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What should an SEO report include?

An SEO report tells the reader, for a closed period, what work was done and what changed in search because of it. It needs goals with their pace, the work shipped, visibility in Google and in AI answers with sample sizes, competitors, spend, and next steps. A good report says plainly when nothing measurable changed.

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Board report · attensira.com · 4 Sep to 4 Oct 2026 · 5 of 6 sections
Board report · attensira.com · 4 Sep to 4 Oct 2026 · 5 of 6 sections
SectionReading
SummaryRead on 23 of 31 days; nothing shipped
GoalsNamed in 0 of 108 answers; Semrush in 43
What shipped0 shipped; 10 waiting; GitHub not connected
Visibility0 changes proven to move
Next periodApprove the ten, connect GitHub, book re-reads
Analyst agentAnalyst · reads this workspace's answersattensira.com workspace, read over the Attensira MCP · · Spend left out; 108 answers to the goal question
Karl-Gustav KallasmaaKarl-Gustav Kallasmaa, Founder & CEO

Last updated

Key facts

An SEO report has one job: tell the person reading it what was done in search during a period, and what changed. Everything else, every chart and every table, is there to support those two answers or should be cut.

Most SEO reports fail that job in one of two ways. They are dashboards exported to PDF, full of numbers with no story about the work. Or they are stories with no evidence, where every number is up and nothing is ever flat. This post covers what a report should contain, how the common report types differ, and the rules that keep it honest, with a real one-page report for our own site.

What is an SEO report for?

Three readers, three uses.

  • The person paying (a founder, a CMO, a client) wants to know whether the money and time produced anything, and whether to keep going.
  • The person steering (a head of marketing, an account lead) wants to know which work to do more of and which to stop.
  • The people doing the work want to know what is left and what is blocked.

One report rarely serves all three. The common solution is two formats: a short board-level report for the first reader, and a detailed report for the second and third.

What sections does an SEO report need?

In order of what the reader asks first:

  1. Summary. Two or three sentences: what shipped, what changed, what is next. If the reader stops here, they should still know the state of things.
  2. Goals and pace. Each goal with its metric, where it stands now, the target, the deadline, and whether it is ahead of, on or behind the straight line from start to target. A goal with no reading yet says "not measured yet", never zero.
  3. Work shipped. What reached the live site or the web in the period, by kind: pages rewritten, articles published, technical fixes merged, listings and placements. Also what is waiting and what failed.
  4. Visibility in Google. Impressions, clicks and positions for the query groups that matter, from Search Console, compared with the previous equal period.
  5. Visibility in AI answers. How many answers named you and how many cited your pages, out of how many answers read, per engine, for the tracked questions.
  6. Competitors. Who is gaining on the questions that matter, and which pages they win with.
  7. Spend. What the period cost, in money, and where it went.
  8. Next period. The work planned, and why.

How do audit, competitor and search marketing reports differ?

The same reader, different questions. Each has its own format.

  • SEO report

    Question it answers
    What did we do and what changed?
    Covers
    A closed period
    Frequency
    Monthly or quarterly

  • SEO audit report

    Question it answers
    What is wrong with the site, and in what order should we fix it?
    Covers
    A snapshot
    Frequency
    Once, then after big changes

  • Competitor report

    Question it answers
    Who wins the questions we want, and with which pages?
    Covers
    The current state of the market
    Frequency
    Quarterly, or when something shifts

  • Search marketing (SEM) report

    Question it answers
    What did paid and organic search deliver together?
    Covers
    A closed period
    Frequency
    Monthly

An audit report is a prioritised list, not a score: findings grouped into what blocks access, what loses signal and what improves pages, each with an owner. Our site audit checklist gives the checks.

A competitor report ends every finding with an action. "Competitor X ranks first for Y" is a fact; "Competitor X wins Y with a comparison page, and three roundups engines cite name them and not us" is a work item.

A search marketing report puts paid and organic side by side, because they compete for the same results page. Report them separately, then note where one covers a gap in the other, for example ads on queries where an AI Overview took the organic clicks.

What rules keep a report honest?

These are the rules we hold our own reports to.

