Matt Mellinger co-founded the Search Console tool SEO Gets after trying — and failing — to buy it from its developer, and runs a boutique local SEO agency alongside it. Editorial note: the verified transcript for this episode was not available when this recap was written, so no passage below is presented as a direct quotation. What follows is a practitioner-facing treatment of the topics the episode covered.
Where The Search Console Numbers Stop Agreeing
The centrepiece of the conversation is an in-progress case study his team has been compiling on a discrepancy most practitioners have noticed and few have quantified: the query-level export and the page-level export do not reconcile.
Anonymised queries are the mechanism. Search Console withholds queries below a threshold, which means the query export is systematically incomplete — sometimes dramatically so on small sites. The page-level export does not carry the same suppression, which makes it the more complete record of where clicks actually landed.
The practical consequence is that a report built on the query export can understate a site’s performance without anybody doing anything wrong.
Page-Level Data Shows Almost All The Clicks
If you take one operational change from the episode, it is this: when you need to know what a site is actually earning, read the Pages tab, not the Queries tab.
The two answer different questions. Queries tell you about demand and intent, with a known gap. Pages tell you about outcome, with far less of one. Reporting that blends them without saying which is being quoted is where client conversations go wrong.
Indexation sits underneath all of this. A page that is not indexed does not appear in either export, and that absence is easy to mistake for a ranking problem when it is really a coverage problem.
What SEO Gets Was Built To Surface
SEO Gets is, in Mellinger’s description, a Search Console API wrapper with the things the native interface does not give you: annotations so you can mark what changed and when, portfolio dashboards for agencies running many properties, data smoothing, and historical storage that outlives Search Console’s own retention window.
The annotation feature is the one he uses diagnostically. His worked example is a Seattle cleaning company whose city pages disappeared after duplicated local schema was deployed — the kind of cause-and-effect that is obvious with a dated annotation and invisible without one.
How Local Agencies Should Report Differently
His position on measurement is that only leads and revenue are ever exact numbers. Everything else — GA4, Plausible, Search Console, Ahrefs — exists to tell a story about patterns and trends, and should be presented that way rather than as precision.
That leads to the harder theme of the episode: how a small business owner is supposed to tell a legitimate SEO from a scam when they do not know what they do not know. Indexation is one of the checks he reaches for, because it needs no expertise to interpret. Either the pages are in the index or they are not.
More on the technical side of the show in the technical SEO real talk guide, and on the local side in local SEO strategies that actually work. The full catalogue is in the episode guide.
