How do I know if my SEO agency is doing anything?

The short answer

The short answer Check four things you can verify yourself in an hour: new indexed URLs in Google Search Console, new referring domains in Ahrefs or Semrush, the site's list of pages published this quarter, and impressions trend by query group. If none of the four moved in 90 days, nothing shipped. Rankings alone are not evidence. The.

The short answer

Check four things you can verify yourself in an hour: new indexed URLs in Google Search Console, new referring domains in Ahrefs or Semrush, the site’s list of pages published this quarter, and impressions trend by query group. If none of the four moved in 90 days, nothing shipped. Rankings alone are not evidence.

The audit, step by step

You do not need SEO expertise to run this. You need login access to your own Search Console property, which you should have regardless.

1. Pages published. Open your sitemap.xml and sort by date, or use the Pages report in Search Console filtered to the last 90 days. Count new URLs. This is the most direct evidence of work. If your agency’s scope says eight pages a month and you find three URLs in a quarter, the conversation is short.

2. Indexed URLs. Search Console’s Pages report splits indexed from not-indexed with reasons. Publishing is not the finish line; a page Google has not indexed cannot rank or be cited. A rising not-indexed count alongside rising published count means volume without quality.

3. Referring domains. Pull a 90-day referring-domains chart in Ahrefs or Semrush. You are looking for new, real domains, not directory spam. This matters because the correlation is strong at the extremes: Ahrefs found roughly 1 in 6,671 pages with zero referring domains gets more than 1,000 monthly search visits, in a study covering about 14 billion pages.

4. Impressions by query group. In Search Console’s Performance report, filter queries by a theme you are targeting and compare 90 days against the prior 90. Impressions move before rankings do and long before traffic does. Flat impressions across every target theme for two quarters means the content is not reaching new queries.

Check	Where	Healthy in 90 days	Warning sign
Pages published	sitemap.xml / GSC Pages	Matches contracted volume	Fewer than half of scope
Indexed URLs	GSC Pages report	Indexed count rising with published	Not-indexed growing faster
Referring domains	Ahrefs / Semrush	New real domains, steady trickle	Zero, or a spike of directories
Impressions by theme	GSC Performance	Up on at least two target themes	Flat everywhere for two quarters
AI feature impressions	GSC generative AI report	Any impressions on target pages	Nothing, where competitors appear

What a slow quarter looks like versus a dead one

SEO is genuinely slow, and honest agencies will tell you so. Ahrefs analyzed 1.3 million keywords and found 72.9 percent of top-10 pages are more than three years old, the average number one result is five years old, and only 1.74 percent of newly published pages reach the top 10 within a year. Nine months without a top-three ranking on a competitive term is normal.

Nine months without new published pages, new referring domains or rising impressions is not slow. It is nothing. That is the distinction the four checks give you: they measure output and leading indicators, both of which move long before rankings do.

There is now a fifth signal worth watching. Google launched a Search Generative AI performance report in Search Console in June 2026, covering AI Overviews and AI Mode. It reports impressions only, with data starting 18 May 2026 and no backfill, no clicks and no query breakdown. Limited, but it is the first official view of whether your pages appear in AI answers at all.

Questions that produce a real answer

Ask these in writing, and give a deadline:

List every URL published or materially rewritten in the last 90 days.
List every referring domain acquired in the last 90 days and how it was acquired.
Show impressions for our five target query themes, this 90 days versus prior 90.
What is the single biggest reason we are not ranking for our top term, and what is the plan?

An agency doing the work answers all four in a day, because the data already exists in their reporting. An agency doing nothing asks for a call.

Google’s Search Central guidance is worth reading before that call. It advises asking directly what changes will be made to your site and warns against firms that will not clearly explain what they intend to do, promote link schemes, or claim tools “approved” by Google. It also states plainly that no one can guarantee a number one ranking.

One more thing to check: whether the links being built violate policy. Google’s spam policies define link spam as creating links primarily to manipulate rankings, and list buying or selling links for ranking purposes as a violation unless qualified with rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored”. If the referring domains you find look purchased, that is worse than no work at all.

What we’d do

TACK™ reports SEO as output first and outcome second, because output is verifiable in week one and outcome takes quarters. Every month: pages published with live URLs, indexed status for each, referring domains acquired with the method, impressions by query theme, and now AI feature impressions where available.

That is how Get Found is structured, and it feeds Get Leads, because organic visibility without a converting page is a vanity metric. See the capability set or the case studies. Engagements start at $5,000 per month.

Common mistakes

Judging on rank-tracker screenshots. Rank trackers can be filtered to flattering keyword sets, and rankings personalise by location and device. Search Console impressions are your own data and cannot be curated.

Confusing traffic with work. Traffic can rise from seasonality or a competitor’s outage. Published URLs and referring domains cannot rise by accident.

Waiting for the annual review. Run the four checks quarterly. Two bad quarters is a decision; four is an expensive lesson.

Not owning Search Console. If your agency holds the property and you are not an owner, fix that today. It is your data.

The bottom line

Published URLs, indexed URLs, referring domains and impressions by theme tell you whether work is happening. Rankings tell you whether it worked, and they lag by two to four quarters. Check the first four every 90 days and you will never be surprised.

If you want an independent read on what your current agency has actually shipped, book a call with TACK™ or call 310-620-1141.