How We Build Your Faro Pro Report (And Why It's Not What You'd Expect)

By Alex Stuart. Founder, Faro Pro

Let me be upfront about something most agencies won't tell you: the way a report is built matters as much as what's in it.

If the data is wrong, the recommendations are wrong. If the recommendations aren't specific to your business — your location, your industry, your competitors — then it's not a diagnosis. It's a generic checklist dressed up as one. And you've probably paid for that before.

So here's exactly how your Faro Pro report gets built, and what we do to make sure you can actually trust it.

We gather the data ourselves. Publicly available, but properly looked for.

Every business has a digital footprint — most owners just haven't seen it laid out clearly before.

We pull together information from the sources that matter: your website, your Google Maps listing, Google search results, your reviews, directory sites like Yell and Checkatrade, and your website's speed and performance data. Nothing hidden, nothing invasive. All of it publicly available — but scattered across a dozen different places that most people don't have time to check.

We bring it together in one place, structured around the seven criteria in the Faro Pro Score.

We use modern tools. But the judgement is human.

Yes, we use AI as part of the process. I'll be honest about that because I think you deserve to know — and because hiding it would be exactly the kind of agency behaviour Faro Pro exists to push back against.

But here's what that actually means in practice: AI helps us gather and structure information faster than any manual process could. What it doesn't do is make the call on what matters for your business.

That's where the Faro Pro Rules come in.

The part I care about most: our quality control.

Before any report gets near you, it has to pass a set of non-negotiable checks. Not guidelines. Not suggestions. Rules.

These exist because AI — for all its capability — makes mistakes. It can misread data, miss context, or produce something that looks credible but isn't quite right. The Rules are how we catch that before you do.

They cover things like: is every score backed by actual evidence we found, not an assumption? Are the recommendations specific to this business, or could they apply to anyone? Is anything in this report something we can't actually verify?

If a report fails any of these checks, it doesn't go out. It gets fixed first.

This step is the most important thing we do. If you can't trust the data in your report, there's no point in the rest of it. And if Faro Pro can't be trusted, we don't have a business.

Priorities and recommendations: the hardest part to get right.

Data is only useful if it tells you what to do next.

The recommendations section of every report has gone through more iterations than anything else we've built — because it's the easiest place to get wrong. Recommendations that are too vague are useless. Recommendations that are technically correct but not achievable for a small business with limited time and budget are almost worse than useless.

What we aim for: the two or three things that will make the biggest difference to your business, explained clearly, with a realistic sense of what acting on them involves. Not a 47-point action plan. Not generic advice. The stuff that actually moves the needle for a business like yours.

If you read your report and want to dig into any of it further, just email us. That's what we're here for.

The report itself: built by hand, on purpose.

The template for the Faro Pro report was designed manually — not generated. Tested, reviewed, reworked, and tested again.

This was a deliberate choice. Formatting might sound like a minor detail, but a report that's hard to read is a report that doesn't get acted on. Ours is designed to give you exactly what you need to understand your position and know your next step — without the jargon, the filler, or the self-congratulatory waffle that fills too many agency documents.

Your data: what we do and don't do with it.

Everything we gather to build your report is publicly available information. But that doesn't mean we treat it carelessly.

Your data is held securely and used for one purpose: building your report. We will never sell it. We will never pass it to third parties. And we will never use it to market to you beyond what you've asked for.

That's not a legal disclaimer. It's just what we think is right.

Why I'm telling you all of this

Because the alternative is a slick website that tells you nothing about how the work gets done — and asks you to trust it anyway.

I built Faro Pro because I watched small business owners get sold things they didn't need, by agencies that never diagnosed anything. The least I can do is show you exactly how we work, and let you decide whether it's worth your time.

The executive summary report is free. There's no pitch attached to it. If it's useful, great — we can talk about what comes next. If it isn't, you've lost nothing but the time it takes to complete the form and read it.

That's the deal.