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Free check · 6 items · 3 minutes

Is your SEO programme measuring retrieval, or only ranking?

Six questions, then your numbers against ours. The check returns the state your programme is in and the one thing to do next — not a list of twenty things.

6 items 3 optional numbers No email Nothing leaves your browser

No email required. Nothing is sent anywhere — your answers stay in this browser.

0 of 6 answered

The Retrieval Readiness Check

Answer as the programme actually is today, not as it is supposed to be. “Not sure” scores as no — if you cannot produce it today, it does not exist for this purpose.

Item 1

Can you produce, today, a list of your pages that rank in the top 10 and are never cited by an AI engine?

Join Search Console pages to the URLs AI engines cite. If that join has never been run, the answer is no.

Item 2

Does your monthly report show impressions and clicks as separate lines, with separate owners?

One line for how often you were shown, one for how often you were visited. They move independently now.

Item 3

Do you know which full-sentence questions your category is actually asked?

Queries of eight words or more, or ending in a question mark — exported regardless of volume.

Item 4

Have you verified AI Overview presence on your top 20 terms with a live SERP fetch in the last 30 days?

A live fetch with a positive control. A cached SERP-features field is not a verification.

Item 5

Can you name the domains cited in your category when you are not?

Ranked by citing responses, with an n and a date attached.

Item 6

Is there an agreed evaluation window longer than 30 days for newly published pages?

Agreed in writing, before the work ships — not argued about at the readout.

Your numbers (optional, but they are what make this yours)

Leave any of these blank and the check still returns a state. Fill them in and it returns a comparison against our own measured estate instead of a generic band.

Your result
Read the method
What you are being scored against

Our own numbers, measured on our own estate

Every figure below comes from a dated pull on our own property. One domain, one window — a case study, not a law. The value is in running it on yours.

MeasuredWhat it is
14 of 17Top-10 pages with zero AI citationsOur own estate: 17 pages ranked in Google's top 10 (average position 10 or better), and 3 of them were cited by an AI engine. · Indexable, 7 September 2026, n = 223 pages
median 6.81 days, P90 37.10 daysHow long citations lag publicationThis is the reason a 45-day evaluation window beats a 30-day one: at 30 days you are reading the lag, not the result. Third-party measurement, not ours — and we hold it second-hand, so treat it as directional. · Profound, 2026, as reported in LinkedIn's 2026 AI Search Visibility guide
at least 543 queries / 7,038 impressionsPage-one queries that earned zero clicks in 28 daysEight queries earned any click, and all eight were brand or navigational. "At least" is deliberate: the export caps at 500 rows per slice, so this is a floor, not a census. · Indexable, 28-day Search Console window to 6 September 2026

One domain, one window. Our own baseline the first time we ran this on ourselves was 2 of 6. A case study, not a law.

The gap list is the deliverable

If item 1 came back no, the first useful artefact is a list of your ranking pages that no engine quotes. That is what an AI search audit produces — by URL, with the passage-level reason attached.

Get an AI search audit

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