Month four. You have paid the retainer four times, the report is a PDF with a green arrow on it, and your rankings look much like they did at kickoff. The phone has not changed. Someone in your business says “we should fire them,” someone else says “these things take time,” and both might be right.

The answer before the detail: at three to six months, rankings and revenue are the worst basis for deciding whether to fire an SEO agency, because they are the slowest signals you have. Judge the work product, not the results. If real work has shipped and the numbers have not moved, you have a patience problem. If four months produced audits, decks and recommendations that nobody implemented, you have a vendor problem, and more months will not fix it.

People get this wrong in both directions. They cancel at month five when the work was sound and two months from paying off. Or they stay eighteen months because the account manager is pleasant and the charts are colourful, while nothing has shipped since onboarding.

What should have happened by month one, three and six

Deliverables and results move at completely different speeds, so separate them.

Month one. An audit naming specific problems on specific URLs, an agreed priority list, baseline numbers written down, confirmed access to your site and analytics, and a few technical fixes already live. Not proposed. Live. Nothing to do with position or traffic has had time to happen; anyone showing ranking gains in month one is reporting terms you already ranked for. This is also where damage happens invisibly: an agency that waits four weeks for your CMS login has burned a sixth of the engagement, and in month five that looks like their fault.

Month three. Work you can open in a browser. Published pages at real URLs, on-page changes reflected live, technical fixes verified rather than ticketed, some early link activity. In Search Console, impressions starting on the pages they worked on, well before clicks or positions. Not yet realistic: attributable revenue, or rankings on competitive commercial terms.

Month six. The excuses run out. Expect impression growth on the pages they targeted, some of them on the board, and reporting about enquiries rather than visibility. You may still not be profitable, and that alone is not grounds for firing. Flat impressions across every page they touched is a different conversation, because impressions move first.

One note before you look: Search Console is not live. Google’s documentation says collected data “should be available in 2-3 days,” and that the newest Performance report data can be preliminary and may change within hours. Compare a three-month window against the previous one.

The eight-point audit to run before you fire anyone

An afternoon, and no technical skill, because you are not evaluating the SEO. You are evaluating whether work exists.

1. Build the deliverables list yourself. Open the contract, then every monthly report, and write one line per claimed deliverable with the month it was claimed. A spreadsheet, not your head. Half of what you need shows up here, because agencies that are not working produce reports describing activity rather than output. “Ongoing optimisation” is billing language, not a deliverable.

2. Read one of their pages properly. Not skim. Does it answer a question a real buyer has? Does it contain anything only your company would know: a price band, a process, a constraint, an opinion? Or could a competitor re-badge it by swapping the name? You need no qualification to judge a page about your own business.

3. Check it shipped. Go to the live URL, not the Google Doc. If it exists only in a shared drive marked “awaiting client approval,” find out who was chasing that approval and how hard. Then search site:yourdomain.com plus a distinctive phrase from the page.

4. Check changes to existing pages too. Open a page they claim to have optimised and look at the browser tab; that text is the title tag. Does it match what they said? Then run URL Inspection in Search Console on it, which tells you when Google last crawled the page and whether it is indexed. Free, yours, nothing needed beyond clicking.

5. Open the backlinks they claim. Take the five most impressive from the last report. Does the page exist? Is your link actually on it, or is it an unlinked mention? Would a human ever read it? Then open the Links report in Search Console, which shows what Google sees pointing at your site. A spreadsheet is not evidence of a link.

6. Look at impressions on the pages they worked on. In Search Console, open Performance, filter by one of their URLs, set the last three months and compare to the previous period. Impressions, not clicks: impressions mean Google is showing that page to somebody, the first sign it has entered the market. Repeat for four or five pages. A page published three months ago with a flat handful of impressions missed. One with rising impressions and few clicks is working but needs a better title and description, which is a fix, not a firing offence. Read it honestly: Google says it may not track queries made very few times or containing sensitive information, and these numbers will not match Analytics.

7. Count recommendations against implementations. Put every item from step one in one of two columns: recommended, or shipped. This ratio is the most diagnostic number in the audit. Forty recommendations and four implementations means they are either not empowered to touch your site or not interested in the unglamorous half of the job.

8. Find out who does the work. Ask for the name of the person writing your content and the one doing the technical work, and ask to be on a call with them. Agencies doing real work put the practitioner in front of you. Agencies running your account through an overloaded junior find reasons why that cannot happen.

