Vendors love “live”. Clients care about indexed. A URL that 200s for one crawler and never appears in the index is a screenshot, not a placement.
We check the candidate page is indexed before we pitch it. We check again after the link is in. Both go in the white-label pack so you are not arguing with a dashboard.
What we actually record
Live URL. Index status. Date. Screenshot of the sentence. If any of those four are missing, the brief is not closed. We do not mark it done because a publisher said “it’s up”.
The report has to survive a client audit. Index status is how it does.
If it drops
- We re-check the live URL and index status
- Replacement if a link drops in the first 12 months
- Notes you can put in the next client update
- No extra invoice for the replacement on the original brief
Send the URLs you already promised the client. We will tell you what we can prove — and what we will not put in a pack.
