Start in your own Search Console
If you do not have owner access to your own Search Console, get it today. That is the first test.
Open Performance, then Search results. Set the range to the last 90 days and compare it with the previous 90. Look at clicks. Impressions rise on their own as Google shows more things. Then open the Pages tab and sort by change. If the top pages are the same pages as six months ago with roughly the same clicks, the retainer has been maintaining rather than building. That may be what you paid for.
Do not judge nine days. A traffic graph nine days after a launch means nothing.
Ask for the list of changes, with dates
Every change to a website leaves a record. A title rewritten. A page published. A redirect added. A robots.txt rule changed. Ask for the list, one line per change, with the date and the URL.
Then ask which pages were added in the last quarter. New pages are the most visible thing a retainer produces and the easiest to count. Open three of them and read them. If they could sit on any competitor's site with the name swapped, they are volume. Forty articles a month does not get cited.
An agency doing the work has this list already. It is how they run the account.
Check the things you can check in an hour
- Titles and descriptions. Crawl your own site with any free crawler, or open twenty pages and read the tab. Every page should have a unique title and a unique meta description that says what the page is. Duplicates across a site under retainer for a year mean nobody has looked.
- The pages that earn. Take your top ten pages by clicks from Search Console. Open each. Check that the title, the first heading and the first paragraph answer the question the page ranks for. This is a 30-minute job. It is most of on-page SEO.
- The generative-AI report. Same Performance screen. It shows impressions inside Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Impressions only. Google only. Ask the agency whether they have opened it. Where to find it and how to read it is a separate answer below.
A report is not a change
The monthly report is the easiest thing to produce. It has a graph, a ranking table and a paragraph about the algorithm. Read it next to the list of changes. If the report is twelve pages and the list of changes is four lines, you are paying for the report.
Rank-tracking numbers prove very little. Positions move on their own. The tracked keywords were chosen by the agency. A rise on a term nobody types is not revenue. Clicks in your own console and leads in your own inbox are the scoreboard.
If you want a second opinion in writing
The first 20-minute call is free, and I will go through it with you. Every price is on the pricing page.
The first 20-minute call is free. It starts with the generative-AI report open in your own account. If the agency is doing the work, I will say so.