If you are comparing agencies specifically on their AEO and SEO reporting, you have probably already been burned the standard way: a glossy dashboard, a score that only goes up, and no way to check any of it against a source the agency doesn’t control. Reporting is where this industry hides. So here is the standard we would hold any agency to — including the one writing this page — stated as five sections a real monthly report contains, the ownership rule that matters more than all of them, and our own current numbers filled in as the sample.
Section one: the ledger summary
A real report opens with your citation totals and their direction — this window against last window, from the engine’s own export. Ours, for this site, reads: 1,459,726 total citations across 922 cited pages in the October 15 export, against 269,399 across 324 pages on September 27. Two numbers, two dates, one source anyone can re-pull. A report that gives you a total without the previous window’s total is giving you a photograph and calling it a trend.
Section two: share on the queries that pay
Totals flatter; share tells the truth. The second section lists the handful of questions your buyers actually ask an AI, and your citation share of each — for us, 24.50% on “claude pricing,” 33.85% on “claude ai pricing,” 54.46% on “anthropic console” in our software coverage. If an agency’s report never names your money queries, it is because the answer would end the meeting. Make them name the queries, in writing, in month one — then the share line becomes the whole relationship in one table.
Section three: the page movers
Which pages climbed, which consolidated, which are being starved — named by URL, with figures. Our current read: the certification guide at the center of our contractor work climbed 1,635 → 1,913 → 2,454 → 2,790 citations across four exports while its duplicate was consolidated from 304 down to 6. That single line tells a client more than forty pages of charts: where the engine is placing its trust, and what the agency did about it. A report without named pages is a report about nothing in particular.
Section four: new questions, and what got built against them
Every export surfaces grounding queries you have never seen — the market asking new questions in the open. Section four lists them and ties each to an action: published, queued, or deliberately passed on, with the reason. This is the section that proves the work is demand-led rather than calendar-led, and it’s the first section a lazy agency quietly drops, because it creates a paper trail of promises.
Section five: the work, priced against the movement
What was done, what it cost, what moved, what’s next — in that order, on one page. Not a ticket dump. If three articles shipped and the share line didn’t move, the report should say so and say what changes next month. The month the report stops admitting flat results is the month it became a sales document.
The ownership rule that outranks all five sections
Every figure in the report must be re-pullable by the client, from the client’s own accounts. Bing Webmaster and Microsoft Clarity are free; the exports belong to whoever owns the property. If your agency generates its numbers inside its own portal, from its own panel, under its own login, then leaving the agency means leaving your history — and a report you can’t verify is a report you’re renting. We run our tracking exactly this way, and the method is published so a client can audit it without us in the room. These five sections, by the way, are the receipts from the buyer’s test wearing their monthly clothes: the test is what you demand before signing; the report is what you should receive after.
What bad reporting looks like, so you can spot it in the wild
A proprietary visibility score with no export behind it. A screenshot of the best week of the quarter. Engines blended into one soup so a Bing collapse hides inside a ChatGPT anecdote. Vanity totals — citations counted without share, traffic counted without asking how much of it was bots (on our fleet this month, roughly six visits in ten were automated; a report that never mentions that is averaging two different worlds). And the tell of tells: a report that arrives as a presentation, live, with no file you keep.
How to choose, then
Before you sign with anyone — us included — ask each finalist for last month’s report for a current client, redacted as needed, and for the source exports behind one number in it. The best agency for AEO SEO reporting is not the one with the prettiest dashboard or the boldest score. It is the one whose report survives your re-pull: same exports, same windows, same figures. Everything else is a pitch. The report is the product demo that can’t be rehearsed — judge that.
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What we actually ran, what it measured, and what it means for a restoration shop — every week, including the flops.
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