The short version
Most SEO agency lies have not really changed since 2016. They still promise number-one rankings, thousands of backlinks, and secret algorithm knowledge that does not exist. The AI search era has added a fresh layer on top, including guaranteed citations in Google AI Overviews and AI-written content at scale. Before you sign with any SEO agency, run the ten questions at the bottom of this article past them. The answers will tell you what kind of agency you are dealing with.
Why this matters more in 2026
We first published this article back in 2016, when SEO felt like a dark art. A decade on, it is still a dark art. The difference is that AI Overviews (the AI-generated summaries Google now shows at the top of many searches), ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini have changed how people actually find businesses. That has given a new generation of SEO salespeople fresh ground to over-promise on.
The good news is that the classic lies have not really changed. If you can spot those, you can spot the new AI-era versions too. Below are the eleven we hear most often when business owners come to us after a bad SEO experience.
The classic lies that have not gone away
1. “I can guarantee you number-one rankings on Google”
Nobody can guarantee something they do not control. Only Google controls Google rankings, and even Google does not control them in any predictable way. Results are personalised, they depend on the exact wording of the query, and they get retested constantly.
Google itself has been clear on this for years. From Google’s own guidance for hiring an SEO:
“No SEO can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”
A common workaround is the rigged guarantee. The agency contracts you to “rank for X keywords”, but quietly chooses long, low-volume keywords that nobody actually searches for. You hit the targets. You stay locked into the contract. The rankings do not bring traffic. Watch for that language.
2. “We will get you thousands of backlinks. That is all you need.”
Backlinks still matter. They remain one of the strongest signals for both classic SEO and how AI systems judge authority. A thousand bad links are not worth one good one, though.
Mass-bought links almost always come from networks of low-quality sites that exist only to sell links, from comment spam and forum signatures, from cheap directory listings on sites Google has already discounted, or from foreign-language sites with no relevance to your business. Google’s link spam policy targets all of this, and the algorithm is good at spotting it.
Real link building is slow, and it looks more like PR than a software subscription. There are no shortcuts.
3. “We do everything by the book. One hundred per cent white hat.”
This sounds reassuring and is mostly meaningless. “By the book” implies there is a book. There is not, beyond a short set of public guidelines. Plenty of effective SEO tactics live in the grey area between what Google explicitly allows and what it explicitly bans. An agency that refuses to acknowledge that grey area is either inexperienced or being evasive.
What you actually want is an agency that can explain which tactics they will use, why those tactics will work, and what the risk profile looks like. “We follow the rules” is not a strategy.
4. “SEO is the only marketing you need”
SEO might bring qualified traffic, but it cannot make a slow website fast, a confusing offer clear, or a dead enquiry form work. We have audited plenty of businesses where the SEO had been “successful” by every internal measure, with rankings up and traffic up, but actual enquiries had not moved. The website itself was not converting.
Honest SEO is one piece of the puzzle. It sits alongside conversion improvements, Google Ads, email or HubSpot marketing automation, and whatever else fits the way your customers actually buy from you.
5. “We know Google’s algorithm”
No agency knows Google’s algorithm. Google does not even document it internally as a single thing. It is hundreds of overlapping systems that get updated thousands of times a year.
What good SEO people actually know is the public ranking signals Google has confirmed, the patterns that emerge from large-scale testing, and what is in the Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which tells us how Google wants its results judged. If anyone tells you they have cracked the algorithm, they are either misinformed or hoping you are.
The new lies of the AI search era
These are the interesting ones. Since 2024, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity have changed buyer behaviour, and a new wave of “AEO experts” has appeared on LinkedIn overnight.
6. “We guarantee citations in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews”
Same lie, new wrapper. AI Overviews and ChatGPT citations are even less predictable than classic rankings. They vary by user, by session and by query. They update constantly as the underlying models retrain. They often pull from entirely different sources for the same question asked twice in the same week.
You can absolutely make your business more likely to be cited. We do this through Answer Engine Optimisation. You cannot guarantee citations, though, any more than you can guarantee rankings. Anyone selling guaranteed AI citations is either uninformed or dishonest.
7. “AI-generated content ranks just as well. We will publish fifty articles a month.”
The pitch is appealing. Pay for one cheap retainer, get a hundred blog posts a quarter, watch the rankings roll in. It almost never works.
Google’s March 2024 core update and the helpful content system specifically targeted “scaled content abuse”. That is the technical name for pages that exist mainly to manipulate search rankings. AI-generated content is not banned. AI-generated content with no human expertise, no original perspective and no editorial check is exactly what those systems are built to demote.