  • Every number names its window and its sample. "Named in 12 of 40 answers, 1 to 30 September" can be checked. "Visibility 30" cannot.
  • No movement words without proof. "Increased", "improved" and "dropped" only where a before-and-after comparison on the same questions cleared a significance test. Otherwise write the two readings side by side and say the difference is within the noise.
  • Missing is not zero. A metric nobody measured is shown as not measured, with the reason, never as 0.
  • Work and outcome are separate. What shipped is a fact you control. What the engines did afterwards is a measurement. A report that blurs them overclaims.
  • "Nothing changed" is a result. Google itself says changes can take weeks to months, and advises waiting a few weeks before judging. A report that is always up is not measuring.
  • No revenue claims without evidence. Show organic sign-ups and pipeline beside the work; do not claim one caused the other.

Does one engine name us more than the other?

The same 61 questions, read in ChatGPT and in Perplexity, counted apart. The two name attensira.com at about the same rate; a gap this small is inside the noise, so it is not a finding.

of ChatGPT answers name attensira.com
4.2%
n=2,346 answers
of Perplexity answers name attensira.com
4.5%
n=2,172 answers
link to it, ChatGPT / Perplexity
6.6% / 3.9%
n=4,518 answers
Analyst agentAnalystattensira.com workspace, Attensira MCP, ChatGPT and Perplexity · n=4,518 answers · to

Why does an SEO report now need an AI section?

Because buyers ask assistants before they search, and the assistants already have an opinion about your category. Take the question an agency asks when it shops for this very kind of report, "AI visibility reporting tool for client reports". In our own tracking for the month to 4 October 2026, Semrush was named in 43 of 108 answers and we were named in none; the most influential sources were third-party sites on both engines, agencyscope.ai on ChatGPT and a how-to guide on building AI visibility reports on Perplexity. A report that covers only Google rankings and traffic never shows that, because it describes the part of the journey that comes after the shortlist was formed.

The AI section does not replace the Google section; it sits beside it. Keep the units apart: Google gives you impressions, clicks and positions, and AI answers give you how many answers named you and how many cited you, out of how many answers read. Blending them into one score hides which one moved, and the work that moves each is different.

Two practical cautions for the AI section. Report per engine, because ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI lean on different pages and an average describes none of them. And report the questions as well as the totals: "named in the answers to our pricing question on Perplexity, not on ChatGPT" is something a reader can act on.

What does Perplexity hand an agency shopping for an AI report?

Perplexity's stored answer of 4 October to the reporting question we track. It names report layers and one product, and cites agency checklists and vendor guides. Attensira is in neither the answer nor its sources, which is what the AI section of a report is there to show.

Answer · Perplexityasked

Question: AI visibility reporting tool for client reports

Perplexity answered: AI visibility reporting tools help clients see where a brand appears in AI-generated answers, track prompts and citations, and provide executive and evidence layers in reports. Examples and options include Amplitude's AI Visibility Report, agency-focused checklists/templates, and multi-client frameworks for structuring reports.

Sources cited

  1. 1botsee.io
  2. 2trakkr.ai
  3. 3customerimpact.be
  4. 4amplitude.com
  5. 5wellows.com
  6. 6maxaeo.ai

Not namedAttensira is missing from this Perplexity answer.

Analyst agentAnalyst · reads this workspace's answersattensira.com workspace, read over the Attensira MCP · · one stored answer, both bullets
How we read these numbers

Which metrics should you leave out?

A report gets better when it gets shorter. Cut anything the reader cannot act on.

  • Domain-level authority scores. They move slowly, every tool calculates them differently, and no decision depends on a two-point change.
  • Total keyword counts. "We rank for 4,000 keywords" includes thousands of irrelevant long-tail terms. Report the query groups that matter.
  • Site-wide average position. It averages queries you care about with queries you do not. Report position per query group.
  • Bounce rate on its own. A page that answers the question quickly can have a high bounce rate and be doing its job.
  • Any number without a comparison. A figure with no previous period, no target and no competitor beside it is decoration.

What stays is what changes decisions: the goals, the work, the visibility readings with their samples, the competitors gaining, and the spend.

What does an honest one-page report look like?

The board report at the top of this page is ours: attensira.com, 4 September to 4 October 2026, built from our own workspace. It is not flattering. That is the point. Read it top to bottom and each line answers the one above it: the summary says nothing shipped, the goal line shows why that matters, the shipped line names what is stuck and why, and the visibility line refuses to credit work that never went live.

