Which SEO company to hire after a bad one, and the evidence to demand before you sign

A British company that has paid for SEO once and got nothing tends to make one of two mistakes next. It either buys the opposite type of supplier, swapping a large agency for a freelancer or the reverse, or it gives up on the channel. Neither addresses what went wrong. The failure is almost always in the buying process, and these five pieces of evidence fix it.

First, work out which of the four failures you had

They need different responses, and buyers who skip this step repeat the experience with a different logo.

The third row is the one buyers blame on suppliers most often and own most often. If nobody internally can publish a page or change a template within a week, that is the problem to fix before the next contract.

The five pieces of evidence to demand

1. A diagnosis before a proposal. Ask a candidate to tell you why the last engagement did not work, from your own data. Give them access to your analytics and search console for an hour. A supplier that cannot form a view from that is not going to form one later.
2. One case with a number, a period and a referee. Not a logo wall. One client, what changed, over what window, and somebody who will take the call. Everybody has one client who will allow a redacted version.
3. Named delivery people, with locations. Who does the work and who you speak to. The gap between the pitch team and the delivery team is the commonest cause of the experience you have just had.
4. A redacted sample monthly report from a live account. This is the document that separates the field, because it shows you what arrives in month two rather than what is promised in week one.
5. A written answer to what the report says in a month when nothing improved. Suppliers who have had those months answer immediately. The rest talk about impressions.

Two things to refuse outright, having been burned once

Any promise of a position. An agency offering guaranteed rankings should be walked away from, and the offer itself is the finding rather than a negotiating position.

A twelve month term with a long notice period. You have earned the right to a short first term. Buy a quarter with a defined output, then extend. A supplier confident in its work will accept that; one that needs the lock in is telling you something.

The British specific check almost nobody runs

Advertising claims in the United Kingdom are subject to the ASA and the CAP Code, and the ASA publishes its rulings. A supplier's own marketing claims are therefore partly a matter of public record, which is a free and unusually direct way to check whether a company says things it cannot support.

One practical warning if you go looking, measured on 22 October 2026. The ASA website serves a fully styled page on a missing address: we hit fifteen URLs that returned a complete looking document with the site's own navigation, and only the status code distinguished them from real pages, with one real advice page at about 35 KB and a missing one at about 33 KB. Its resource library search also filters in the browser, so three different queries returned the same ten links. Neither a page that renders nor a search that returns results is evidence of anything there. Navigate from a page you know is real rather than guessing addresses, and treat an empty search as inconclusive rather than as proof that nothing was published.

What the engines currently name in this category in Britain

On 22 October 2026 we put a 198 question set of British buying questions to ChatGPT and Gemini, with the market fixed inside the prompt because the usual country parameters are accepted and then ignored. In the 64 blind readings, British agencies were named without being prompted, led by Impression in 18 readings, with Whito in 5, Brainlabs in 4, Builtvisible in 3 and Rank4AI in 2. Global software was named as often, with Semrush in 13 and Ahrefs in 11. Across all 64, 34 readings named at least one supplier and 30 named nobody.

Use that as a sourcing input rather than a shortlist. A name appearing often tells you a firm has published material the engines read, which is evidence about its marketing rather than about its delivery. The five evidence items above are what tell you about delivery, and no engine can answer them for you.

What British buyers ask after a bad SEO engagement

Should we go smaller or larger this time? Neither is the variable that failed. Judge on the five evidence items, which a good freelancer and a good agency can both satisfy.

Is it worth asking the previous supplier for the work? Yes, and ask in writing for the artefacts: the changes made, the pages created, the accounts and the data. You are entitled to what you paid for and it informs the next brief.

How long should we give the next one? Agree the one number and a review at ninety days, with a short notice period in the first term. Then actually hold the review.

Can we judge them in month one? You can judge whether work shipped, which is the thing that failed last time. Outcomes need longer.

What if we cannot tell whether the last supplier did anything? That is itself the answer, and it means your next contract needs named outputs with a count and an artefact per item.

The baseline that makes the next engagement provable

The reason the last engagement is unresolvable is almost certainly that nobody recorded the starting position. Take the reading before the next supplier starts: the same buyer questions, who gets named, which sources get cited, dated. AI Knows Us keeps that record monthly across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, with citation and naming reported separately so a supplier cannot claim one as the other. For a British buyer the plan that reads all five engines is 299 dollars a month, the price for the United States and the United Kingdom, read from aiknowsus.com on 22 October 2026.

For what the ASA can actually do about a claim and what the CAP Code permits, which is the other half of the supplier claims check, see our page on advertising standards in the UK.