If an agency’s main pitch is volume of AI content, that is your sign to keep looking. If they cannot tell you who their writers and editors are, keep looking harder.
8. “SEO is dead. You only need AEO now.”
A handful of agencies have rebranded as “AEO-only”, and the pitch is that classic SEO is finished. It is not.
Google AI Overviews are built on top of regular Google search results. ChatGPT’s web tool searches Bing. Perplexity searches the open web. The pages AI systems cite are mostly the same pages that rank in classic search. The technical foundation is the same either way. Your site has to be easy for search engines to read, fast to load on a phone, and well-linked internally. Your content has to be genuinely useful, with the small bits of code (called schema) that help Google and AI systems understand what each page is about.
Anyone telling you to abandon SEO to chase AEO is selling you a cheaper service that still needs everything classic SEO already did. AEO is a layer on top, not a replacement.
9. “We have cracked the AI Overview algorithm”
This is the 2026 update of “we know Google’s algorithm”. Nobody has cracked the AI Overview algorithm, including the people who built it. Large language models are non-deterministic, which is a fancy way of saying the same query produces different answers on different days. There are patterns and best practices. A “secret method” does not exist.
10. “Domain age is the biggest ranking factor. That is why you are not ranking yet.”
We hear this one a lot, usually as a way to manage expectations on flat results. Google’s John Mueller has stated repeatedly that domain age in itself is not a ranking factor. What new sites lack is the trust signals that older sites tend to have built up over time, like backlinks, brand mentions, useful content, and user engagement. You can build those without waiting a decade. We have written more about this in Domain age: what is it really, and does it actually matter?.
11. “All your competitors are doing it. You will fall behind.”
Sometimes true. Often not. We have seen pitches built on cherry-picked competitor screenshots that conveniently leave out the competitors with stronger rankings and zero of the suggested tactics. Always ask which competitors, ranking for which terms, in which business model. A generic “your competitors are crushing you” framing is usually a closing technique, not analysis.
Ten questions to ask any SEO agency before you sign
Print these out. Email them to anyone pitching for your SEO. The answers will tell you what kind of agency they are.
- What is your honest expectation for results in the first ninety days, the first six months, and the first twelve months? “Top three by next month” is a warning sign.
- Which specific keywords or topics will we target, and how did you choose them? Generic keyword volume is not a strategy.
- Show me three case studies with real client names and real numbers. Anonymous case studies are usually fictional.
- What does a typical month of work look like? How many hours, on what? Vague answers mean vague work.
- Who is doing the writing, and can I see samples of their work? You are paying for writers, so meet them.
- What is your link-building approach, specifically? Listen for the difference between “outreach and digital PR” and “we have a network”.
- How will we measure success, and which metrics will we explicitly not use? A good agency will tell you what not to chase.
- What happens to my rankings if I leave you? If everything you have built belongs to them, that is a trap.
- What is your stance on AI-generated content? You want a clear, considered answer, not a flat yes or no.
- What would you do if Google penalised us tomorrow? Real agencies have an answer. Sales teams panic.
What good SEO actually looks like in 2026
Honest SEO is not magic. It is a steady set of activities that, done together, give your website the best possible chance of being found by the people who want to buy from you. It looks something like this.
It starts with a real audit of your current site, current rankings, and current customer journey, before anyone touches anything. From there, the work is built on a specific keyword and topic strategy tied to the people who actually buy from you, not to whatever has the highest search volume. The content is useful and original, written by humans with subject knowledge, sometimes helped along by AI tools but never replaced by them. The technical work covers site speed, the page-experience signals Google calls Core Web Vitals, structured data, and clean internal linking. Link building is slow and deliberate, built through real relationships and genuinely useful assets. The content gets shaped to be both ranked in classic search and cited in AI Overviews. Reporting connects the work to traffic, to enquiries, and to revenue, not just to rankings.
It is slower than the lies. It is also the only thing that produces measurable growth over the long term.
What to do next
If anything in this article matches a pitch you are sitting on right now, pause. Run those ten questions past the agency first. Their answers will tell you whether you are talking to a partner or a salesperson.
If you would like a second opinion on the SEO you are currently paying for, get in touch. We are a Geelong-based team serving Geelong and Melbourne, and we have been doing this work for ten years. We will tell you what is working, what is not, and what we would actually recommend. Even if that is not us.
