Score the answer, not the room
Agency pitches are designed to be pleasant. The people in them are usually good at their job, which is winning the pitch — a different job from running your account. So the trick isn't to be suspicious. It's to have a written list and a column to tick.
The questions below are grouped by the stage of the buying process where they land best, because sequence matters. Measurement questions asked before you see a proposal get you an honest answer. Asked after, they get you a slide.
For each one there's the answer you want and the answer that should end the conversation. Most real answers sit in between — that's fine and normal. What you're watching for is a specific pattern: vagueness in exactly the places where specificity is cheap.
Stage 1 — the first call: five questions about whether you fit
You're not evaluating competence yet. You're checking whether they've thought about who they're good for, which is the fastest available proxy for whether they've thought about anything.
| Ask this | Answer you want | Answer that ends it |
|---|---|---|
| What kind of sites do you do your best work on? | A specific shape — B2B SaaS, multi-location clinics — with a reason attached. | "Any industry. SEO is SEO." |
| What would make you tell us not to hire you? | Real conditions: no dev resource, no budget for twelve months, no search demand. | "We can help anyone." |
| How many accounts does the strategist on my account carry? | A number, usually four to eight, and mild discomfort about it. | A shrug, or "we scale as needed". |
| What's the last engagement you ended, and why? | A real story where they name their own share of the fault. | "We've never lost a client." |
| What do you need from us for this to work? | A list: dev hours, an approver, access to a subject expert, a decision cadence. | "Nothing, we handle everything." |
Stage 2 — the proposal: five questions about measurement
This is the group that decides whether you can ever prove anything. Ask them before the numbers are on screen.
The one that does the most work is the first one, and it's worth sitting through the silence afterwards. If nobody can say what today's number is, nobody can prove movement in month nine — which is convenient for exactly one party in the room.
| Ask this | Answer you want | Answer that ends it |
|---|---|---|
| What number are we measuring, and what is it today? | A business metric — qualified leads or revenue from organic — plus today's figure. | "Traffic and rankings." |
| When and how do you freeze the baseline? | Before any work starts, trailing 90 days, written into the contract. | "We'll set that up once we're live." |
| What does month three look like if this is going badly? | Named leading indicators that would worry them, with thresholds. | "SEO takes time." |
| Which keywords do we report on, and who picks the list? | An agreed, fixed list weighted to commercial intent, chosen jointly. | They pick it, and it quietly changes each month. |
| How do you attribute a lead to organic? | CRM-side source capture, plus an honest admission that some attribution is unknowable. | "GA4 shows it." |
Stage 3 — the deep dive: six questions about who does the work
The gap between agencies is widest here and the pitch is least reliable. The people who win the business are often not the people who deliver it, and that's the single most common complaint founders bring us about a previous agency.
- On links: the source of a link is the whole risk profile. How SEO agencies get backlinks covers what's earned, what's bought and what's a penalty with a delayed fuse.
- On AI drafting: everyone uses it somewhere. The question isn't whether, it's who is accountable for what ends up published under your domain.
| Ask this | Answer you want | Answer that ends it |
|---|---|---|
| Who specifically works on my account — and will they be in this room? | Names, roles, and at least one of them on the call. | "An account manager will be assigned after onboarding." |
| How do your hours split across technical, content, links and analysis? | Rough percentages, answered in ten seconds because they've planned it. | Two minutes of hedging. |
| What do you outsource, and to whom? | A straight answer. Most agencies subcontract something; honest ones say what. | "Everything is in-house" said too quickly. |
| Name three link placements you earned last quarter. | Three real publications, plus how each was earned. | "Our private network" or "high-DA sites". |
| Who writes the content, and how do they learn my subject? | Named writers, scheduled interviews with your experts, a research process. | "Our content team handles it" with no access to your people. |
| How much drafting is AI-assisted, and who checks the facts? | An honest description of the tooling plus a named human editor and a fact-check step. | Indignant denial, or no answer to the second half. |
Stage 4 — the contract: five questions nobody enjoys asking
Ask them anyway, and ask them before you're emotionally committed. These take four minutes and routinely save a year.
| Ask this | Answer you want | Answer that ends it |
|---|---|---|
| What's the minimum term and the notice period? | A short committed period, then month-to-month with 30 days' notice. | Twelve months locked, 90 days' notice. |
| Who owns the content, the site changes and the data if we leave? | You do, all of it, with no transfer fee. | Anything agency-owned, licensed, or subject to a handover charge. |
| Will Analytics, Search Console and the Business Profile sit in our accounts? | Yes — your accounts, they get user access. | "We use our own properties and send you reports." |
| What happens if we miss the target? | A stated consequence they've written down and can explain. | "SEO isn't guaranteed" with nothing after it. |
| What's in this contract you'd be uneasy about if you were me? | They name an actual clause. This is the best-value question on the page. | "Nothing, it's very standard." |
If you only ask three
Twenty-one questions is a lot for a forty-minute call. These three carry most of the signal, and they work because each one is cheap to answer honestly and expensive to answer dishonestly.
"What number are we measuring, and what is it today?" Everything downstream depends on this. No baseline, no proof, no argument in month nine.
"Will the people in this room run my account?" Watch what happens in the pause. That pause is more informative than the deck.
"Name three link placements from last quarter." Anyone earning links can list them instantly and enjoys doing it. Anyone buying them will describe a category instead of a name.
A fourth, if the meeting is going well: what happens if it doesn't work. Our answer is that we freeze your trailing-90-day qualified leads from organic on day one and keep working free until we beat it — never a promise of a specific ranking position, because nobody controls Google's index. See how the guarantee works. Whatever an agency's answer is, the fact that they have one is the point.
If several answers land in the disqualifying column, you're not being fussy. The red flags that predict a failed engagement are ranked by how reliably each one shows up before the failure does.