You cannot report what you cannot measure, and you can measure less every year. So the reporting has to change shape.
There was a moment when search marketing was better than PR and better than newspapers, because we had full attribution. We knew which links we built, which rankings moved, how many people came, what they searched and whether they converted. Then Google shipped not provided. Then Search Console started showing a fraction of the query data behind the clicks it reports. Now assistants recommend brands without linking to them at all.
That is three separate hits to the same evidence chain, and the invoice still has to go out at the end of the month.
The gap is bigger than most reports admit
Pull up the pages report in Search Console, find a URL with two or three hundred clicks, then drill into the queries for that URL and add them up. The numbers do not match. They are not close.
“I’ll go on the a pages report and be like, okay, each one of these pages has two hundred, three hundred clicks, then I go drill down, to c take a look at a a query report for that URL, and I’m like, Where where’s all my clicks? Who moved my clicks?”
— Rob Bonham, on Unscripted SEO
I have a blog post ranking for a query about Search Console data being unreliable. It has around fifty clicks. I have query data for four of them. The page proves its own thesis, which is funny for about ten seconds and then becomes a reporting problem.
Rob’s answer is not a better dashboard
“I honestly think it it’s a matter of telling the right story, right? I mean, and I’m not talking about being manipulative, but using data to your benefit to show how you might impact things or how you have impacted things.”
— Rob Bonham
The distinction he draws matters. Telling the right story is not spin. It is choosing the unit of analysis where you can still see something true. Two decades of local, e-commerce, SaaS and home services work has left him with a specific version of that:
“Of course, make sure you’re paying attention to how things are performing at a URL by URL level, but also you might be getting better visibility for your branded searches.”
— Rob Bonham
Technical fixes and content work land at a page level and then show up somewhere else — brand queries, homepage traffic, conversion rate on entrances from organic. The connection is a correlation and should be labelled as one. Labelling it does not make it worthless.
Say what you did, then say what moved, then keep them apart
The reporting discipline that survives the attribution collapse looks like this:
- Name the source and the window on every number. “Search Console, 1 June to 31 August” beats “recent data” in every conversation you will ever have with a CFO.
- Separate the measured from the inferred. Clicks are measured. The revenue you attribute to a technical fix is inferred. Say the word estimate out loud.
- Report the boundary condition in the same breath. A percentage lift without its denominator is a claim, not a finding.
- Show the work, not just the outcome. Deliverables shipped on time are evidence of a functioning engagement even in a month where the graph is flat.
Rob’s framing of what an SEO is actually claiming is honest about its own limits: because we changed this here, we are seeing growth in this area, and it is reasonable to connect them because of how the site works. That sentence contains a hypothesis and admits it. Clients respect that more than a confident number they cannot verify.
The bigger risk is not under-reporting. It is over-producing.
There is a second thing happening at the same time, and Rob thinks it is what will actually cost agencies their accounts. Clients are looking at a ten thousand a month retainer and doing the maths on doing it in-house with AI. Some of them will. What they will not price in is the downside:
“it might be super enticing to you know publish that 50 pages in a month or 100 pages in a month. But think about how that will be perceived by not only you know you know LLM bots, search engine bots, but perceived by the users too.”
— Rob Bonham
And the timeline on the reckoning:
“You’re gonna work yourself into a hole. And you might be you know looking like a like a hero, you know, for maybe a month, a few months, who knows, maybe six months out. But you know, as soon as as soon as that site starts to tank, and it it and it surely will after you know a period, then then they’re gonna start looking at their their agency sideways”
— Rob Bonham
Fast results that come from volume are borrowed. We set out what a credible timeline looks like instead in how long SEO takes to work.
The line to hold
His whole argument comes down to one distinction that is worth more than any dashboard:
“in in a way that is actually adding value instead of just perceived value of, they knocked out five blog posts for me this month.”
— Rob Bonham
Perceived value is what you sell when you cannot measure the real thing. It works right up until it does not, and then it takes the account with it. Measure less, claim less, and be specific about which is which.
Quotes are verbatim from the raw Riverside transcript, trimmed for false starts and filler only. Advisory work and fractional SEO leadership at The SEO Advisory; the full conversation is on Unscripted SEO.