Section
Buying search and AI visibility services
Every pitch sounds the same. The differences that matter are all in the contract. What to demand, what should end the conversation, and why a penalty is a liability on your books rather than a bad month.
Judgment from buying these services ourselves. Google's spam policies, which set the penalty exposure, are linked.
These services are unusually hard to buy. The work is technical, the results are slow and muddled by everything else going on, the vocabulary is unfamiliar, and the worst outcomes take about a year to show up.
By then the vendor has moved on and the damage is sitting on your domain.
So stop evaluating the pitch. Every competent vendor can deliver a good pitch. Evaluate the contract, which most of them can't.
What should I look for when hiring an SEO agency?
Look at the contract. You want KPIs tied to outcomes instead of keyword positions, full ownership of all content, markup and accounts, a written description of how they acquire links, short termination rights, and the names of the people actually doing the work. Any guarantee of rankings or AI citations, walk away.
The pitch tells you how well they sell. The contract tells you what happens when results are slow — which is the situation you're going to be in.
About that guarantee
A guaranteed ranking or AI citation should end the meeting. Not because it's overselling, but because it's a promise about a system the vendor doesn't control. Which means one of two things: they don't understand what they're selling, or they plan to deliver it on terms that make it worthless.
Usually the second. "Page one guaranteed" gets satisfied with phrases nobody searches for, including your own firm's name. The guarantee is met, the invoice is good, and nothing happened.
AI-citation guarantees are the new version and they're worse, because the measurement is noisier and almost never gets defined in the contract at all.
Who owns what
This is where the real money goes, and it never looks urgent when you're signing.
Everything produced has to be yours. The page content, the structured data, the analytics property, the Search Console property, the business profile, and any account anybody set up on your behalf.
Vendors who hold accounts "for efficiency" are building you a switching cost. You find out how big it is on the day you try to leave, and the answer is usually your entire history.
Get ownership in writing, and check it during the engagement instead of at the end.
How do you get links?
Ask exactly that, and get the answer in writing.
Good answers describe work: original research, digital PR, relationships, building something people want to point at. Bad answers are vague about method, promise a volume ("forty links a month"), or mention networks, placements, or guest posting at scale.
This one matters more than the rest because the liability is yours. A penalty attaches to your domain, not to the agency that earned it, and the agency will be gone. The black-hat risk guide does the math: the cost is the chance of a penalty times the value of everything at risk, not the money you saved on the line item.
What to pay for
Pay for work and for outcomes. Never for positions.
Structures that work: a fixed fee for defined deliverables, a retainer with a written scope and named people on it, a performance component tied to qualified leads or revenue.
Structures that don't: payment on keyword rankings, payment on "traffic" with no definition of what counts, and anything where the vendor picks the metric, measures it, and reports it with nobody checking.
Get access to the raw data. A vendor who'll only show you their own dashboard is selling you their interpretation of their own work.
Red flags
A short list of things that end the conversation, and why. Most of them aren't dishonesty. They're somebody describing a product that can't exist.
Black-hat risk
Cheap links and generated pages aren't a cost saving. They're a bet against everything your domain has earned, and you should price them that way before you buy them.
Contract terms
Everybody's pitch sounds the same. The contract is where firms differ, and these are the clauses that decide what happens when results are slow — which is the situation you'll actually be in.
Channel economics
A switch, a building, and something in between. The comparison that matters isn't cost per lead today. It's what each one is worth after you stop paying for it.
Recovery playbook
What to do when visibility collapses. The first job is working out which of two very different things happened, because the response to one is a process and the response to the other is a diagnosis.