Did my SEO actually work?
You cannot tell from a traffic chart, and neither can your agency. The only way to know is to leave some pages alone and compare. If nobody kept a control group, the honest answer is that nobody knows.
Traffic goes up and down for reasons that have nothing to do with the work. Seasons, a competitor going quiet, one post that got shared, a Google update that lifted or sank the whole category. A report that says "traffic up 31%" is true, unfalsifiable, and entirely compatible with the work having done nothing at all.
Farmers solved this in 1843. Rothamsted sowed a field, fertilised most of it, and deliberately left one strip alone so the rest had something honest to be compared against. The strip has been left alone ever since. That is the whole method: the pages nobody touched are the answer to what would have happened anyway, and the gap between them and the pages that were worked on is what the work was worth.
Applied to a website it looks like this. Split the pages into two halves, matched on the kind of page, its traffic and its age. Work on one half. Leave the other half exactly as it is for ninety days. Compare the change in each half, page by page. The difference is the result, and the range around it is how sure you can be. If the difference is inside the range, the honest word is "unclear", not "success".
Ask your agency for the pages they deliberately did not touch and the comparison against them. If there is no such list, the number on the report is a description of the weather.
The longest-running field experiment in the world has kept one strip unfertilised since 1843, so the fertilised strips have something honest to be compared against. It is still running.
Broadbalk Wheat Experiment, sown autumn 1843
68% of US Google searches ended without a click between January and April 2026, up from 60% in 2024.
SparkToro and Similarweb clickstream panel
Repeated runs of the same prompt on commercial AI engines agree on only 34% to 42% of sources within 24 hours. A move from 8% to 11% visibility cannot be told from random variation.
Survey of GEO measurement, bootstrap intervals 3 to 7 points wide
The free check reads your own site and tells you how many of your pages have not changed in a year, and whether the site is big enough for a real comparison. No account, no estimate, about a minute.