What your agency should show you every month

The six

1. What was completed, dated. Specific enough to verify against your own site.

2. Visibility, against a fixed set of competitors. Agreed at the start, restated every month, never changed silently.

3. Qualified enquiries, against a fixed definition. Not raw call volume.

4. What did not move, and what that might mean.

5. What happens next month, and why.

6. The evidence. Screenshots, raw responses, exports. Yours to keep.

Why fixed denominators matter more than any single number

A competitor set or keyword list that changes between reports makes every comparison meaningless, and it is the easiest way to show improvement that did not happen. Some movement is real and outside anyone's control, which is why AI answers move from one day to the next.

Ask once: has the tracked set changed since we started? The answer, and how readily it arrives, tells you a great deal.

What you should not accept

A single composite score with no derivation. A dashboard login instead of a report. “Ongoing optimisation” as a line item. Percentage changes without base numbers. A month with no bad news in it.

None of these are scandals on their own. Together they describe a relationship where you cannot tell whether the work is working.

The question that settles it

If you are still choosing, we have read the published agency lists for this work and counted who wrote them, and set out What searching for an agency near you actually turns up. Pick three lines from last month's report and try to verify them yourself. If you cannot, because they are too vague to check, that is your answer.

It is a fifteen-minute exercise and most owners have never done it.

What this costs us to publish

A checklist a client can hold us to, including on months where the honest report is that one number went backwards. We would rather be measured against it than not.

“A checklist a client can hold us to, including on months where the honest report is that one number went backwards.”