I’ve been on both sides of the agency-client relationship. I spent years in-house, hiring and firing SEO agencies. I’d sit through pitch after pitch, sign the contract, and then receive the same thing every time: a fifty-page PDF full of charts I didn’t ask for, jargon designed to make me feel like I needed them (“link juice”, “domain authority”, “keyword density”), and precisely zero explanation of what we should actually do to move the needle.
It was theatre. Expensive theatre.
Now I’m the consultant, and I’m determined to do it differently. Not because I’m nicer than those agencies — because the game has changed so fundamentally that the old model literally doesn’t work any more. In 2026, your SEO agency can’t just optimise your website and send you a report. They need you. Actively. And you need to understand enough about what’s happening in search to be a genuine partner, not just a signature on an invoice.
Why the Old Model Is Broken
Here’s what a typical agency engagement looked like five years ago: they’d audit your site, fix some technical issues, write some content, build some links, and send you a monthly report showing your rankings going up (or explaining why they hadn’t yet). Your role was to pay the invoice and stay out of the way.
That model assumed one thing: that SEO meant ranking on Google. One platform. One set of results. One strategy.
That assumption is now wrong.
Your customers find you through Google, yes — but also through Google’s AI Overviews (the AI-generated answers that now sit above the traditional results for many queries). Through ChatGPT, when they ask “who’s a good solicitor for a drink driving charge in Manchester?” Through Perplexity, when they’re researching software options. Through Siri and Alexa, pulling from Bing and Apple Maps. Through AI agents that will increasingly make purchasing decisions on behalf of users.
Your agency cannot optimise for all of this without your active participation. They need your knowledge, your industry context, and your willingness to challenge their thinking — just as you need their technical expertise and strategic vision. The best results I’ve ever delivered have come from genuine collaboration, not from clients who handed me the keys and disappeared.
What Collaboration Actually Looks Like
Let me give you two real examples.
Example 1: Spotting Search Patterns Together
One of my enterprise clients, Coviant Software, sells managed file transfer software. During our regular strategy calls, I’d share what I was seeing in the search data — people were searching for specific product comparisons: “GoAnywhere vs Globalscape”, “Diplomat MFT vs GoAnywhere MFT”, “Serv-U alternative”. Real buyers, comparing real products, with real commercial intent.
The idea for comparison pages didn’t come from a keyword research spreadsheet emailed to a client who never opened it. It came from a conversation. We discussed the opportunity, they provided the technical differentiation data, I built the pages with the right architecture and schema markup. Those comparison pages now rank #1 for their target terms and are driving enterprise conversions.
That doesn’t happen when the agency works in isolation. It happens when both sides bring their expertise to the table.
Example 2: Entity SEO Requires Your Input
I had a meeting this week with Olliers Solicitors — a criminal defence law firm I’ve worked with for over eleven years. We spent the session going through their NAP consistency across Google Business Profile, Bing Places, and Apple Business Connect. We discussed their Crunchbase profile, their Wikidata entry, and how these entity signals feed into AI systems’ confidence when deciding whether to cite them in responses.
Here’s the thing: I can audit these platforms and identify inconsistencies. But only the client can verify what’s correct. Is this the right phone number for the London office? Has the Manchester address changed? Who are the current practice directors? Is the company number on Companies House matching what’s on the website? This is entity SEO — and it requires the client to be in the room, actively engaged, because the entity data has to be accurate. An agency working from a brief written six months ago will get it wrong.
What makes Olliers exceptional as a client is that they don’t just answer my questions — they challenge my thinking. When I suggest a new approach, they push back. When they have an idea, they sound it out with me. We debate. We test. The best strategies emerge from that friction, not from one side deferring to the other.
What You Should Expect From Your Agency in 2026
If your agency is still operating on the old model — quarterly reports, keyword rankings as the primary metric, and “trust us, we’re the experts” as the answer to every question — it’s time for a serious conversation. Here’s what the modern relationship should look like.
They Should Be Talking to You About AI Visibility
If your agency hasn’t mentioned AI Overviews, Answer Engine Optimisation, or Generative Engine Optimisation, they’re behind. These aren’t buzzwords — they’re fundamental shifts in how your customers find information. Google’s AI Overviews now appear above traditional results for a growing percentage of queries. ChatGPT and Perplexity are becoming default research tools for a significant segment of buyers. Your agency should be explaining what this means for your specific business and what you need to do about it.
Ask them: “Are we appearing in AI Overviews for our key terms? Are AI tools citing us? What’s our AI visibility compared to competitors?” If they can’t answer, they’re not monitoring it. If they’re not monitoring it, they’re ignoring a channel that’s growing while traditional click-through rates decline.
