Index / Agency & Vendor Oversight
PB-032

SEO Retainer Deliverable Check

Checks what the retainer promised against what actually shipped, and whether the shipped work is live and indexed.

The spec — copy this

Set up a new bot for me that runs monthly per SEO engagement. Walk me through connecting my site, Google Search Console, and wherever my agency reports and scope documents are stored, then configure it: extract what the retainer or scope actually commits to each month — pages published, content refreshed, links acquired, technical fixes, local citations, reporting cadence — then verify each claimed deliverable against live evidence rather than against the report. For a published page, confirm it exists at a real URL, is indexable, is internally linked from somewhere other than the sitemap, and has begun to accumulate impressions. For an acquired link, confirm it exists on the live page, whether it is followed, and whether the linking page is itself indexed. For a technical fix, confirm the condition is actually resolved on the live site. Produce a table of committed, claimed, verified, and unverified, with the evidence for each, and total the unverified against the monthly fee. Report only what it can check and mark anything it cannot verify as unverified rather than failed. Ask me where the scope document lives, which deliverables to track, and my reporting period, run it on a past month so I can check its verdicts, then save it.
Paste into an assistant that can connect to your systems.◆ Ethics note below — read before you run it

Connect first

The spec asks for these as it goes — however you normally connect them works. Nothing needs to be set up in advance, and a system named here is usually an example rather than a requirement. If yours has an API or an export, the spec generally adapts.

What it never does
  • Mark a deliverable as failed when it merely could not be verified
  • Judge the quality or strategic value of the work — it checks existence and status only
  • Contact the agency or the linking sites
Agency & Vendor Oversight — category rule

These specs are written to establish facts, not to build a case. Every one reports observed gaps and the mechanism behind them, and none concludes that a vendor or agency acted in bad faith — because the most common answer is a definitional mismatch or a gap in your own intake, and the second most common is something a contract already addresses. Before you put a finding in writing to a counterparty, read your agreement and have counsel look at it.

Before you run this

Unverified is not the same as undelivered. Some legitimate work leaves no public trace, and some deliverables take months to show impressions. Use this to open a conversation, not to close one.

Category
Agency & Vendor Oversight
Contributed by
Jacob Malherbe @jacobmalherbeMass Tort Ad Agency
Approval gate
A named human approves before anything sends, files, or publishes.
Last verified
2026-08-19

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