Working together
We report against the constraint we said was binding, in four separate layers (eligibility, appearance, arrival and outcome) and we say when something did not work. A report that only contains good news is not a report.
Aggregate traffic is the least useful number in most reports, because it conceals which stage is failing.
Separating indexation, impressions, sessions and enquiries means a fall has a location: pages dropping out of the index is a different problem from pages that rank and are not clicked.
Every report states what we believed was limiting performance, what we did about it, and whether the measure moved. When it did not, that is the headline rather than a footnote, because the alternative is discovering six months later that a hypothesis was wrong.
We distinguish measurement from sampling. Search and analytics figures are measurements. AI visibility is a sample: a fixed set of buyer questions asked repeatedly across assistants. Presenting a sample as a measurement is how AI reporting becomes theatre, so we label it.
Cadence matches the mechanism. Monthly for programmes on channels that move over quarters; weekly numbers on slow-moving work produce reaction to noise, and the usual casualty is work that was about to start paying.
We report against the constraint we said was binding, in four separate layers (eligibility, appearance, arrival and outcome) and we say when something did not work. A report that only contains good news is not a report.
Everything above is how we say we work. Thirty minutes on a real problem is the fastest way to find out whether it is also how we behave — and it costs you nothing to check.
