Six honest rules for hiring an SEO agency, borrowed from a film about business

This page exists because the same conversation arrives in our inbox most weeks. An owner paid for a year of search work, saw graphs move and money not move, and now cannot tell whether the fault was the provider, the market or himself. Almost always the answer is simpler than he fears. No one ever showed him what was actually done.

Below are six rules. Each one ends with a check you can run yourself, without hiring anyone, including us.

Rule 1: strictly business is how a client becomes a deleted page

There is a moment early in the film where a man is told that nothing here is personal, it is strictly business. Half of this industry runs on that sentence. We have sat with an owner whose entire website had been rewritten by a provider who never called him. Three years of his own words replaced with template paragraphs. Every photograph of his own workshop swapped for stock images of a workshop in another country. Strictly business.

When a business feeds a family, a website is not a spreadsheet row. That is why we show every edit with a date and let the owner read the words before they go live. It is slower. It is also the only version where the owner can still recognise his own company a year later.

Check it yourself: open your site on the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org and compare a page from three years ago with the same page today. If the meaning changed without your knowledge, the work was done to you rather than for you.

Rule 2: the offer nobody can refuse is a warning, not a welcome

The famous line in that film is a threat. Marketing has borrowed the shape of it without the honesty. Five guarantees, a discount that expires on Friday, a proposal that needs your signature tonight, a promised position on page one within ninety days.

Google's own documentation says plainly that no one can guarantee a ranking, and its spam policies treat paid ranking promises as a sign of an unreliable provider. An honest agency sells work, not position. Position is decided by Google's systems and now by answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, none of which take instructions from an invoice.

Check it yourself: ask the provider what happens to the fee if the promised position does not arrive. If the answer involves a guarantee that quietly excludes "algorithm updates", the guarantee was decoration.

Rule 3: asking for help should never cost you dignity

In the film a man is told to ask for a favour properly, with respect. That part is worth keeping. What is not worth keeping is what the industry has built on top of it, an atmosphere where owners are embarrassed to ask basic questions.

People apologise to us for not knowing what robots.txt is. They apologise for not understanding the report they paid for. We answer the same way every time. It is our trade, not yours, and you were not supposed to arrive knowing it. A provider who makes you feel stupid is protecting a knowledge gap that keeps him employed.

Check it yourself: ask your provider to explain the last report in plain language, in writing, in under 200 words. A confident provider can. A fragile one sends a call invite and a slide.

Rule 4: plan for the family, not for the empire

The film is about business but every decision in it is really about family, and the characters who forget that pay for it. Most of the owners who write to us are not trying to build an empire. They are trying to keep the thing they built feeding the people it feeds.

That is a different job from growth for its own sake, and it deserves a different plan. Steady work, unglamorous, nothing that depends on next quarter being kind. In practice this means fewer new pages written to chase trends and more repair of the pages customers already land on. It also means telling an owner when he does not need us yet, which costs us money and is the correct answer more often than anyone in sales would like to admit.

Check it yourself: ask what the plan looks like in month seven, when the novelty is gone and the invoices are ordinary. If the answer is vague, the plan was a pitch.

Rule 5: keep the one line that matters, leave the rest

There is a well known instruction in the film about what to take and what to leave behind. Reports should follow the same rule. We have read forty slide audits that could be compressed into one useful line, and the rest was theatre: keyword lists nobody types, graphs with no money in them, a percentage with no denominator.

A useful report answers four questions. What changed. On which page. On what date. What it was meant to do. Rankings and traffic belong in the report too, but they are outcomes. Without a change log there is nothing to audit, and an invoice you cannot audit is a subscription to hope.

This matters more in 2026 than it did in 2019, because the same change log now answers a second question, whether AI assistants can read you at all. If your facts exist only inside a PDF brochure, an assistant such as ChatGPT or Perplexity has nothing to quote, and a competitor whose numbers sit on a dated page gets named instead. The mechanics are public and documented: robots.txt exclusions follow RFC 9309 from the IETF, structured data follows schema.org, and named crawlers such as GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot can be allowed or blocked in four lines of text, and an llms.txt file at the root of a site can hand assistants a plain summary of what the business actually does.

Check it yourself: open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for the words GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot. Then read what GEO actually means and run our free checkers. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.

Rule 6: accept what your own trade costs

In the second film a man shrugs off a betrayal by saying this is the business they chose. It is a cold line and there is something honest inside it. Every trade has a cost that cannot be negotiated away, only accepted.

In ours the cost is this. The truthful answer loses deals. We tell owners their site is fine and they do not need us. We tell them the guarantee they want cannot be given by anyone. We publish our methods so a competitor can copy them tomorrow. That has a price and we pay it weekly, because the clients who stay are the ones who came for the honesty rather than in spite of it.

You should expect the same from whoever you hire next. Every claim we make here is checkable. When we are wrong the page says so and keeps saying so. Start with the claims ledger and the proof page, and check us as hard as you are about to check them.

Questions people actually ask

Want us to look at your site and tell you what is broken, free, in writing, whether or not you hire us? Request the free audit or message us on LinkedIn. Prices are public on the pricing page, and our corrections live in public on the glass page.