They Should Care About Your Entity, Not Just Your Website
Traditional SEO optimised websites. Modern SEO optimises entities — the digital representation of your business across every platform that matters. That means Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Wikidata, Crunchbase, industry directories, review platforms, social profiles, and your website’s structured data. AI systems don’t just crawl your website — they cross-reference your entity data from dozens of sources to determine confidence before citing you.
Your agency should be auditing and managing your entity presence, not just your on-page SEO. And they should be asking you to verify that entity data is accurate — because only you know whether the phone number on Apple Maps is still correct or whether your Companies House details are current.
They Should Explain What Moves the Needle, Not Bamboozle You
I’ve seen the reports. Fifty pages of crawl data, charts showing “domain authority” improvement, paragraphs about “link equity distribution” and “semantic relevance scoring”. Most of it is noise designed to justify a retainer.
A good agency should be able to tell you, in plain English: here’s what we did this month, here’s why, here’s what it achieved, and here’s what we’re doing next. If you can’t understand the report, it’s not because SEO is too complex — it’s because the agency is hiding behind jargon. The best SEO practitioners I know can explain their strategy to a business owner in five minutes. If yours can’t, ask why.
They Should Be Proactive About Zero-Click and Content Strategy
A growing percentage of searches now end without a click. Google answers the question directly — either through featured snippets, AI Overviews, or knowledge panels. Your agency should have a strategy for this reality, not ignore it.
That strategy might include: ensuring your content is structured to be cited in AI answers rather than just ranked in traditional results. Building video content that captures attention in formats AI Overviews can’t replicate. Creating interactive tools and calculators that provide genuine utility beyond what a text answer can offer. Focusing on brand searches and direct traffic alongside organic rankings.
If your agency’s entire strategy is still “rank higher on Google and the clicks will come”, they’re fighting yesterday’s war.
What You Should Be Doing as the Client
Collaboration isn’t one-sided. Here’s your part of the deal.
Show Up to the Calls
The number one predictor of SEO success in my experience isn’t budget, industry, or competition — it’s client engagement. The clients who show up to strategy calls, respond to questions within a day, and actually read the recommendations are the ones who get results. The ones who cancel meetings, take three weeks to approve content, and treat SEO as a “set it and forget it” expense consistently underperform.
Your agency is doing work that directly affects your revenue. Give it the attention you’d give any other investment of that scale.
Share Your Industry Knowledge
You know things about your industry that your agency doesn’t. You know what questions your customers ask. You know what your competitors are doing offline. You know which trade publications matter. You know the terminology your buyers use — which might be completely different from the terminology your agency found in a keyword tool.
That Coviant comparison page strategy? It worked because the client could explain exactly why someone comparing GoAnywhere and Diplomat MFT would choose Diplomat — the 20-year zero CVE security record, the transparent pricing, the healthcare compliance certifications. I could see the search intent; they could provide the substance. Neither side could have built those pages alone.
Challenge Your Agency’s Thinking
If something doesn’t make sense, say so. If a recommendation feels wrong for your business, push back. The best client-agency relationships involve constructive friction — not blind agreement, not adversarial questioning, but genuine intellectual partnership.
My best client relationship is one where they challenge me every month. They ask hard questions. They push back on assumptions. And the work is better for it, every single time. If your agency can’t handle being questioned, that tells you something about the quality of their thinking.
Own Your Entity Data
Your agency can audit and recommend. But your Google Business Profile, your Apple Business Connect, your Crunchbase, your Wikidata — these are your business listings. You should have the login credentials. You should know what’s on them. And when your agency asks you to verify that your address, phone number, and company details are consistent across platforms, do it promptly. In the entity SEO era, inaccurate data across platforms doesn’t just confuse customers — it reduces AI systems’ confidence in citing your business at all.
Think Beyond Rankings
If your only question to your agency is “what are we ranking for?”, you’re measuring the wrong thing. Ask instead: are we appearing in AI Overviews? Are AI tools recommending us? Is our entity data consistent and trusted? Are we building the kind of authority that compounds over time? Are we getting enquiries — actual leads, actual revenue — from search? Rankings are an indicator, not the outcome. The outcome is business growth.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Most agency-client relationships fail not because the agency is incompetent or the client is difficult, but because neither side invests in genuine collaboration. The agency defaults to automated reports and templated strategies. The client defaults to passive consumption and periodic complaints about rankings.
In 2026, that mutual passivity is fatal. Search is fragmenting. AI is rewriting how discovery works. LLM optimisation, entity authority, AI citation strategy — these require active, informed, collaborative engagement from both sides.
The businesses that figure out how to work with their SEO partner — not just pay them and hope — are the ones that will own visibility across every platform that matters. The ones that don’t will be sending each other fifty-page PDFs while their competitors get cited by ChatGPT.
Choose collaboration. Challenge your agency. Demand plain English. Show up. And if they can’t meet you at that level — find someone who can.
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