Businesses often hire an SEO because they want better visibility. But SEO isn’t always the problem, and SEO alone isn’t always the answer.
Search now includes traditional results and AI-generated answers, so the work needs to account for both. It also needs to fit the business and the website.
That makes the agency’s job broader than chasing rankings. They need to understand SEO and AEO, know where each applies, and help you improve the content without pretending they know your business better than you do.
TL;DR
A good digital agency should help identify the problem before prescribing the work. It should understand how SEO and AEO fit together, involve your team where your expertise matters, and put a clear endpoint or renewal point around ongoing work. If the answer is always another service, another retainer, or more work only the agency can do, it may be time to reconsider the relationship.
1. They recommend the service before they understand the problem
Agencies tend to be good at the services they sell. That doesn’t mean one of those services is automatically what you need.
A drop in leads might involve search visibility, but it could just as easily be the website itself. Maybe the offer isn’t clear. Maybe good traffic is reaching a weak page. Maybe the problem happens after the form is submitted.
The diagnosis should come before the proposal.
This applies to SEO too. A local business doesn’t have exactly the same search needs as a company trying to reach buyers across a much larger market. The work should reflect the business rather than forcing the business into a standard package.
2. Their default is an endless retainer
Some marketing work needs to continue. That doesn’t mean the agreement should run indefinitely without a point where everyone stops and looks at what happened.
SEO and AEO work can be scoped as a project. A fixed term can be renewed. New work can follow from what was learned.
The important part is having an endpoint or renewal point where the results and next priorities are considered before another commitment is made.
An open-ended retainer shouldn’t be the automatic answer.
3. They do the work for you instead of helping you get better at it
There will always be specialist work that makes sense to outsource. But your agency shouldn’t need to own everything forever.
You should understand more about your website and marketing after working with them than you did before. Your team should be able to handle more of the everyday work without opening a ticket or asking permission.
If the agency’s process makes you increasingly dependent on the agency, that deserves a closer look.
4. They understand SEO but not AEO. Or they’ve abandoned SEO for AEO.
Search has changed, but the fundamentals haven’t.
Google says its established SEO practices remain relevant to AI Overviews and AI Mode. It also says there are no separate technical requirements for appearing in those features. Google’s newer guidance on generative search specifically pushes back on many of the supposed AEO and GEO shortcuts now being promoted.
So an agency still talking about search as if AI hasn’t changed anything is behind. An agency selling AEO as an entirely new replacement for SEO isn’t giving you the full picture either.
They need to understand how the two work together.
5. Their optimization makes the copy worse
Keyword research still has value. Keyword stuffing does not. Google explicitly identifies keyword stuffing as a spam practice. The bigger issue is often what happens to the copy once SEO gets involved.
Your agency can research how people search, identify gaps, interview your team, and help improve the page. It still doesn’t know the subject as well as you do.
Your expertise needs to come through in the writing.
Google’s own guidance puts significant weight on original, people-first content that demonstrates real experience and knowledge. Its guidance for generative search makes a similar point about creating useful, non-commodity content based on what you actually know.
If the finished copy sounds like it could have been written for any competitor, the optimization hasn’t happened.
6. They build things your team can’t comfortably manage
The agency may know how to build the campaign, website, landing page, or integration. Your team still has to live with it.
That means being able to make normal updates without breaking things or calling the agency every time something changes. It means understanding how pages are meant to be used and having a reasonable way to keep the website current.
The same applies when an agency keeps adding tools or custom work. More capability isn’t very useful if maintaining it becomes another problem.
Good agency work should make the website easier to work with, not harder.
7. Their reporting tells you what happened, but not what to do next
Numbers can be useful, but reporting should help you decide something. Do we keep going? Is there a problem worth fixing? Did the work produce enough value to justify another phase? Should the priority change?
If the report mainly proves that activity happened, you’re missing the part that helps you run the business.
So, do you need a new digital agency?
You're at a fork in the road, or you wouldn't be reading this. Look at how your agency works with you, not just what it sells. The strongest relationships are collaborative. That’s how we prefer to work at Kayak Websites. Sometimes the issue is SEO or AEO. Sometimes it’s the copy, the website layout, or how the site has been built and managed. Let's figure out the problem - together - first, then scope the work around it.
