Skip to content
stated:methodWhat search visibility is actually worth, measured

About

Stated Method publishes measurements of what search visibility is actually worth, and sells one thing: the same analysis, run on your data.

Where the numbers come from

Properties we built and operate. Every finding here is measured on our own sites, with our own Search Console, analytics and ad revenue data, which is why the windows are absolute dates and the sample sizes are stated rather than described.

It also means the awkward results get published. A site measuring its own properties has no client to keep happy, so a finding that says an optimisation did nothing, or that a number we were proud of was mostly an artefact, goes up the same as any other.

No client work is ever published here

Not anonymised, not aggregated, not as a case study. If you buy a diagnostic, your data produces your report and never appears on this site in any form. That is a permanent boundary rather than a current policy, and it is the reason every finding is drawn from properties we own.

Why nobody is named

There is no byline anywhere on this site, by choice. Search advice is sold almost entirely on authority - a face, a following, a claimed history - and that is precisely the kind of evidence a reader cannot check.

So the argument here has to be carried by things you can check instead: the instrument, the window, the sample size, and figures that either reproduce or do not. Method sets out how that works, including the claims this site refuses to make.

What happens when we get it wrong

It gets corrected in place, dated, with the original reading still visible. Several findings here carry the correction in the title, because the correction was the more interesting result.

That is not modesty. A publication arguing that most search claims are unfalsifiable does not get to hide its own revisions, and a measurement that turned out to be wrong is more useful with its correction attached than quietly deleted.

How this is paid for

By the diagnostic, and by nothing else. There is no advertising on this site, no affiliate link, no sponsored finding and no arrangement under which anyone can pay to be measured favourably or to keep a result off the page.

It matters because the alternative funding models all quietly decide what gets published. A findings page paid for by a tool vendor is a different document, whatever it says about itself.

Who it is for

People responsible for a site who need to know what its search visibility is worth before spending more on it - including, often, the answer that it is worth less than the invoice they were about to approve.

Contact

hello@statedmethod.com. Questions about a published figure are welcome, including uncomfortable ones - if a finding here does not hold up, we would rather hear it than not.