Slow but real, or nothing at all: the tells

Real work, slowly: output is dated and traceable. They ask you for things: interviews, sign-off, access. They push back on some of your feedback instead of agreeing with all of it. They explain why they chose one page over another in terms specific to your market. They bring bad news before you find it, and hard questions get answers containing a date.

Nothing: the deliverables are documents about work rather than work. Audits, strategies, keyword decks, roadmaps that reset each quarter. The monthly report is a tool export with a paragraph that would fit any client. Content sits in draft for months and nobody chased you, which is convenient. Reported rankings cover phrases nobody types, or your own brand name. Links sit on sites with no traffic and a suspiciously similar template. Nobody is named. Questions get answered with vocabulary instead of information, and under pressure the algorithm gets blamed with no date and no specific page.

Google’s guidance on hiring an SEO is blunt about two of these: no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and be careful if a company is secretive or will not clearly explain what it intends to do.

Before you blame them: bad agency or bad brief?

A real share of failed retainers failed on the client side, and everyone knows it except the person paying. Search your inbox for the agency’s last ten emails to you, check your reply times, then answer honestly:

• Did they get CMS and hosting access, or are they still emailing your web developer, who has not replied since March?
• How many pieces of content are in your approval queue, and how old is the oldest?
• Did you give them the subject matter interview they asked for, or say “just write it” and then complain it was generic?
• Did you change your target market, services or pricing mid-engagement without telling them?
• Did you buy a small package and expect the scope of a large one? Four hours a month is four hours, however senior the person.
• Did you veto what would have worked: changing the homepage, publishing pricing, letting them talk to your customers?

If three or more land, firing this agency and hiring another reproduces the same result at a different price. The fix is not a new vendor. It is one named person in your business with authority to approve content and grant access, plus a standing thirty-minute call every fortnight. The honest middle case is that they were mediocre and you were slow. That one is worth a reset conversation.

The conversation to have before you fire your SEO agency

Do not open with “I’m not seeing results,” which invites the speech about SEO taking time. Open with the audit instead.

• “Send me everything live on my site because of you, with URLs and dates.” A working agency produces this within a day. A stalled one takes a week and sends a deck.
• “Which of your recommendations have not been implemented, and why not?” This surfaces a bad brief without forcing them to accuse you.
• “What is the biggest thing stopping this working: something you control, something I control, or the market?” Good answers are uncomfortable and specific. Bad answers are about algorithms.
• “Show me impressions for the pages you built, and what you expected by now.” You already know. You are testing whether they do, and whether they will say it.
• “What do months seven to nine look like, deliverable by deliverable?” Vague here means vague forever.

A good answer sounds like this: “Six of the fourteen pages went live late because sign-off took until August, which is on both of us. Impressions on the service pages are up, the location pages have not moved and that approach was wrong, so I want to rebuild them. Here is what ships in the next sixty days, with dates. If those pages are still flat then, you should not renew.” That is someone who wants to be measured. A bad answer is a strategy session, a budget request, or a fresh twelve-month plan opening with another audit. Give the first sixty days with written deliverables. Give the second nothing.

The exit checklist nearly everyone gets wrong

Most people send the termination email, stop the payment, and feel better. Three weeks later the Business Profile turns out to be controlled by a Gmail address nobody can identify, and the next agency is rebuilding from zero. Do the ownership work before you send that email. Access is much harder to get from a vendor you have just fired.

Accounts you must own, not merely access

• Google Business Profile. One primary owner per profile, and it should be an account you control. Owners have full control including deletion; managers can do everything except add or remove users and remove the profile. Two timing details from Google’s documentation: a profile needs at least one other owner or manager before primary ownership can transfer, and newly added owners and managers wait seven days before they can delete it, remove users or transfer ownership. If access is already lost, requesting ownership notifies the current owner, who has three days to respond; after that you may get the option to claim it, which Google says is not always available.
• Search Console. A verified owner verified the property with a token: an HTML file, a DNS record, a Tag Manager container. A delegated owner was granted ownership by a verified owner. Only owners can add or remove users. The trap is the token: while a removed owner’s token remains on your site they can re-verify themselves, so deleting them from the user list is not enough. Remove the file or DNS record, and export your performance history first.
• Analytics and Tag Manager. Check whether the GA4 property sits in your account or theirs. If theirs, get it moved, or at minimum Administrator rights on an account you control. Tag Manager transfers separately and often holds conversion tracking.
• Domain, DNS, hosting, CMS. Registrar login and registrant email in your name, sorted now rather than during a dispute. Admin accounts and billing yours, theirs closed on the last day.
• Ads and assets. Your Ads account linked to their manager account, never the reverse. Plus source files, image licences, dashboards, call tracking numbers (which port, not copy) and tool licences in their name.

