My SEO Agency Isn't Delivering Results — Now What?

The conversation happens at kitchen tables and in boardrooms across the UK every month. An SEO retainer has been running for six, twelve, eighteen months. The agency sends reports full of metrics — domain authority, ranking improvements, crawl health scores. And yet the phone isn’t ringing, the enquiries haven’t moved, and the question is becoming unavoidable: is anyone actually benefiting from this spend?

It is worth separating two different problems, because they have different solutions.

Problem 1: The agency is not delivering good work

Some agencies are genuinely underperforming. Signs that this is the case:

The reporting focuses on vanity metrics. Domain authority scores, keyword rankings for terms that don’t drive enquiries, “impressions” without clicks, and traffic to pages that aren’t your services pages — these can all be improved without affecting your business.

There is no clear line from their work to your leads. An agency doing genuine SEO work should be able to point to specific pages they’ve improved, specific queries those pages are now appearing for, and — most importantly — specific enquiries or conversions that came from organic search.

They are still doing the same things they were doing three years ago. Ongoing technical audits, link acquisition, and content production were the right activities in 2021. In 2026, an agency that hasn’t adapted its approach to generative engines, schema markup, and entity work is optimising for a mechanic that is structurally declining.

They can’t explain what they’re specifically doing for your business. Genuine SEO work is explainable. “We’re building your entity coherence across these five directories and correcting these schema issues” is more credible than “we’re doing ongoing optimisation.”

Problem 2: The discipline itself has changed — and the agency’s work is correct but insufficient

This is the more frustrating scenario. Your agency may be doing solid, legitimate SEO work. The problem is that the channel has changed shape underneath their correct execution.

Traditional SEO results — rankings, organic traffic growth — are less reliable predictors of business outcomes in 2026 than they were in 2019. If your category has significant AI Overview coverage, a significant share of your previously-ranking queries now generate zero clicks regardless of your position.

In this case, the agency is not failing at the old game. The old game has changed rules.

How to have the right conversation with your agency

Rather than arriving at a retainer review with “this isn’t working,” which puts the agency on the defensive, try arriving with specific diagnostic questions:

1. Show me our citation rate in Google AI Overviews for our key queries. Do we appear? If not, what is the plan to change that?
2. Which of our service pages generated the most organic enquiries last month? Not sessions, not rankings — enquiries or form submissions with an organic source.
3. How has our entity coherence in the Knowledge Graph changed since we started working together? What specific structured data work has been done?
4. Are we appearing in AI answers on Perplexity and ChatGPT for our main category queries? If not, is this in scope?

An agency doing modern search work should have clear answers to these questions. An agency that is genuinely confused by them — or that dismisses them as irrelevant — is operating from a 2021 playbook.

What to do next

If the agency can adapt: Give them a specific mandate to address generative engine visibility, not just traditional rankings. Define success in terms of AI citation rates and enquiry volume from organic, not domain authority scores.

If they can’t: Consider whether the retainer is the right model at all. Some of what traditional SEO agencies charge for monthly maintenance can now be done more cost-effectively with direct entity work — a one-time infrastructure build — supplemented by periodic audits and content work.

If you’re starting over: Be explicit about what you need. A practice that does entity engineering — Wikidata work, schema architecture, Knowledge Graph optimisation — is doing different work from a traditional SEO agency. The outputs are different, the measurement is different, and the fee structure should be different.

The discipline is not dead. The version that runs on autopilot, generating rankings reports that don’t translate to commercial outcomes, may be.