Buying a report for a client's site

What authorisation means here

Our terms ask that you own the website you give us or are authorised to act for whoever does. In practice that means the client knows you are doing it. We do not ask for proof, and we are not in a position to check, but naming a site you have no relationship with is a misuse of the product and we will refuse or refund it.

The practical reason, rather than the legal one: we crawl the site. If the client's host sees an unfamiliar crawler and nobody there knows why, the person fielding that is you.

The crawler page is the thing to forward if that conversation happens. It has the header to match in a log and says the crawl was bought.

The four questions, when the answers are not yours

All four are optional, so you can buy without them. But they are the part that turns the report from a description of the site into a judgement about the business, and they are the part you cannot answer from outside.

The efficient version is to send your client the four questions before you buy, as they are written, and paste back what comes. They are deliberately the questions a person can answer off the top of their head:

• What do you sell that isn't on your website?
• What do people ask you before they buy?
• What do customers get wrong before they come to you?
• What do you work with?

Four short sentences is enough: the sample customer's own answers are on that page and they are four short sentences. If the client will not engage before you have something to show them, buy the report without answers, use it to start the conversation, and re-run it with their answers for another €49.

What it is actually useful for in an engagement

• A page list to scope and price from, with an address and an audience for each
• A brief per page you can hand to a copywriter without writing one yourself
• The list of proof the client has to go and find, which is the thing that stalls every content project, in writing and dated
• An argument for content work that is not your opinion against theirs

That third one is the one that decides whether the work starts at all. A page cannot be written while it is waiting on a certificate number or a tolerance figure, and the report puts that list in the client's hands as a task rather than as a chase.

What it costs across several clients

The second pass on the same client costs the same as the first: after the pages are written, after a pivot, or to add the answers you did not have the first time. Pricing has what the price covers.

If you are buying for several clients regularly, write to us. We would rather hear what the shape of that is than guess at it.

Can you put your name on it

The PDF is yours and you can forward it, print it, and quote from it freely: that is what it is for. There is no restriction on showing it to the client it is about.

What there is not, today, is a rebranded version: the document carries our name in its running head on every sheet, and there is no white-label build of it. If a report going to a client under our name is a problem for you, tell us before you buy rather than after.

Forward it to the client

Yes

Quote it in a proposal

Yes

Share the private link

Yes: it is a link, and anyone with it can read the report

Remove our name from it

Not possible today