

Comparison is what matters. A figure on its own says little; only comparison with the previous month, the same month last year or an equally long period before a measure makes a development visible. Seasonal industries such as landscaping or tax advice need the year-on-year comparison, because a decline in December says nothing about the quality of the work.

A common problem is reporting designed mainly to impress: dozens of charts, visibility indices without explanation, rankings for terms with no demand. Honest reporting also shows what did not work and explains why. It separates measurements (from Search Console) from estimates (from tools such as the visibility index) and always states the period and the source.

For AI visibility there is not yet a Search Console in the classic sense. What can be measured is whether a company is named for defined questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI Overviews. For these values to remain comparable, the questions, language and location reference must stay the same every month.