A monthly SEO retainer should list three things: the work that was done, the exact pages it touched, and numbers pulled from accounts you own. Everything past that is packaging. If the report is a stack of charts with no work list under it, you are paying for a screenshot.
The work list comes first
The first page of the report should read like a job ticket. Dates, tasks, and the URL of every page each task touched. You should be able to check it on a phone in two minutes.
A usable line reads like this: “August 6, rewrote the water heater repair page, added the two towns you asked for, /services/water-heater-repair/.” A useless line reads “on-page optimization, ongoing.”
Google Search Central publishes a page called Do you need an SEO?, last updated June 5, 2026. It says that if an SEO has FTP access to your server, “they should be willing to explain all the changes they are making to your site.” If nobody will name the change and the page it landed on, that is your answer.
Ask for the work list even in a slow month. A month with two hours of work in it is a real month. A month dressed up to look like ten is a problem.
The numbers should come from your own accounts
Google Search Console is free, and it is the record of what happened in Google Search. Every retainer should report out of it, and you should sit on that account as an owner, not a guest.
Search Console’s own help page, Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup, names four metrics: clicks, impressions, CTR (click-through rate), and average position. The same data can be grouped by queries, pages, countries, devices, search appearance, and dates. It says the default view of the report covers the past three months. That page carries no update date.
So the number part of your report should show, month against month:
- clicks from Google Search
- impressions
- click-through rate
- average position
- the queries and the pages sitting behind those four
One caution about that last metric. The Search Console help page called What are impressions, position, and clicks? says the position it reports is “the topmost position occupied by a link to your property or page in search results, averaged across all queries in which your property appeared.” That page carries no update date. Publish four new pages and the average can slide down in a month where your phone rang more. Read clicks and queries first, and treat position as background.
Speed belongs on the list, and you can check it yourself
Site speed is one of the few parts of this work with public numbers attached. Google publishes them on web.dev under Web Vitals, last updated October 31, 2024. Largest Contentful Paint, how long the main thing on screen takes to appear, should be 2.5 seconds or less. Interaction to Next Paint, how fast the page answers a tap, should be 200 milliseconds or less. Cumulative Layout Shift, how much the page jumps around while it loads, should be 0.1 or less. All three are judged at the 75th percentile of page loads, measured separately for mobile and desktop.
Those numbers are checkable by you. Run your busiest page through Google PageSpeed Insights and read the result. The Galloping site scores 100 there on desktop and mobile, which is the one result this company can show you without asking you to take its word for anything.
A retainer that never mentions speed is skipping a line that anyone with a phone can audit, and it is fair to ask why. Speed also sits inside the rest of what your monthly website bill covers, so make sure two vendors are not both charging you for the same job.
The AI answer line needs a real definition
Plenty of retainers now carry a line called AI optimization, or AEO, or GEO. Ask what the work under that line actually is.
Google Search Central publishes a page called AI features and your website, last updated December 10, 2025. It says there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” It also says you do not need to create new machine readable files or AI text files to show up in them.
The hiring page asks the same thing in different words. Of a vendor selling advice on optimizing for AI experiences, it tells you to ask: “is their advice aligned with Google Search’s official guidance on optimizing for generative AI features?”
So the honest version of that line is reporting, not promising. A retainer can write down which assistants named your business this month, which named a competitor, and for which questions. Nobody can promise you a mention. A free scan asks assistants a real customer question and writes down who got named, and ongoing search checks repeat that same checking, month after month.
The lines to question, and when not to buy at all
Some things do not belong on a monthly list.
- A ranking promise. The Google hiring page is blunt: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” Google Search Essentials, last updated December 10, 2025, adds that “just because a page meets all of these requirements and best practices, doesn’t mean that Google will crawl, index, or serve its content.”
- A third-party tool score as the headline result. The hiring page says Google “doesn’t evaluate or endorse third-party SEO tools, and these tools don’t have access to Google’s internal ranking data.” A rising score inside a tool is not a rising call count.
- Ad money passed on to Google, folded into the same fee as the labor. That is a purchase, not a service.
- Any line you cannot see the page for.
Now the harder part. There are months when you should not buy a retainer at all. If your site is slow, thin, or missing the services you actually sell, fix the site first. Ongoing work on a broken page is rent.
The Google hiring page also says that if you run a small local business, you “can probably do much of the work yourself.” If the entire monthly list is one blog post and a screenshot, you could do that between jobs. Buy the retainer when the list is longer than your free time, not before.
One limit on all of the above. Google publishes guidance on hiring an SEO. Nothing on that page sets out a required monthly deliverable list. If a vendor tells you Google demands a certain report, ask them to show you where Google says so.
If a retainer turns out to be a bill for work nobody did, that same Google page points at the remedy: “In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices.” It gives the number as 1-877-FTC-HELP. This is not legal advice. For a contract you want out of, talk to your own attorney and check your state rules on service agreements.
What to do next
- Open Google Search Console and confirm you are listed as an owner. If a vendor holds the only owner seat, ask to be added today. A new vendor needs read access only while they audit.
- Ask for last month’s work list with dates and URLs. Pick three lines at random and go look at those pages.
- Run your busiest page through PageSpeed Insights and write the numbers down. Ask what the plan is for them.
- Ask one ownership question: if you stop paying next month, what do you keep? Pages, content, and accounts should stay yours.
- Put two retainer offers side by side on the same list of line items before you sign, the same way you would compare written quotes for a build.
A good retainer is boring to read and easy to check. That is the whole test.