The change log, which is the genuinely valuable part

Ask in writing for everything they changed: redirects, robots.txt and meta robots, title and description rewrites, schema, plugins, pages deleted or merged, canonicals. And the sleeper item, whether they uploaded a disavow file, because it lives in your Search Console, keeps working after they leave, and a careless one can suppress your own links for years. Without this list your next agency spends month one on archaeology you pay for.

Notice, refunds and the clauses that bite

Read the agreement before the emotional conversation. The usual traps: notice of thirty, sixty or ninety days running from the next billing cycle rather than the day you called; auto-renewal that already rolled you into another year; a minimum term with an early termination fee; and an IP clause under which work product transfers only on final payment, so withholding the last invoice costs you the content you want to keep. You will rarely recover fees for time genuinely spent. Your leverage is over itemised deliverables paid for and never delivered, which is why step one matters. A realistic settlement is the notice period waived or the final month credited, and do not fire off a chargeback while they still hold your domain and Business Profile. Ask, too, whether any links are rented on recurring payment, because those vanish when you stop paying.

Not landing here again, and when to bring it in-house

The next contract should make this audit unnecessary. A written deliverables schedule with quantities and dates, monthly, as an appendix. Every account created in your name on day one. Notice capped at thirty days after any initial term. A paid audit as a small separate engagement before any retainer, so you can judge their thinking cheaply. The name of the person doing the work, in writing. And be the client you wish you had been: one decision maker, access in week one, content approved within five working days or it ships as written.

In-house is right more often than agencies admit, under specific conditions: a continuous content need requiring real subject knowledge, someone who can write or be interviewed, and a developer who can ship without a three-week queue. Then one capable generalist plus tools beats a retainer, because the constraint was never SEO expertise. It was access to what your business knows. It fails when one person is expected to cover technical work, content and links at once, and it fails completely when nobody internally will own it.

Questions people ask at this point

They have offered a discount to keep me. Worth taking?

Only if the discount comes with a different scope. A cheaper version of the same retainer buys you more months of the same output. A smaller fee attached to a named person, a shorter notice period and a written deliverables list is a genuinely different arrangement, and occasionally the better deal on the table.

What if the agency built and hosts my website?

Settle it before you terminate. Establish who owns the domain, who the registrant is, where it is hosted, and whether the content and design licence transfers on final payment. If it sits on a proprietary platform you cannot export, budget for a rebuild and treat that as the cost of leaving.

They blame a Google update. How do I check?

Ask for the date of the update and the matching drop in your Performance report on the affected pages. A genuine algorithmic hit shows a visible change around a specific date on specific page groups. A vague reference to “recent updates” over a flat chart is not an explanation.

Fire them for absence of work, not absence of rankings. An afternoon spent building the deliverables list, opening the pages, checking what shipped and reading impressions per page usually makes the decision for you. Have the honest conversation first, because a bad brief looks exactly like a bad agency from the outside. And whatever you decide, secure the accounts and get the change log before you send the email. That is the part you cannot go back for.

If you are mid-retainer and want an independent read on whether the work was real, AB7 Solutions runs SEO, AEO and GEO programmes and regularly picks up sites part-way through, including the unglamorous half: reconstructing what was changed, recovering account ownership and clearing technical debt before a word of content is written. A short second-opinion review is usually enough to tell you whether to reset or leave. Call +1 321 341 7733, email ab@ab7solutions.com or director@ab7solutions.com, or read more at www.ab7solutions.com.

Sources: Google Search Console Help, “About Search Console data” (2-3 day availability, untracked and sensitive queries, differences from Analytics); “Performance report: about the data” (preliminary data); “Performance report: overview and basic setup” (default three-month view, export); “Managing owners, users and permissions” (verified vs delegated owners, verification tokens); Google Business Profile Help, “Add and remove owners and managers” and “Request ownership of a Business Profile” (primary owner rules, seven-day restriction, three-day response window); Google Search Central, “Do you need an SEO?” (no guaranteed rankings, warning on secretive providers).