White label SEO reports: what they should include and what to tell clients about your tools

A white label SEO report is a report produced with another company's tool and delivered with your agency's name, logo, colour and contact details. It lets the client receive a document consistent with your brand, but it does not take any responsibility off you: you sign off every figure in it.

To check it on your own site: For agencies

Which sections the report needs, how often to send it and how to prove results are covered in the guide to the SEO client report. This piece is about what changes once your brand goes on it: what it has to include, what to tell the client about your tools and which details reveal that the report is someone else's.

What is white labelling in an SEO report, and what is it not?

In an SEO report, white labelling is a tool's option to replace its own visual identity and contact details with those of the agency delivering the report. The client sees your logo, your colours and your email address; they do not see the software vendor's.

It is worth keeping apart from something else that goes by the same name: white label SEO as a service, where one agency subcontracts the whole job to another and resells it as its own. This article is only about the report, meaning the tool. Who does the work and how you explain it to the client is a separate conversation, although the transparency rules below apply to both.

Nor is it a way of passing an automated analysis off as hours of consultancy. White labelling changes who signs the document, not what the document is.

What should a report carrying your agency's brand include?

A report under your brand should make clear who is delivering it, when it was produced, for which URL and where each figure comes from. This is the list we suggest, focused on what changes because it carries your brand:

On colour, one concrete rule. The WCAG 2.2 accessibility guidelines ask for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 between text and background, or 3:1 for large text; logotypes are exempt1. If your brand colour is a pale yellow or a light green, use it for bars, borders and blocks of colour, not for the text of your figures.

Should you tell the client which tools you use?

You do not need the vendor's logo on every page, but you do need to explain where the data comes from and what it means. White labelling hides the software's brand, not the method.

Google frames this from the client's side. In its guide to hiring an SEO it suggests asking whether they will share all the changes they make to the site and explain their recommendations, and it warns: be careful if a company is secretive or will not clearly explain what they intend to do2. The same page reminds readers that nobody can guarantee a number one ranking on Google. A report under your brand is your answer to those questions, so it has to be able to answer them.

What is always worth saying:

• Where each figure comes from. "Speed: Google PageSpeed Insights, real-user data from the last 28 days." The client can open PageSpeed Insights and see the same thing3.
• What the score means and what it does not. A 0-100 score from a tool is that tool's own model, not a Google score or a ranking factor.
• What the report does not measure. If it does not include traffic, rankings or mentions in AI assistants, say so, and say where those figures come from when you do present them.
• How often the analysis is repeated and what happens if something breaks between two reports.

What you do not need to state is the brand name of every internal tool, just as you do not explain which hosting provider runs your website. But if the client asks, do not deny it. And never present as your own something that is not: an "our authority index" that is really a third party's metric, or a manual audit that was in fact an unreviewed automated analysis.

Access belongs to the client

Transparency is also about ownership. Search Console distinguishes between owners, who have full control and can add or remove users, full users, who can see all data, and restricted users, who can see most of it4. The healthy set-up is for the client to own the Search Console and GA4 properties and for your agency to join as a full user. If the client changes agency one day, their data stays with them, and knowing that makes them more comfortable signing with you.

What gives away that a white label report is someone else's?

Few things undermine credibility like a report with your logo on the cover that lets the vendor show through the seams. These are the most common slips:

1. Mixed branding. Your logo on the cover and the vendor's name in the footer, in an email subject line or in the file name.
2. Figures that do not match PageSpeed Insights. If the report gives a lab load time and the client opens PageSpeed Insights and sees real-user data, one of the two will look wrong. PageSpeed Insights keeps them apart: field data is a 28-day history of real visits on a range of devices and connections, while lab data is a simulated load on a single device3. How to read each block is explained in the guide to PageSpeed Insights.
3. Untranslated jargon. Findings that use the technical name of the check, with no sentence saying what it means for the business.
4. Scores that rise on their own. If the tool changes how it calculates between two months and you present the difference as progress, the client will notice sooner or later.
5. A colour that cannot be read, or a logo stretched across the header of every page.

None of these mistakes is serious on its own. Together they tell the client that the report is a tool export with a cover page on top.

How does white labelling work in SmoothSeen?

Declaration of interest: this blog belongs to SmoothSeen, a website audit tool that measures visibility in search engines and AI assistants and delivers reports under the agency's brand. White labelling is included in the Agency and Enterprise plans, and works like this:

• What you customise: the agency name, logo, main colour, website and contact email. Any field you leave empty uses SmoothSeen's.
• Where it applies: to the four PDFs (web ranking, AI ranking, competitor comparison and action plan), to the share link and to the monitoring alert email.
• The share link opens for your client without an account, carries the brand of the agency that owns the report (not that of whoever opens it), is not indexed by search engines, shows how many times it has been opened and can be revoked. The address is on SmoothSeen's domain: it is not served from a domain of yours.
• The alert email goes to your account's address, not the client's, signed with your brand so you can forward it. Its link points to your dashboard; for the client to see the report, send them the share link.
• It can be switched off at any time: reports go back to carrying the SmoothSeen brand. The setting applies to the whole account.

On the Professional plan the PDFs and the link exist, but with the SmoothSeen brand. The plans are on the pricing page, and what it offers agencies is on SmoothSeen for agencies.

Two details help with the transparency described above. The reports state where each speed measurement comes from, naming PageSpeed Insights, so the client can check it. And the before and after compares two analyses on the same basis, so an improvement in the report is a change in the site and not in the yardstick. To make sure nothing breaks between one report and the next, SEO monitoring re-analyses the client on its own and alerts you if a score drops.

Frequently asked questions

Is it misleading to deliver a white label report?

No, as long as you do not mislead anyone about what you have done or where the data comes from. Using a tool and putting your brand on the output is as common as using an accounting template. What is misleading is presenting an automated analysis as a manual audit, inventing proprietary metrics or passing a tool's score off as Google's opinion.

What if the client compares the report with PageSpeed Insights and the figures differ?

First check that you are comparing like with like. PageSpeed Insights shows real-user data from the last 28 days and, separately, a lab test on a single simulated device, and the lab test varies from one run to the next. If your report states the source and type of each figure, the difference can be explained in one sentence.

Does the client need an account to see the report?

It depends on the tool. In SmoothSeen they do not: the share link opens without an account, with the web ranking, AI ranking and action plan views and a PDF download. Search engines do not index it, and you can revoke it whenever you like, for example when your contract with that client ends.

What should the report say about what the tool does not measure?

One line for each thing the client might assume is included: traffic, keyword rankings or mentions in AI assistants, if the tool does not measure them. If those figures do appear in the report, state that they come from another source, such as Search Console or GA4, so nobody credits a figure to something that did not measure it.

What to do next

Open the last report you delivered and go through the table of elements: date, URL, the source of each figure and what was not measured. Fix first anything that reveals the vendor or cannot be checked. For the full structure of the report, carry on with the guide to the SEO client report.