Performance

Performance is where you read the evidence SERPclimber collects for a project. It has four tabs — SEO, GA4, AI answers, and Authority — that share one toolbar, one date-range control, and the same card layout, so a habit learned on one tab carries to the others.

The shared toolbar

Every tab opens with the same row above the chart:

• Filter opens a popover for the tab's dimensions. Active filters become chips you can remove one at a time. Clicking a row in any card adds that row as a filter — click a query, page, country, or device on SEO, or a landing page, source, or referrer on GA4 — so you can drill in without typing.
• The metric bar chooses which series the chart draws and which columns the cards show. On SEO the metrics are Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Average position; on GA4 they are Sessions, Engaged, Users, Events, and Key events.
• Stat tiles total the selected range, each with its change against the comparison period.
• The date-range button holds presets in three groups — Recent (Last 7, 14, or 28 days, Last week), Calendar (This month, Last month, This quarter, Last quarter, Year to date), and Longer (Last 3, 6, 8, 12, or 16 months, All history) — plus custom start and end dates. The comparison mode is set in the same control: Previous period (the default), Same period last year, a custom comparison window, or off. Comparisons match weekdays by default so a Monday is compared with a Monday. All history has no comparison.

Filters and the selected range live in the page URL, so a view can be bookmarked or shared with a teammate who has access to the project.

Every card has a sparkle button in its corner: Explain with AI. It opens a new conversation in the pinned chat pane with the card's title, range, comparison, filters, and visible numbers already in the prompt, so the assistant explains exactly what you are looking at. See Explain with AI.

Stored summaries and live fetches

Search Console evidence for the standard trailing windows — 7, 28, and 90 days, and all history — is summarized when the data is synced, so those views open instantly. Any other range or comparison is answered for exactly the dates you picked: calendar presets, custom dates, year-over-year comparisons, and every filtered view are fetched live from Search Console when you open them. A thin progress bar runs under the toolbar while a live view loads. Live views are limited to two years of history.

GA4 works the same way: the standard spans read stored rollups, and other windows are aggregated from the synced daily rows. On very large sites a custom GA4 range can take a few seconds.

Cards that cannot follow a filter say so with an unfiltered chip rather than showing a wrong number.

SEO

The SEO tab reads Google Search Console. The chart plots the selected metrics day by day with the comparison period ghosted underneath, a flag on every day the engine resolved a task, and a Google mark on the baseline for each Google Search update (core, spam, and Discover updates plus serving disruptions) with its rollout window shaded. Hover a mark for the update name and Google's status note; click it to open the incident on Google's status page.

Below the chart, ranked cards each carry an All / Growing / Decaying lens (with new entries marked in the expanded view) with inline bars. Every metric on a ranked card is two columns — the value and, when a comparison is on, its change (Δ) against the previous period. Both headings sort: click a metric to rank the rows by its current value, click Δ to rank them by how much they moved, and click the same heading again to flip the direction. The lens keeps filtering while sorting applies inside it, and a chevron marks the column the card is sorted by.

• Topic clusters — queries grouped by meaning and named by the analysis model. Names are produced when data is synced, so a cluster's name appears after the next sync; for live ranges that are not stored, clusters are grouped by landing page and shared phrase instead. Open the card's expanded view for sample queries per cluster.
• Content groups — pages grouped by their first path segment, with GA4 landing metrics for the same window when GA4 is connected.
• Queries and Pages — the top rows by the selected metric.
• Branded vs non-branded clicks — the split by brand terms, with each share's movement.
• New rankings — pages and queries that earned their first clicks in the range. This card needs a comparison turned on.
• Ranking bands — how many queries sit in the top 3, positions 4–10, 11–20, and beyond, day by day. Banding needs at least two days of query rows and is not available with a position filter or for very large result sets.
• Countries and Devices — clicks by searcher country and by device type.
• Traffic sources and Key events — GA4 sessions by source / medium and the conversions they produced, shown when GA4 is connected.

SEO filters are query (contains, equals, or does not contain), page (equals or contains), content group, country, device, branded or non-branded, and position (top 10 or top 20). A position filter applies to the ranked rows and totals, not to the daily series, and it turns the Ranking bands card off. Up to twelve filters can be active at once.

How Search Console data is collected

Connecting Google is the only manual step. When a Search Console property matches the project domain it is attached automatically and the first sync pulls the last four weeks of daily clicks, impressions, and positions. The remaining history — Search Console keeps about sixteen months — is backfilled in monthly chunks over the following hours. After that a daily run re-pulls the last three days, because Google keeps restating recent days, and stores country and device breakdowns alongside the site totals. Page-and-query pairs are kept for the last four weeks to drive opportunity detection.

If the Google connection that owned a property is removed, the project is reattached to any other connected Google account that can read the same property and a fresh sync is queued. The Refresh control in the header is a manual reconciliation for when something looks out of date; normal operation never needs it.

GA4

The GA4 tab reads Google Analytics. The chart plots daily sessions, engaged sessions, users, events, or key events with the same range and comparison controls. The timeline and stat tiles always describe the whole property; filters narrow the cards below.

