What buyers ask AI before choosing a marketing agency

Before anyone asks for your credentials deck, they ask an assistant three kinds of question: whether to hire an agency at all, what this normally costs, and who does this specific job for this specific kind of business. Most agency websites answer only the third one, and answer it with adjectives.

The questions, in the words buyers use

• "agency or in house team for a company just starting performance marketing"
• "how much does a digital marketing retainer cost in India for a small brand"
• "what should be in an agency scope of work"
• "who actually works on my account at an agency"
• "is it normal for an agency to charge a percentage of ad spend"
• "how long before SEO or ads start working"
• "agency for a manufacturing company that sells to distributors"
• "how do I check if an agency's case studies are real"
• "what do I need to give an agency before they can start"

Half of those are not vendor questions at all. They are process questions from somebody who has not bought this service before and is worried about being sold to. That worry is the thing you are actually competing on.

What a good answer looks like

The agency that gets named in these answers is the one that has written the buyer's guide instead of the sales page.

Explain the commercial model in plain words. Retainer, project fee, a percentage of media spend, or a mix. Say which one you use, what it includes, what is billed extra, and what the shortest sensible engagement is. You are not giving away a secret. You are removing the reason a cautious buyer does not reply.

Describe the team the client gets. How many people, at what level, how much of their week, who they speak to. "Dedicated account manager" says nothing. A named structure says everything.

Be honest about time. Paid media shows numbers quickly. Content and search do not. An agency that says so is more believable than one that promises both.

Write one page for each industry you genuinely understand. A page about marketing for a distributor led manufacturer, written by somebody who has done it, cannot be faked by a competitor and cannot be answered by a generic agency site.

The six things a buyer is actually checking

Behind the nine questions above sit six worries. Answer the worry and the question answers itself.

• Will I be able to tell whether this worked? So publish what you report, how often, and which numbers you hold yourself to.
• Am I paying for senior people and getting junior ones? So publish the team structure and the seniority mix by name of role.
• Will I be locked in? So publish the notice period and what happens to assets on exit.
• Do they understand my business or only my channel? So publish one industry page rather than ten channel pages.
• Is the spend going to the platforms or to the agency? So publish whether media is bought in the client's account and whether you mark it up.
• How much work falls on me? So publish what you need from the client each month, honestly, including approvals and product information.

What drives the number, even when you cannot publish the number

A buyer asking what a retainer costs is really asking what makes one retainer twice another. Name the drivers.

• How many channels are live, because each one is a separate weekly job.
• How much creative is produced, and whether it is static, video or regional language versions.
• The number of markets and languages.
• Whether media is planned as well as bought.
• How much reporting and analytics setup is needed, which is front loaded and often underestimated.
• Whether the client has an in house team, which reduces hours in some places and adds coordination in others.
• The approval process, because a three stage legal review in a regulated sector genuinely costs more time than a founder who approves in a chat.

A page that says this, with no figure in it at all, answers the cost question better than a form does.

The questions a buyer asks that agencies avoid

• What is your client retention like, and why did the last one leave?
• Will you tell me when a channel is not working, or keep spending?
• Do you take clients who compete with me? And where the line is drawn.
• What is the smallest budget you will take, and what do I get for it?
• What happens in the first thirty days, in detail, before any campaign is live?

Each of these can be a short page. The reason they are worth writing is not that they are clever. It is that nobody else has written them, so the assistant has no other source.

A worked example

A founder is about to spend on performance marketing for the first time. She asks an assistant whether to hire an agency or a person. The answer explains the trade off and cites two blog posts, one from a large agency and one from a software company.

She then asks what a retainer includes for a brand at her stage. The answer lists typical inclusions and cites the same large agency. Nowhere in either answer is there a small agency, because no small agency has written either page.

The agency that wins her is the one that published three plain pages: "agency, freelancer or in house, how to decide at your stage", "what our retainer includes and what it does not", and "the first thirty days with us". None of the three contains a case study. All three get read by exactly one kind of person, which is the kind she is.

Where you are probably missing

Three gaps show up again and again on agency sites. There is no pricing signal anywhere, so every cost question is answered by somebody else. Case studies have no industry, no channel and no method, so they are unusable as evidence. And there is no page about how you work, only about what you offer.

Outside your site, the gap is usually a thin Clutch or GoodFirms profile and a Google Business Profile with no reviews. Those get read for this trade whether you maintain them or not.

What this does not cover

Writing these pages does not make you a better agency, and a buyer who arrives from a very honest page and then meets a disorganised first call will not come back. The pages set an expectation you then have to meet.

This also will not help with the part of agency selection that happens in a room. Chemistry, a pitch and a reference call still decide most appointments. What these pages change is whether you are on the list at all.

And it does not apply evenly. A buyer looking for a large integrated agency for a national brand is not going to be served an eleven person specialist by any assistant, however good the pages are. Aim at the questions you can actually win, and accept that some questions are not yours. No one can guarantee a place in an assistant's answer.

Common questions

Is it normal for an agency to charge a percentage of ad spend?

It is one of the common models, and the thing to look at is not the model but what happens as spend grows. A percentage means your fee rises with the client's budget whether or not the work rises. Some agencies cap it, some switch to a retainer above a level, some use a blend. Whichever you do, write it down, because a buyer who reads it from you does not have to suspect it.

When can search or content work be judged?

Longer than paid media, and the honest answer names what it depends on rather than giving a month count: how much authority the domain already has, how contested the queries are, and how fast the client can approve and publish. An agency that promises a fixed timeline here is either guessing or selling.

Who should own the ad accounts and the analytics?

The client, in almost every case. The agency gets access. This matters because the historic data in those accounts is worth more than any single campaign, and losing it on exit is the most common serious complaint buyers have about agencies. Saying this plainly on your site costs you nothing and marks you out.

What should be in a scope of work?

The deliverables with counts, the channels, who approves what, the reporting cadence, the response times, what is explicitly out of scope, how out of scope work is priced, the notice period, and who owns the accounts and the creative files. Most disputes come from the last three.

How do I check whether an agency's case studies are real?

Ask which of the work they did themselves, who on the case study team is still at the agency, and whether you may speak to the client. An agency that describes method rather than results is easier to check, because you can ask follow up questions about decisions and hear whether the answers are lived.

We are in a regulated sector. Does any of this change?

The commercial questions do not change, and the content questions change a great deal. What an advertisement may claim for a medicine, a food product, a financial product or a real money game is restricted, and the restrictions differ. Ask the agency to show you a page where they have written about the rules in your sector. If they cannot, they will be learning on your budget.

What to do first

Start with the four pages that answer the process questions: how we charge, who works on your account, what to expect in the first thirty days, and how to brief an agency. Add the line about account ownership to the first of those. Then one industry page for your strongest sector. Then fix the directory profiles.

If you want the mechanics of which sources get read and how to check your position, the companion page on how a marketing agency gets recommended by AI covers that and this page does not repeat it.

How we know this

We read the assistants rather than guessing what they do. In our own audit of 1,260 saved answers from ChatGPT and Gemini across the United States, the United Kingdom and India, 82.0% of every citation landed on a site the business itself owned, and review directories took 0.7%. Counted as one domain per reading, 16,516 of 20,143.

That is the whole asymmetry: the pages you own are the pages an assistant quotes back to a buyer. See the dated readings and the method on our proof page.

Find out whether assistants name your business, on your own domain and your own buying questions.

By Aditya Goel, Founder, AI Knows Us. Reviewed 1 November 2026.