Spoke
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.
Our judgment from buying these services. Where a flag relates to a banned practice, Google's published spam policies are the source and are linked.
Most of these aren't signs of a crook. They're signs of somebody selling a product that doesn't exist.
Costs you the same money either way.
What are the biggest red flags when hiring an SEO agency?
A guaranteed ranking or guaranteed AI citation, because nobody controls the system that would deliver it. Vagueness about how they get links, because the specific answer is the only one that matters. Refusing you ownership of accounts and content. Reporting you can't check against raw data. And a proposal that shows up without anybody asking about your business.
None of that needs technical knowledge to spot. That's the point — the checks that protect you are the ones you can run before you understand the work.
The disqualifiers
A ranking guarantee. Nobody controls the ranking system. The guarantee is either meaningless or it gets satisfied with phrases nobody searches, including your own firm's name.
An AI citation guarantee. Worse, because the measurement is noisier and almost never defined in the contract. No platform publishes how sources get picked, which makes the guarantee a promise about something unknowable.
Vagueness about links. Ask exactly how they get them, in writing. A good answer describes work. A bad one describes volume, or mentions networks, placements, or guest posting at scale. The liability lands on your domain, not theirs.
They keep the accounts. Analytics, Search Console, your business profile, anything created for you. "We manage it in our account" builds a switching cost, and the price is your entire history.
Reporting you can't check. If you can't see the raw data behind the dashboard, you're buying their interpretation of their own work.
No questions. A proposal that arrives without anybody asking about your margins, your capacity, your best clients, or what you're actually trying to do is a template with your name pasted in.
"Proprietary." A reasonable firm can explain its method without handing over a trade secret. Proprietary used as a reason not to explain is a reason not to buy.
A guaranteed volume of content. Forty pages a month is a production target, not a strategy. It's also close to a description of scaled content abuse.
The subtler ones
They only talk about rankings. Positions are an input. If nobody brings up leads or revenue, nobody is thinking about your business.
They never ask about your intake. For any firm where the deal closes on a phone call, a vendor who never asks how calls get handled is optimizing half a system.
They say measurement is easy. AI visibility attribution is genuinely hard. Anybody who says otherwise either hasn't tried or is about to show you a number they invented.
Everything is urgent. Urgency is a sales technique. This work compounds over quarters.
What a good answer sounds like
Ask how they get links, and listen for something like:
We do original research and pitch it to journalists who cover this area. We place expert commentary. We find broken references to you and get them fixed. We don't buy links. Here's what we produced for a comparable client, and here are the placements.
Specific, checkable, describes work instead of volume. You don't need to be an expert to hear the difference between that and the alternative.
More in Buying services
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.