Cards: Landing pages, Content groups, Source / medium, Referrers (external hosts only), and Key events with their conversion rate per session and revenue when the property records it. Mark events as key events in GA4 to see them here.

GA4 filters are landing page (equals or contains), content group, source / medium, and referrer. Source and referrer cards follow only the filters on their own dimension and say so in a tooltip.

The first sync backfills landing-page sessions, engagement, sources, and key events; a daily run keeps them current.

AI answers

The AI answers tab tracks the questions AI engines answer about your space and whether they cite your site. It has its own page: AI answers.

Authority

The Authority tab reads the site's off-site standing from a stored backlink profile. It opens with the same toolbar as the other tabs: the series bar and the stat tiles — Referring domains, Backlinks, Authority rank, and New / lost links — choose what the timeline draws, and the date-range button sets the window and comparison. The timeline shows the selected series across the range with the comparison window ghosted in the same colours and resolved tasks flagged on the baseline; the gained-versus-lost band under it draws each day's new links above the baseline and lost links below.

Filters. On Authority, rows are the filter. Click a domain in the link-source cards, a page in Pages that earn links, or an anchor in Anchor profile to narrow the whole tab to it; click the same row again to clear it. Active filters become chips you can remove one at a time, and the set lives in the page URL (?f=) so a filtered view can be bookmarked or shared. Filtering to a domain adds a Links from that domain card below the source cards, listing every link it sent or dropped in the range (source page, target path, anchor, dofollow, date) behind a New / Lost switch, paged fifty at a time. The link-source cards, pages, anchor profile, and link targets all follow the filters. While a filter is active the timeline, the new/lost band, and the tiles are rebuilt from the matching links themselves (a link counts from the day it was first seen until the day it was lost), so the chart shows only the links you filtered to. Authority rank is a whole-site score with no per-link meaning, so its tile and line step aside until the filter is cleared. Links lost before the first full pull are not on record, so filtered lines for days before that pull run slightly low. The assistant takes the same filters as arguments (rank, dofollow, page, host, domain, anchor, pattern), so asking about a filtered view returns the same numbers.

Below the chart:

• Where new links came from and Where links were lost attribute the links gained and lost inside the range to the source domains that sent or dropped them — including domains that already linked to you, which is usually where a sudden spike comes from. Each card ranks the domains in two sortable columns like the other ranked cards: New links (or Lost links) and their Share of the range. With a comparison turned on, the links column also shows its change against the same domain in the previous period. Each row carries a DR chip, the referring domain's rank on a 0–100 scale (hover it to see the source); its color runs on a continuous gradient from red at 0 through orange and yellow to green at 100, climbing on a compressed curve rather than evenly, because most domains sit low and the last points are the hardest to earn. Beneath the domain, one line reads whether the links are dofollow and where they land — the pages themselves with counts when there are a few, a page count when they spread wide; hover it for the exhaustive breakdown with anchors. A Sitewide chip marks one template link repeated across many pages of the source (a footer, sidebar, or blogroll — it counts as roughly one vote, however many links it adds). New marks a domain first seen in the range; Lost marks one that dropped every link. The Explain with AI button carries the card's story (who sent the links, what pattern they follow) into the assistant. Expand in the footer opens the exhaustive table behind the card — every domain, sortable and searchable — and clicking a row there filters the tab the same way. A lost source offers Create task, which starts an authority task the engine triages.
• Pages that earn links ranks the site's own pages by referring domains and backlinks, folding http/https, www, and trailing-slash variants of the same path into one row.
• Anchor profile splits all anchor text into branded, exact match, generic, naked URL, and other, lists the top anchors, and warns when a single exact-match anchor carries more than 30% of links.
• Link targets are domains that link to your competitors and not to you, ranked by rank × competitors linked, each with Create task. Competitors come from Competitor domains in Project Settings; when that list is empty the tab uses the top rivals from the AI answers tab.
• Ask the assistant why backlinks spiked or dropped, who sent the links, which links were lost, who links to a given page, or where to get links next: it reads the same attribution, referring-domain, backlink, anchor, page, and link-target rows this tab shows and explains whether a change is sitewide, directory, or editorial and what that is worth.
• Listings and directories is the catalog of directories and profiles the engine knows for the site, grouped as Available (core listings first), Submitted, Live, and Skipped (collapsed), with a progress line of how many are live. Submitted and skipped are your workflow states; live and lost come from the backlink data when the next refresh verifies them.

How backlink data is collected

Backlink data comes from a paid evidence provider, so collection runs only when Scheduled authority evidence is on in Project Settings and the project's Monthly evidence budget allows it. The first run is one exhaustive pull: every referring domain and backlink, the monthly history back to 2019, and the daily gains and losses. Weekly runs after that read only rows first seen or lost since the last run, plus small full re-reads of anchors, linked pages, competitor suggestions, and link targets; once a quarter the full lists are re-read to reconcile. A run that reaches the monthly budget stops where it is and resumes from the same place the next week. The header's Refresh (or Collect backlinks before the first pull) queues a run now instead of waiting for the weekly tick; changing the competitor domains also queues one.

Performance does not create actions directly beyond the Create task buttons above. When a card points at other work worth doing, ask the assistant with Explain with AI, or open Audit and create the related task.