The agency work you cannot watch, and the artefact that proves each piece of it

Almost everything a marketing agency bills for happens where you cannot see it. Keyword research, a technical audit, content drafting, bid changes, experiment analysis, strategy time. None of it is watchable, and all of it leaves an artefact in a system you can reach. So the useful question is never whether the work happened. It is which artefact should exist for this line on the invoice, whether it is dated, and whether it links to something live. Three questions, and they turn an argument about trust into a short list of files.

The register

The three questions, in the order that settles things fastest

1. Does the artefact exist? A document, a list, a revision, a live page. If the answer is a verbal summary, ask again in writing.
2. Is it dated, and does the date fall inside the month you were billed for? This is where padding shows up. A keyword document created in month one, delivered again in month four with a new filename, is one piece of work billed twice.
3. Does it connect to something live? A technical audit that recommends 40 fixes is a document. A technical audit with 23 of them deployed is work. The connection between the two is the deployment record, and it is the thing to ask for.

Those three establish that the work was done, when, and that it reached your property. Impact is a separate measurement with a separate method, which needs a baseline and a comparison group rather than an artefact.

The two artefacts you will not get, and what to use instead

• Time. Timesheets from a retainer are reconstructed rather than recorded, so a request for them produces a document nobody should rely on. Price the retainer against named outputs instead, and judge the outputs.
• Thinking. There is no artefact for an hour of analysis. The decision log is the substitute, and it is a better one, because a decision with a reason attached is more useful to you than an hour count.

Auditing an outgoing agency, in the right order

When a relationship is ending, the order matters more than the thoroughness, because access is easy to lose and hard to recover.

1. Ownership first, before any conversation about the audit. Confirm that the domain, the DNS, the hosting, the analytics property, Search Console, the Business Profile and every advertising account sit in your company's name with an administrator who works for you. Remove nothing yet. Just confirm who owns what.
2. Export everything. Search Console and analytics history, ad account history, the CRM, the content inventory and every report you have been sent. Platforms hold a limited window and some of it leaves with the account.
3. Take a snapshot of the site. A crawl and a list of indexed URLs, so a later change is attributable to somebody.
4. Request the artefact list from the register above, for the last six months, with dates. One email, one list, a deadline.
5. Check the three or four highest value claims rather than all of them. Links that should exist, pages that should be live, a fix that should be deployed, a campaign change that should be in the history.
6. Write down what you found, including what checked out. A handover note that records both is the thing your next supplier needs in week one.

Do this before the notice conversation where you can. Audit requests read differently after notice has been served, and the artefacts are the same either way.

What a clean handover pack contains

• Administrator access transferred, confirmed by you logging in without the agency present.
• Every working document, including the keyword map, the audit, the content calendar and the brand assets, in editable formats.
• Source files for anything designed or built, not just the published output.
• A list of third party tools and subscriptions bought on your behalf, with who holds the licence.
• A written list of work in progress, with its current state.
• Any tracking, tag container or script installed on your site, named, so the next supplier knows what is there.

Settle this in the contract rather than at the exit

Four clauses remove most of the difficulty, and all four are reasonable to ask for before signing.

• Accounts and property in your name. The agency is granted access rather than owning it.
• A dated change log as a deliverable, not as a courtesy.
• Intellectual property in deliverables passing to you on payment, including source files.
• A handover obligation, with a stated number of working days after termination.

Questions about verifying agency work

Is it unreasonable to ask an agency for proof of work?

No, and the best ones supply the register above without being asked, because a dated change log is also how they protect themselves. A request for artefacts that already exist costs a good agency ten minutes.

What if the agency says the work is proprietary?

Methodology can reasonably be proprietary. The output you paid for cannot, and a deliverable you have paid for belongs to you. Separate the two in the conversation and the objection usually dissolves.

How do I check a link really exists?

Open the page. Confirm the link is there, that it points at your site, and that the page is indexed and reachable without a login. A link reported in a spreadsheet and absent from the live page is the single most common gap in this list.

Our site is managed by the agency's developer. How do we verify changes?

Ask for read access to the CMS revision history or the repository. Where that is refused, the live page and its dated source are still available to you, and that covers most claims.

Should we audit before or after serving notice?

Before, where you can, and confirm your own ownership of the accounts first. The artefacts do not change, and access sometimes does.

How much of the last six months should we check?

Three or four claims, chosen because they are expensive or load bearing. A full audit of every line costs more than it recovers, and a sample answers the question you actually have.

The claim with no artefact at all

One line on a modern marketing invoice leaves nothing behind in any system you can open. When an agency says its work has improved how AI assistants describe your business, there is no dashboard, no change history and no platform report to check it against, because none of the five surfaces sends anybody one. The artefact in that case has to be created deliberately: the same buying questions, asked of the same engines, on two dates, with the answers saved. AI Knows Us produces exactly that record across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, which puts the newest line on the invoice back into the register above. The counting rule behind readings of that kind is published in the 597 reading benchmark, and the artefacts a UK agency should hand over for this specific work are listed in the note on audit deliverables for a UK agency.