SEO Reports Are Fiction

Every month, agencies across the world send their clients PDF reports. Twenty, thirty, sometimes fifty pages of graphs, metrics, and analysis. Impressive-looking documents that justify the retainer and demonstrate progress.

Most of it is fiction.

Not lies, exactly. The numbers are usually real. But the narrative wrapped around those numbers? The cause-and-effect stories? The implications of success? That's where the creative writing begins.

The Art of Metric Selection

The first fiction technique: choosing which numbers to show.

SEO generates hundreds of metrics. Rankings for individual keywords. Traffic from different sources. Impressions in search. Clicks. Bounce rates. Time on site. Pages per session. Conversion rates. Domain authority. Referring domains. Indexed pages. Core Web Vitals scores.

Some of these went up this month. Some went down. Some stayed flat. The agency's job is to build a story from whichever ones look good.

Traffic down? Focus on ranking improvements. Rankings down? Focus on impressions growth. Impressions down? Focus on click-through rate improvements. Everything down? Focus on technical fixes that will pay off later.

There's always a positive story to tell if you're selective enough about which numbers you show.

The Causation Illusion

The second fiction technique: implying that agency work caused the good things.

"After implementing our recommended title tag changes, organic traffic increased 23%."

Did the title tags cause the increase? Maybe. Or maybe there was a seasonal uptick. Or a competitor dropped out. Or Google's algorithm shifted. Or the client got press coverage that had nothing to do with SEO. Or it's just normal fluctuation that would have happened anyway.

SEO operates in a chaotic environment with countless variables. Establishing clear cause-and-effect is genuinely difficult. But reports need to justify fees, so agencies write as though they control outcomes they often can't measure, let alone influence directly.

The honest version would be: "Traffic went up this month. We did some things. These might be related. We're not sure." No one writes that. (The same causation problem plagues most SEO case studies too.)

The Vanity Metric Parade

Some metrics in SEO reports are genuinely meaningless. They're included because they look good on graphs, not because they matter.

Domain Authority: A made-up number from Moz. Google doesn't use it. It's not predictive of anything specific. But it usually goes up over time, so it gets reported.

Keywords ranked: The total number of keywords your site appears for. This almost always increases simply by adding more content. It says nothing about whether you rank for keywords that matter.

Impressions: How many times your site appeared in search results. Not how many people clicked. Not how many converted. Just... appearances. A number that can grow even as actual value shrinks.

Backlinks acquired: How many new sites linked to you. Without context about quality, this is meaningless. A thousand spam links count the same as one link from a major publication.

These metrics fill space in reports. They make charts go up and to the right. But they're proxies for things that matter, several degrees removed from actual business value.

The Progress That Isn't

Many SEO reports show "progress" that's actually just activity.

"We published 8 blog posts this month." That's activity. Whether those posts accomplished anything is a separate question.

"We optimized 15 pages for target keywords." Great, but did rankings improve? Did traffic increase? Did conversions go up?

"We acquired 12 new backlinks." From where? Do they matter? Will they help rankings?

Activity reports feel like progress. Look at all this work we did! But work without results is just busyness. The report should show outcomes, not tasks completed.

Yet tasks are easier to guarantee than outcomes. So agencies report tasks and hope clients conflate the two.

The Comparison Game

Reports love comparisons. Month over month. Year over year. Against "industry benchmarks."

Each comparison frame tells a different story. Traffic down 10% month-over-month but up 40% year-over-year? Lead with the year-over-year number. Rankings dropped since last month but above where they were before we started? Emphasize the before-and-after.

Industry benchmarks are particularly malleable. "Your click-through rate is 15% above industry average." Which industry? Which average? From what source? Whose data? These details are rarely explained because the point isn't accuracy. The point is a favorable comparison.

Any data can be made to look good with the right comparison frame. The report writer's job is finding that frame.

The Future Promise

When the present doesn't look good, reports pivot to the future.

"While traffic was flat this month, the technical foundation we're building will enable significant growth in Q3."

"Rankings haven't moved yet, but based on our competitive analysis, we expect to see improvement as our content matures."

"The links we acquired this month typically take 3-6 months to impact rankings."

These statements might be true. SEO does take time. Results do lag effort. But they're also unfalsifiable in the moment. By the time Q3 arrives, there will be a new explanation for whatever happens.

The future promise is the ultimate escape hatch. Disappointing present? Promising future. Always.

What Honest Reporting Looks Like

Not all SEO reporting is fiction. Some agencies and practitioners do it honestly. Here's what that looks like:

Focus on business metrics: Not rankings or domain authority, but traffic that converts. Revenue influenced by organic search. Actual business outcomes.

Acknowledge uncertainty: "Traffic increased this month. We made changes that may have contributed, but we can't isolate the exact cause."

Show the full picture: Including metrics that don't look good. Honest accounting of what went down, not just what went up.

Separate activity from results: "Here's what we did. Here's what happened. Here's what we think, but don't know, about the connection."

Time-bound accountability: "We predicted X would happen by Y date. It did/didn't. Here's our updated thinking."

This kind of reporting is rare because it requires confidence and integrity. It means admitting what you don't know. It means sometimes delivering bad news. It means being honest about the limits of SEO as a practice.

Why Clients Accept Fiction

If SEO reports are often fiction, why do clients accept them?

Because they want to believe. They're paying for results. They need to justify the expense internally. A report full of green arrows and positive-sounding numbers provides that justification.

Because they can't evaluate the claims. Most clients aren't SEO experts. They can't tell meaningful metrics from vanity metrics. They can't spot cherry-picked comparisons. They trust the agency to tell them the truth.

Because questioning the report means questioning the relationship. If you push back too hard on reporting, you're essentially saying you don't trust your agency. That's uncomfortable. Easier to nod and move on.

The relationship between agency and client often becomes a mutual agreement to maintain pleasant fictions. The agency pretends everything is going great. The client pretends to be satisfied. Everyone gets what they need in the short term.

The Alternative

The solution isn't abandoning SEO reporting. It's demanding better.

If you're a client, ask harder questions. What's the connection between activity and outcomes? Why are we measuring these specific metrics? What would failure look like in this report?

If you're an agency, be more honest. Your best clients will appreciate it. Yes, some clients want comforting fiction. But the clients worth keeping want the truth, even when it's complicated.

If you're an in-house SEO, report with integrity even when the numbers aren't great. Your credibility is more valuable than looking good in any single month.

The best SEO report is one that accurately describes reality, admits what's unknown, and holds itself accountable to predictions. Almost no one produces these.

Don't let pretty PDFs substitute for actual understanding. The chart going up doesn't mean you're succeeding. The narrative being compelling doesn't make it true.