What results should I expect from a web agency in 90 days?

Days 1 to 30: the build or fix ships and the sitemap is submitted, verified by the sitemap and the crawl. Days 30 to 60: indexation resolved, verified in the page indexing report; and field data accumulating, verified in the Core Web Vitals report over a 28-day window — lab data where traffic is too thin for CrUX, labeled as lab. Days 60 to 90: a query and page baseline from the performance report, and attribution live through call tracking and form logging.

The indexation and baseline rows are the honest center of the answer. Search Console's page indexing report tells you what Google has and why it refused the rest, and the performance report gives queries, pages, impressions and clicks. Both are facts about your site rather than interpretations of it, and both are in your account, not the agency's deck.

Google is direct that SEO takes time and that nobody can guarantee outcomes. Ranking is a comparative outcome against competitors who are also working, decided by systems nobody outside Google controls. We do not promise a position, and an agency that does is either mistaken or selling.

What you can hold an agency to in 90 days is every row in the sequence above, because each one is verifiable in an account you own. If month three arrives and the indexing report still shows unresolved exclusions, that is a missed deliverable regardless of where anything ranks.

And if traffic moves the wrong way, Google publishes the diagnostic order — which separates a reporting change from a ranking change from a technical one.