The report arrives on the first Monday of the month. Eleven links built. A chart trending up and to the right. A paragraph about "continued authority growth."
You skim it, file it, and pay the invoice. What else is there to do? You hired an SEO agency because you do not know how to evaluate this, and the SEO agency report is written by people who know you do not know.
Here is the uncomfortable part: auditing an SEO agency report takes about twenty minutes and requires no SEO knowledge at all. I have spent years on the supply side of this business, and the clients who run these checks get noticeably better work than the ones who do not. Not because their agency is dishonest, usually. Because anything nobody checks eventually gets optimised for looking good rather than being good.
Here is exactly what to check.
Check 1: Open every link
Start with the stupidest possible test. Click each URL in the SEO agency report.
You are looking for three failures, and all three are common. The page returns a 404, because it was removed after the agency reported it. The page loads but your link is gone, because an editor cleaned it up later. Or the page loads and your link is there, but it sits in a footer or a "partners" block rather than in the article.
That last one matters more than it looks. A link inside a paragraph is a recommendation. A link in a footer block is furniture.
If more than one or two links in a month fail this test, you are being charged for placements that did not survive their first month. Every one of those lines is still counted in the report total.
Check 2: Find out whether the link is followed
This is the check that separates a report from a receipt, and it takes ten seconds per link.
Open the page, right-click your link, and choose Inspect. You will see the HTML for that link. Look for a rel attribute.
- No rel attribute, or rel="noopener" → the link is followed. This is what you are paying for.
- rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" → the link is marked as paid or untrusted.
- rel="ugc" → the link was left as user-generated content, usually a comment.
Google's own documentation explains what those values mean and asks publishers to use sponsored for paid placements (Google Search Central). Links carrying those attributes are generally not followed.
Nofollowed links are not worthless — they still send readers, and a natural profile contains plenty of them. But if your SEO agency reports "11 links built" and nine of them are nofollowed, the report is describing something different from what you think you bought. Ask which number is which. A good agency already separates them.
Check 3: Confirm the page is indexed
A link on a page Google has not indexed does nothing at all.
Copy a full sentence from the article, paste it into Google inside quotation marks, and search. If the article comes back, it is indexed. If nothing comes back, Google does not have that page, and your link is sitting somewhere Google never looks.
Run this on a sample, not every link. Three or four is enough to tell you whether the agency's prospects are real publications or a network of sites nobody visits.
Check 4: Look at whether anyone reads the site
This is where most link reports quietly fall apart, and it is the check clients skip because they assume it requires a tool.
It does not. Open the site. Look at the last ten articles. Ask three questions:
Does this site have a subject?
If a post about commercial insurance sits next to one about crypto and one about wedding dresses, you are not looking at a publication. You are looking at inventory.
Do the articles have dates, authors, and comments?
Real publications have people attached to them.
Would you read this?
You know your own industry. If an article in your field reads like it was produced to hold a link, your customers would notice too, and so does Google.
Authority metrics — Domain Authority, Domain Rating — can be inflated deliberately. Traffic and a real audience are much harder to fake. When I look at where a placement is going, the organic traffic number decides it, and the authority score is a tiebreaker. Any marketplace or vendor worth using shows both up front: on our own guest post marketplace, every listing displays its Domain Authority, Domain Rating, monthly organic traffic, traffic country and link type before anyone commits to it, because those are the numbers a buyer needs to make the decision. Your SEO agency should be able to show you the same thing for every site it proposes, before the article is written.
Check 5: Read the anchor text
Look at the words your link is attached to across all eleven placements.
If eight of them are your exact target phrase — "commercial insurance broker london", repeated — that is a pattern, and patterns in anchor text are one of the easier things for a search engine to spot. Natural linking produces a mess: your brand name, the article title, "this guide", sometimes just the bare URL.
An SEO agency that uses the same commercial anchor every time is optimising for a report line, not for your rankings.
The three report lines that should worry you
Having audited this kind of reporting from the other side for years, three phrases in a typical SEO agency report do most of the hiding.
"Links built: 11." Built where? Followed or not? Volume with no breakdown is the least informative number in SEO reporting, and it is the headline on most reports.
"Domain Authority 54." A metric from a third-party tool, not from Google, and one that can be manufactured. Ask for monthly organic traffic alongside it. If the agency cannot supply traffic figures for sites it placed on, it did not check before it spent your money.
"Ongoing content syndication." Sometimes real. Often the same article republished across a network of sites the agency controls. Ask for the URLs and run checks 3 and 4 on them.
What a good report actually looks like
A good SEO agency report is not longer. It is specific. Every line should carry: the live URL, the anchor text used, followed or nofollowed, the site's monthly organic traffic, and the date placed.
Five columns. Any SEO agency doing real work already has this data, because they needed it to choose the site in the first place. An agency that cannot produce it is telling you something.
If you want to sanity-check what you are being charged, work out what the placements should cost independently before the next invoice — our guest post cost calculator prices placements by authority level, and the gap between that and your monthly fee is your agency's margin and labour. That gap can be entirely reasonable. You should just know what it is.
How to raise it without blowing up the relationship
You do not need to accuse anyone of anything. Send one email:
Could you add four columns to next month's report — live URL, anchor text, followed or nofollowed, and the site's monthly organic traffic? It would help me explain the work internally.
That last clause does the diplomatic work. A good agency will say yes immediately, because they have the data. A weak one will explain why those numbers are not meaningful, which is itself the answer.
Then run the five checks on next month's SEO agency report. Twenty minutes, once a month.
The SEO agencies doing real work want clients who check. It is the only way the difference between their work and a cheaper competitor's ever becomes visible.
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Muhammad Farhan has spent five years in guest posting and link building, working with agencies and site owners on both sides of the transaction. He runs Guest Publisher, a marketplace where publishers list sites with verified traffic and authority data.
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