Two things the frame cannot show. First, why it has five sections and not six: we left Spend out, because on our own workspace it would describe internal usage rather than a bill a customer pays. In a customer's report, the Spend section says what the period used and where it went. Second, what the next-period line actually asks of the reader. It is a list of decisions, not a forecast: a yes or no on each of the ten waiting items (four new articles and six rewritten passages), one repository connection so the approved changes can land as pull requests, and re-read dates booked for whatever ships, so the next report can say whether anything moved.

Notice what it does not do. It does not turn 0 of 108 into a reassuring trend line, it does not describe the waiting work as progress on the goal, and it does not hide the blocker in an appendix. Each line can be checked against the workspace that produced it.

A report like that is uncomfortable to send, and it is the most useful report a founder can get: it says exactly where the work is stuck.

How does Attensira produce reports?

Attensira writes two report formats from your workspace's own data. The client report carries visibility per engine, the work shipped, before-and-after re-reads, deciding sources, competitors and next steps. The board report is one page in six sections: summary, goals with their pace, what shipped, spend, one line on visibility, and next period. Both cover the last complete week, month or quarter, use no movement words unless a re-read proved the change, and write counts as "X of N answers". Each report gets a signed link that opens without an account, lasts 180 days and prints to PDF.

Agencies that send these to clients can read how Attensira works for agencies. For how the visibility numbers themselves are built, read what SEO visibility means.

What else do people ask?

How often should an SEO report be sent?
Monthly for most teams, covering the last complete calendar month, with a weekly working view for the people doing the work. Quarterly reports suit boards. Reporting more often than the data can change produces noise, not insight.
What is the difference between an SEO audit report and an SEO report?
An audit report is a one-time diagnosis of what is wrong with a site and in what order to fix it. An SEO report is recurring and covers a period, what was done and what changed. An audit feeds the work queue; the report tracks it.
What should a competitor SEO report contain?
For the queries and questions that matter, who ranks and who is named in AI answers instead of you, which of their pages win, and which third-party pages name them and not you. End each finding with the action it implies.
Should an SEO report include AI search?
Yes, if your buyers use assistants. Report how many answers named you and how many cited your pages, out of how many answers read, per engine, beside Google impressions and clicks. Keep the two separate rather than blending them into one score.
Can an SEO report prove revenue?
Rarely, and a report should not pretend it does. It can show traffic, sign-ups and pipeline from organic search beside the work shipped, and say what changed. Claiming that a sale was caused by a specific change needs evidence most reports do not have.

Where do these facts come from?

3 sources, 6 statements: each statement with the page it came from and the day it was checked.

  1. attensira.com workspace, Attensira MCP reading of 2026-10-04 (30 days): for "AI visibility reporting tool for client reports", Semrush was named in 43 of 108 answers and Attensira in none; the first deciding sources were agencyscope.ai on ChatGPT and a cognizo.ai guide on Perplexity.

    attensira.com workspace, read over the Attensira MCP on

  2. attensira.com workspace, read over the Attensira MCP on 2026-10-04: Perplexity's stored answer of 2026-10-04 to "AI visibility reporting tool for client reports" named Amplitude's AI Visibility Report, cited botsee.io, trakkr.ai, customerimpact.be, amplitude.com, wellows.com and maxaeo.ai first, and neither named nor cited Attensira.

    attensira.com workspace, read over the Attensira MCP on

  3. Attensira's board report covers the last complete week, month or quarter in six sections (summary, goals, what shipped, spend, visibility, next period), uses no movement words unless a re-read proved the change, and writes counts as X of N answers.

    docs.attensira.com · retrieved

  4. Read over the Attensira MCP on 2026-10-04: for 2026-09-04 to 2026-10-04 the attensira.com workspace read its tracked prompts on ChatGPT and Perplexity on 23 of 31 days and had no shipped change with a re-read verdict; 10 finished pieces of work were waiting for approval on 2026-10-04.

    attensira.com workspace, read over the Attensira MCP on

  5. Google says some changes take effect in hours and others in months, and that you generally want to wait a few weeks to assess whether your work had beneficial effects.

    developers.google.com · retrieved

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