Marketing & analytics Available
SE Ranking
SE Ranking supplies most of what a monthly client report is made of: where a client's keywords sit, what the site audit found, and whether the client turns up in AI answers. One key per agency covers every client project; for the AI Search overview the Data API's key often joins it.
What you need
- An SE Ranking account with a project per client you want to report on
- An API key from that account
- For the AI Search overview: a subscription to SE Ranking's Data API. It often issues a key of its own
- The Marketing module switched on under Instellingen → Modules, with a licence covering it
- The marketing.link.manage permission to store the key and link projects
How to connect it
- 1 Switch Marketing on under Instellingen → Modules (Settings → Modules). Without a covering licence the module goes read-only after the grace period and the nightly sync stands down; everything already collected stays readable.
- 2 Go to Instellingen → Marketing (Settings → Marketing) and paste your key into SE Ranking API-sleutel. It is stored encrypted and never handed back to the browser; leave the field empty on a later save to keep the stored key. If you were given a separate key for the Data API, put it in SE Ranking Data API-sleutel (optioneel); empty means the first key serves both APIs.
- 3 Press Sleutel controleren (Check key). It costs no units and shows, per API, whether the key used for it has access, and how many Data API units your plan has left. If the key works for rankings but not for the Data API, the screen says so: that is a missing second key, not a broken first one.
- 4 Link each client's SE Ranking project: open the client, click edit on the Marketing panel and pick the project under SE Ranking-project.
- 5 Linking kicks off a backfill of roughly thirteen months, so trend lines and year-on-year comparisons are right from day one. After that the nightly sync re-pulls the last few days and upserts each date on the same key, so late corrections heal themselves.
- 6 Read the figures on the client's Marketing panel and tab: the tiles Gem. positie, Top 3, Top 10, Top 30, Scorende zoekwoorden and Gevolgde zoekwoorden, with drill-downs Zoekwoorden, Zoekwoordgroepen, Website-audit and Zichtbaarheid in AI-zoekresultaten.
- 7 Want the AI Search overview? Switch AI-zichtbaarheid on, as the house default under Instellingen → Marketing or per client with Inschakelen voor deze klant (Enable for this client) on the Marketing tab. Pick the AI engines, the country database and, where needed, the domain and the brand name there too.
- 8 With the Rapportage module licensed, the same sources become chapters in the monthly report: Zoekwoordposities (compared with the month before), Zichtbaarheid in AI-zoekmachines (visibility in AI search engines), Zichtbaarheid in AI-zoekresultaten and, in the internal version only, Website-audit.
One key for the agency, no per-employee connection
Google sources hang off one colleague's personal grant, with scopes, revocation and a reconnect prompt. SE Ranking has none of that: there is one key per organisation, and it is configured or it is not. That removes a whole class of misdirection, because a missing agency key is an admin's job in Instellingen, not something an employee fixes by signing in again. If SE Ranking rejects the key (a 401 or 403) the screen says exactly that and points at Instellingen; any other failure keeps the neutral message, because guessing helps nobody. A project whose plan has no AI Result Tracker is not shown a refused key for it: the drill-down says this project has no access to the tracker, and the rest of SE Ranking is read as usual.
Stored daily, fetched per report
Only the daily figures go into storage: one small row per link per day carrying the average position, the top 3, 10 and 30, and how many keywords rank against how many are tracked. Per-keyword detail, the audit and the AI figures are fetched live when you ask for them, and a report freezes them into its own snapshot. The daily figures are folded out of exactly the same response the report table uses, so an average on a screen and the same average on paper cannot drift apart.
There is no position zero
SE Ranking reports a keyword that ranks nowhere as position 0. That number is kept out of every average: a keyword entering the top 10 from nothing would otherwise drag the average towards zero, and a client would look better the worse things got. In the report table an improvement is a positive number even though the rank goes down, and the table carries the keywords that sat in the top 25 at either the start or the end of the period. Rows are grouped the way you grouped them in SE Ranking itself.
- Positions are read per search engine, so a client tracking Google NL and Google BE counts both
- The report table is capped at 200 keywords; a truncation is reported on the run's warnings, never on the client's document
- The Zoekwoordgroepen drill-down rolls the same rows up per theme: keyword count, how many sit in the top 10, and the average position
The audit and the AI tracker
The audit read is the latest finished audit for that project, found by project id and never by fuzzy-matching a domain across your whole account. Out of it come the score, the number of pages crawled, the counts of errors, warnings and notices, and the findings themselves with the number of affected pages each, sorted by severity. Finding names arrive in your SE Ranking account's own language and are passed through untranslated: it is their text, not ours. From the AI Result Tracker comes, per configured engine, how often you are linked and mentioned in answers, with the change against the previous measurement.
The AI Search overview: last month against the month before
SE Ranking tracks a large, fixed set of prompts per country in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, and re-runs it every month. From the Data API schakl. reads four figures per client: brand mentions (answers that name the brand), links to the site (answers that cite a page of the site as a source), average position (where that link sits among the cited sources, lower is better) and AI opportunity traffic (the search volume behind those answers, not visitors). It is always the last whole month, compared with the month before, because in a channel where a year ago most engines cited nobody, last year says nothing. The overview sits on the client's dashboard and as the chapter Zichtbaarheid in AI-zoekmachines in the report. All engines together is SE Ranking's own figure and never a sum of the engines.
- Off by default: one read costs 800 units per engine choice per client per month, and that price is in the settings, in the client editor and on the Opnieuw ophalen (Fetch again) button
- A paid read is made once and stored per month; opening the tab afterwards costs nothing
- A month SE Ranking has not published yet is shown as the month it is and never under another name
- The brand being counted is printed under the figures, because a wrong brand gives a wrong number that looks exactly like a right one
- In the Dutch database only Google AI Overviews has a monthly series; for a Dutch client, all engines together is the useful choice
The source is called what you call it
If your agency sells SE Ranking under a name of its own, set it under Instellingen → Marketing. That name then appears in every sentence that names the source: in the AI search engines section, in the drill-downs and in a report run's warnings. A client in the portal reads the source under your name or a neutral one, and sees no vendor name, no refusal and no link to a console. Only the screen holding the keys keeps calling SE Ranking by its own name.
Permissions
Grant these to the role that manages this integration (Settings → Roles). Admin-only by default, and never to the client role.
-
marketing.link.manageStore the SE Ranking key and link or unlink client projects. Admin only by default. -
marketing.metrics.readSee the figures on a client's Marketing tab. Admin, member and the client role by default. -
marketing.overview.readRead the cross-client overview, with average position as a column.
What it deliberately does not do
- No per-keyword history is warehoused. Only the daily figures are stored; the detail arrives live and afterwards lives on only inside a report's snapshot.
- schakl. reads SE Ranking and never writes to it: no adding keywords, no starting an audit, no creating a project.
- The site audit is an internal chapter and never appears in the document a client reads.
- The AI Search overview is a sample, not a count of every AI answer: it describes the prompts SE Ranking tracks for that country. A small site often does not appear in it, and then the screen says so in words instead of showing four dashes.
Where to find it Instellingen → Marketing (Settings → Marketing) for the keys and the house default, the Marketing panel and tab on a client for the figures, and the chapters inside Rapportages (Reports).
Read the guide