This is one of the most common problem-aware searches in the entire SEO industry, which tells you something uncomfortable about how many retainers are running on autopilot.
The five-minute check
- Open Search Console yourself. Has anything measurable changed in the last quarter, impressions, average position, indexed pages?
- Ask for three specific technical fixes made in the last month, by name, not "ongoing optimisation"
- Check whether your site's actual code changed recently, via a simple page-source diff or asking your developer directly
- Look at whether the monthly report says anything different from last month's, or if it's the same template with new dates
Why this happens so often
SEO is genuinely hard to police from the client side, most business owners can't audit technical SEO themselves, and that information gap is exactly what a report-only retainer exploits, intentionally or not. It's not always dishonesty, sometimes it's simply an agency that never built the capacity to actually implement fixes, only to describe them.
The direct question to ask your agency
"Do you implement the fixes yourselves, or does my team need to?" A retainer that requires your own developer to action every recommendation is really just a consulting report with a subscription price, and that's a legitimate service, but it's not the same thing as SEO that's actually being done to your site.
What good actually looks like
Documented changes you can point to. A report that changes month to month because the site changed month to month. Someone who can explain, in plain English, what moved and why, without retreating into jargon when you ask a direct question.
See how technical SEO gets implemented, not just listed in a report →