Question 1

What is Search Pulse?

Accepted Answer

It's an SEO diagnosis that runs inside the brand kit and repeats. A pulse reads your client's own Google Search Console data across a window you choose, finds the pages quietly losing traffic, photographs the live mobile results page for each one, and diagnoses every finding down to a single cause with the evidence cited. You get ranked fixes, copy-ready rewrites, and a white-label client report. Then you re-run it next month against the same site, after the fixes — which is what turns an audit into a retainer.

Question 2

How is this different from an SEO audit or a rank tracker?

Accepted Answer

Most tools stop at the number. A rank tracker tells you a position moved; an audit hands you a list of issues. Search Pulse closes the loop: it names one cause per finding rather than listing everything that could be wrong, it hands you the actual replacement titles and descriptions instead of advice to write them, and the next pulse reads the same site after the fixes so each recommendation comes back as a number you can show a client. Scan, diagnose, fix, re-measure — the re-measure arc is the part that gets billed monthly.

Question 3

What is a click gap?

Accepted Answer

A click gap is a page that ranks perfectly well and still loses the click. Its position is healthy, Google is showing it plenty, but its click-through rate sits far under what that position should reasonably earn — so the traffic is going to somebody else on the same results page. These are the cheapest wins in SEO because you don't have to move the ranking at all; you have to make the listing worth clicking. Search Pulse flags them, estimates the clicks being left on the table, and writes the replacement titles and descriptions.

Question 4

What is decay — and what's the "invisible traffic killer"?

Accepted Answer

Decay is the slow bleed: a page whose clicks are falling window over window. The nastier version is the one that hides — click-through rate collapsing while Google keeps showing the page just as often, or more. Impressions look fine or even improve, so nothing in a normal dashboard raises a flag, and the clicks quietly drain away. Search Pulse calls that out by name, and measures the loss as what the page should have earned at its old click rate over the recent window's impressions, so a page whose clicks stayed flat while impressions doubled is correctly reported as losing.

Question 5

Where does the data come from — and do you need access to my client's website?

Accepted Answer

No website access. The data is your client's own Google Search Console performance data, connected once with a read-only link. The connection reads performance data and nothing else: nothing is ever written back to their Search Console, and disconnecting removes the stored credential entirely. One account-level connection covers your agency, and each Search Console property maps to the brand kit for that client, so a pulse always measures the right site.

Question 6

What window does it measure — and can I choose it?

Accepted Answer

You choose it, because SEO is a time span rather than a snapshot. Pick a from-date and a to-date, anywhere from a week to six months; it defaults to the span since your last pulse when that's long enough to be meaningful, and to ninety days otherwise. Every number is then measured over that window against the equal-length span immediately before it, so growth and loss are like-for-like. Every stat on the page and in the report carries its dates — no unlabeled numbers.

Question 7

What does "photographing the results page" mean?

Accepted Answer

For each finding, the pulse captures the live mobile Google results page for that query as it appears right then — the competitors ranking around your client, the People-Also-Ask questions, and the AI Overview when Google is showing one. That's what turns a metric into a diagnosis: you can see that the page slipped because an AI Overview now sits above the results, or because a competitor took the shape of the page. If a capture comes back incomplete it's retried, and if it still fails the most recent good photo is reused and clearly labeled with its original date rather than passing off old evidence as new.

Question 8

Does it track AI Overviews?

Accepted Answer

Yes — when Google shows an AI Overview for a query, the capture includes it, and it becomes evidence in the diagnosis. It's also where the honesty matters most: AI Overviews come and go on the same query within hours, so a count that changes between two pulses is usually Google churning rather than anything wrong with the measurement. That's exactly why every photo is stamped with the moment it was taken, and why a run with no usable sample says so instead of reporting a confident zero.

Question 9

How does the diagnosis work?

Accepted Answer

Every finding gets exactly one primary cause, chosen from a fixed set of seven, plus a confidence score, a priority, and the evidence quoted line by line. That constraint is deliberate: a list of eight possible explanations is a way of not committing, and it's useless to a client. If the evidence is thin — an incomplete results-page sample, for instance — the confidence score drops and the diagnosis says why, rather than dressing up a guess as a finding.

Question 10

What do I actually hand over to fix a page?

Accepted Answer

For every click gap: three replacement titles and three replacement descriptions, copy-ready, each one annotated with the persuasion lever it's using — so you can pick on reasoning rather than taste. Every finding also carries its ranked fixes in priority order. It's written to be handed straight to a client's web team or dropped into the CMS, not turned into homework.

Question 11

Can I see the work, or do I just get conclusions?

Accepted Answer

You see all of it, and it's built to be shown to a client. The Scan lists the pages and the query–page pairs Google reported, green-dotted as read and checked. Alongside it: the pulse line day by day with clicks and impressions charted, the pages and queries that are growing, brand-new queries the site started appearing for, the split between people searching your client's name and people discovering them cold, and the device breakdown. That brand-versus-discovery split is often the uncomfortable one — plenty of sites find out most of their search traffic is people who already knew the name.

Question 12

What's in the client report?

Accepted Answer

A white-label document carrying your agency mark and the client's logo, with the measurement window stated up front. It runs an executive verdict, the pulse line, the scoreboard, the leak breakdown, what's growing, then every finding in full dress with its diagnosis, evidence and rewrites — followed by a full appendix of everything scanned and a method page that explains, among other things, which numbers are stable measurements and which are moments in time. It prints to PDF with a client-ready filename, and the recommended-actions page is the last sheet by design so it detaches: keep it and the report is your proposal, drop it and it's a findings document.

Question 13

What does it cost?

Accepted Answer

A pulse run costs 300 tokens, and that's the only paid step. Reading the findings, browsing the scan, and generating the client report are all free and can be repeated as often as you like — you pay for new measurement, never for reading or re-issuing a deliverable. It's available on Pro and up, and trial tokens cover a real run, so you can pulse a site you already know and judge the diagnosis against what you'd have concluded yourself.

Question 14

What if the pulse finds nothing?

Accepted Answer

Then that's the finding, and the report says so. The thresholds are set to flag meaningful loss rather than noise, so a pulse with no findings means nothing is measurably leaking at those thresholds. It's documented as a clean bill of health — which is a legitimate thing to hand a client who is paying you to watch, and considerably better than manufacturing three issues to justify the invoice.

Question 15

What are the honest limits?

Accepted Answer

Three worth stating. Google omits rarely-searched queries from Search Console for privacy reasons, and only reports queries where the site actually appeared — so the scan shows everything Google reports, which is honest and still less than everything that exists. Window numbers are stable measurements while results-page photos are moments, and the two are labeled apart rather than blended. And today the pulse hunts two lanes — click gaps and decay — so it finds pages that were strong and are slipping; a third lane for pages that were never strong enough is on the way, along with a packaged fix deliverable and month-over-month movement on every stat card.

What is search quietly costing your client?

Every pulse makes the last one pay off

The diagnosis, end to end

From-date to-date, your call

Click gaps and quiet decay

Photographed, dated, honest

One cause, with receipts

Show everything that was read

A client report built to bill

Run the whole diagnosis from Claude

Run the diagnosis

Work the findings

Deliver it

Where this is heading

Search Pulse & SEO analysis