Choosing an SEO agency got harder in the last eighteen months, because the thing you are buying changed shape. Pew Research Center, tracking 68,879 real Google searches across 900 US adults, found users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits where an AI summary appeared, against 15% where none did. Rankings held. Clicks did not.
That gap is now the central problem in evaluating an agency. A firm can hit every ranking target in its contract while the client’s traffic falls, and both parties can be telling the truth about their numbers. The evaluation questions that worked in 2019 will not catch this.
Key Takeaways
- Rankings and traffic have decoupled, so ranking-based reporting no longer proves value.
- Any agency selling link packages is selling something Google’s policies define as spam.
- You can inspect an agency’s own backlink profile before you sign anything.
- Ask who does the work, in writing, and whether it is subcontracted.
- Account and asset ownership belongs in the contract, not in a conversation.
Why the Old Checklist Stopped Working
The standard advice was to check case studies, ask about methodology, confirm white-hat practices, and compare pricing. All still worth doing. None of it tests for the failure mode that now dominates.
Similarweb data put US organic search traffic down 2.5% year over year in April 2026, the first sustained structural decline on record, and informational categories fell far harder than that average. An agency that keeps reporting position gains against this backdrop is not lying. It is measuring something that no longer converts into visits.
So the first question in any evaluation is no longer “can you rank us.” It is “what do you do when ranking first stops producing traffic,” and the answer tells you whether you are talking to an operator or a reseller.
Red Flags That Should End the Conversation
Guaranteed rankings
Nobody can guarantee a position on a system they do not control. An agency offering one is either inexperienced or planning to rank you for a term nobody searches. Ask what happens contractually if the guarantee is missed, and watch how quickly the guarantee becomes conditional.
Link packages and publisher “relationships”
Any pitch involving a fixed number of links per month at a fixed price is describing paid link placement. That is not a grey area. Google’s spam policies name buying or selling links that pass ranking credit as link spam, alongside automated link building, excessive link exchanges and private blog networks. The December 2022 link spam update stated that its systems detect both sites buying links and sites passing them, with unnatural links nullified rather than simply ignored.
The precise tell is the attribute. Google’s own policy permits paid links that carry rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". An agency selling links for their ranking effect cannot use those attributes, because the attribute removes the effect being sold. Ask directly whether their placements carry them. There is no good answer that is also a no. The documentation on what Google’s spam policies actually say is worth reading before the call.
Rankings as the headline metric
A monthly report leading with average position and keyword count is a report designed to look good rather than to be useful. Ask what the report would show if the work were failing. If nothing in the template can move downward, it is not a measurement instrument.
Vagueness about who does the work
Subcontracting is not automatically a problem. Undisclosed subcontracting is, because you cannot assess the quality of people you were never told about. Ask for names and roles of the people who will touch the account, and ask which parts are outsourced. Get it in writing.
Inspect Their Own Work First
This is the step most buyers skip, and it is the most informative one available. An SEO agency’s own site is a work sample sitting in public.
Pull their backlink profile in any standard tool. You are looking for whether their own links come from places that make editorial sense or from a spread of unrelated low-quality domains, and whether the anchor text reads like language or like keyword targets. A firm that built its own authority through the methods it warns you against has answered the methodology question already.
Do the same for two client sites they name. Look at whether link acquisition arrives in smooth accumulation or in bursts, and whether the referring domains overlap suspiciously across different clients. Shared referring domains across an agency’s whole client base usually means one network doing the work for everyone.
Then search for their own brand and a few of their target terms. An agency that cannot rank itself is not disqualified, since competitive niches are genuinely hard and client work rightly comes first, but it should have a straight answer for why.
Questions That Separate Operators From Resellers
Six questions, chosen because a reseller cannot answer them without exposing the gap.
- Show me a client whose traffic went down. What happened, and what did you change?
- How do you measure success when a query resolves without a click?
- What would you refuse to do if we asked for it?
- Which of our current pages would you remove, and why?
- Do your placements carry sponsored or nofollow attributes?
- What does month one look like, specifically, before any content is published?
The first is the most revealing. Every agency with real tenure has lost traffic for a client, usually through a core update or a migration. One that claims otherwise is either new or editing the history.
Contract Terms That Matter More Than the Pitch
Four clauses decide how much leverage you retain, and they are easier to negotiate before signing than after.
Account ownership. Analytics, Search Console, ad accounts and any tooling should be registered to your organisation with the agency granted access. Agencies that create these under their own accounts hold your historical data hostage at renewal.
Asset ownership. Content, technical documentation and audit deliverables should be yours outright on payment, without a licence-back arrangement.
Notice period. Twelve-month minimum terms are common and often reasonable given how slowly SEO compounds. Twelve-month terms with automatic renewal and ninety days’ notice are a retention mechanism rather than a strategic one.
Link disclosure and indemnity. If any part of the engagement involves external placements, require disclosure of every domain used and an indemnity covering manual actions arising from their work. An agency confident in its methods will accept this. One that hesitates has told you what you needed to know.
What Good Reporting Looks Like Now
The reporting standard has moved. Position tracking still belongs in the appendix, but it can no longer be the headline.
What should lead instead: qualified sessions and what they did, revenue or pipeline attributable to organic where attribution is possible, branded search volume as a proxy for whether awareness is growing, and visibility in AI-generated answers for the queries that matter to the business. That last one is genuinely hard to measure and the tooling is immature, which is fine. An agency that admits the measurement is imperfect and explains its method is more trustworthy than one presenting a clean number it cannot substantiate.
Ask to see a real client report with the figures redacted. The structure tells you what the agency thinks its job is.
Conclusion
The best available signal is not the pitch deck or the case studies, both of which are marketing artifacts. It is what the agency has actually built, for itself and for clients, visible in link profiles and site quality that no proposal controls.
Spend an hour on that inspection before the first call. It costs nothing, it cannot be prepared for, and it will tell you more than the next three meetings.
Read Next
- What Instagram Views Actually Measure, and Why Buying Them Fails
- Private Blog Networks: What Google’s Spam Policies Actually Say
- How the Instagram Algorithm Works in 2026: Signals, Surfaces, and What Actually Changed
