An AEO Report You Can Re-Pull: A Worked Example

A report you can trust is a report you can re-pull. Every figure in it traces back to a source you own — your own Bing Webmaster account, your own Microsoft Clarity account — so checking the work takes an afternoon, not an act of faith.

I have argued before that the best agency for AEO SEO reporting is the one whose numbers you can re-pull. That is the standard. Our page on what an AI visibility report should show lays out the requirements. This piece is the missing third thing: the artifact itself. What follows is one monthly report, walked section by section — what each section shows, where each number lives, and how you would re-pull it yourself to check it.

One disclosure before the numbers. This is a worked example. The business is a regional restoration company, the kind of outfit that answers the phone at 2 a.m. when a pipe lets go. Identifying details are changed, and the figures are a composite drawn from real reporting periods — not one client’s month dressed up as gospel. The sections, though, are the real sections, in the real order, and every figure in every section has a home in an account the client owns and can open without asking me.

1. The ledger summary

The first page is the whole story in one table: how many times the answer engines cited this business in the period, set against the period before. Nothing else. No score, no grade, no wall of arrows.

Where the numbers live: the overview export in the AI Performance section of Bing Webmaster Tools. The client logs into their own account, picks the same date range printed at the top of the report, downloads the CSV, and the headline citation count is sitting right there. Re-pulling this section takes about four minutes. If the number in the report and the number in the export disagree, the report is wrong, full stop — and the client found that out from their own account, not from a call with me.

2. Share on the queries that pay

A citation total by itself is a vanity number wearing a suit. What matters is which questions the citations hang on. This section lists the money questions — the ones a buyer asks an answer engine right before picking up the phone. For a restoration company, that is things like “water damage cleanup near me,” “how much does mold remediation cost,” and “who do I call for a burst pipe.” Next to each question: whether this business got cited for it, and who else did.

Where the numbers live: the Search Queries export, same Bing Webmaster AI Performance section, same date range. Re-pull it, look up the questions that matter to the business, and the cited sources are listed per query. This is the section owners actually read, because it reads like the market itself. You can watch a competitor take a question you used to own, in plain text, with nobody’s opinion layered over the top of it.

3. Page movers

Citations land on pages, not on businesses. This section lists the pages that gained citations in the period and the pages that lost them, biggest moves first. A service page that doubled its citations after a rewrite. A location page that went quiet. A post from two years ago that an engine suddenly started quoting.

Where the numbers live: the Page Stats export, same account, same date range, compared against last period’s export — which is why we keep every month’s files. Re-pulling means downloading the current export and setting it against the file from the prior period. The “why” written next to each mover is our read, and it is labeled as a read. The movement itself is not an opinion. It is in the client’s own files.

4. New questions

Every month, the query export contains questions that were not in it before. Somebody asked an engine something new — a new phrasing, a new service name, a question nobody in the market has written a page for yet. This section lists those questions, flags the ones this business was already cited on, and marks the rest as gaps.

They come straight out of the same Search Queries export. There is no separate tool and no secret feed behind this section. New questions are the demand moving, in public, in the askers’ own words. Half of next month’s content list is usually sitting right here — and the client can check that claim too, because the questions are in their export, not in my notes.

5. The work, priced against the movement

This is the section most reports skip, and it is the one that keeps everybody honest. On one side, what was actually done in the period, named plainly: three pages published, two pages rewritten, one round of technical fixes. On the other side, what moved. It is the measurement loop from the workstreams behind AI SEO services, printed instead of described — the work and the numbers on facing pages, where the client can judge whether one earned the other.

Two rules govern this section. First, the work list is complete. The page that was published and went nowhere sits on it, right next to the one that took off. Second, no credit is claimed where the movement cannot be tied to the work. If citations rose on a question nobody touched, the report says so and calls it what it is: the market moved, or the engine changed its mind, and we do not know which. An agency that only shows you the wins is editing. Editing is the first step toward inventing.

6. What the report refuses to show

The last section is a list of absences, and it is there on purpose. There is no proprietary visibility score, because a score only the agency can compute is a number you can never check. There is no best-week screenshot, because a business runs on months, not on its best seven days. And the engines are never blended into one soup of a number. The Bing and Copilot figures come out of the client’s own Microsoft accounts; anything that cannot be pulled from a source the client controls is reported separately, with its method stated, or left out — with the report saying it was left out.

Blending is a hiding place. A blended number can rise while the engine that actually sends you buyers is falling, and you would never see it. Separate numbers can be wrong, but they can be caught. That is the whole trade, and we will take catchable over impressive every time.

The test

Here is the one test you can run on any report from any agency, including this one. Pick a figure — any figure, the bigger the better. Ask one question: “Show me where this lives in my own accounts.” Then watch what happens. If you get walked to the export, the account, and the date range, and the number matches when you pull it yourself, you are looking at reporting. If you get an explanation of why the methodology is proprietary, you are looking at a story about reporting. The figure was never the product. The trail behind the figure is the product.

Questions buyers ask

What should an AEO report include?

Five things: a citation total you can re-pull, your share on the specific questions your buyers ask, which pages gained and lost citations, the new questions showing up in the data, and the work done in the period set next to what moved. A report carrying a score you cannot recompute from your own accounts is missing the point, even if it has everything else.

How do I check my agency’s numbers?

Log into your own Bing Webmaster Tools account, open the AI Performance exports for the same date range printed on the report, and compare. The overview export checks the headline, the queries export checks the questions, the page stats check the pages. Microsoft Clarity is yours the same way. An agency should be able to tell you which export backs which figure, gladly. That conversation is the check.

What is a red flag in an SEO report?

A number with no trail behind it. Proprietary scores, blended engine totals, best-week screenshots, and rankings reported without the source account are all the same flag in different colors: a figure you are being asked to take on trust. Trust is fine in a relationship. It has no place in a spreadsheet.