7 min read Brenden Parker
7 Things an SEO Agency Should Publish Before You Call
Price, contract length, how to cancel, who owns your accounts. Seven facts you should be able to check on any agency's website in ten minutes, and ours.
Seven facts decide most of the risk in hiring a marketing agency, and you should be able to find all seven on the agency’s own website before anyone calls you back. Google’s own guidance on hiring an SEO tells business owners to interview the agency, check references, and walk away from anyone guaranteeing first place (Google Search Central, updated June 2026). That advice is right, and it starts one step too late.
The cheapest version of due diligence happens before the call, while you still have no relationship to protect. Below are the seven things to look for, why each one matters, and our own answers, including the two we currently fail.
Why check the website before the sales call?
Because a sales call is designed to answer your questions in the order that suits the seller, and a published page is not. What an agency chooses to put in public, where a competitor can read it, is the closest thing to a commitment you will get for free.
There is a practical reason too. If price, contract length and cancellation terms are only available on a call, you cannot compare three agencies without spending three hours and handing your phone number to three sales teams. That is a real cost, and it is a cost the agency chose to move onto you. Plenty of good agencies quote per project and genuinely have no standard price. It still means you cannot shortlist them from your desk.
The reason this matters more in 2026 is that AI assistants now do the shortlisting for a lot of buyers, and they read published pages. When we asked four assistants in October 2026 how much a small business should pay for AI search work, all four answered using pricing-guide articles on third-party blogs. Not one retrieved an agency’s own pricing page. In the same week, a consumer ChatGPT answer put one agency at the top of its shortlist and gave the reason in plain text: it publishes rates rather than hiding everything behind a sales call. What is published is what gets quoted back to buyers.
What are the seven things?
Price, minimum term, how to cancel, early termination fee, who owns your accounts and content, at least one named client beside real numbers, and the agency’s own review count and rating. Those seven cover nearly all the money and nearly all the exit risk.
Here is what each one is really asking.
| What to look for | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| A published price or price range | Whether you can compare at all without a call |
| Minimum term | Whether month to month is a marketing line or a term |
| How to cancel, and the notice period | What the exit actually involves |
| Early termination fee | The worst case if month four goes badly |
| Who owns the site, accounts, content and reviews | What you keep when it ends |
| One named client beside their numbers | Whether the proof is checkable |
| Review count and star rating | Whether anyone will say this publicly |
The order matters. The first four are contractual and an agency can publish them today if it wants to. The last three are earned and take time, which is why a young agency can be completely honest and still score badly on them.
Which of these do agencies usually skip?
Price and the exit terms, in our experience of reading these pages. The pattern is consistent: the service description is detailed, the results page is enthusiastic, and the terms page defers everything to a private agreement you see after you are already talking to someone.
The specific phrase to watch for is an initial term whose length is never stated. “No long-term contracts” in the marketing copy and “the unpaid balance of the initial term” in the terms are not a contradiction if the term is one month, and they are a serious problem if it is twelve. If the length is not published, the honest reading is that you do not know, and the number is not zero.
The second thing that gets skipped is account ownership beyond the website. Most pages that mention ownership mention the site and stop. The assets that actually hurt to lose are the Google Business Profile, the customer database and the phone numbers, because those hold your customers after the relationship ends. Google’s Business Profile rules make this concrete: a primary owner cannot remove themselves from a profile without first transferring ownership to someone else (Google Business Profile Help). If an agency made itself the primary owner of your profile, leaving requires their cooperation.
Google’s hiring guidance makes the same point about Search Console in the other direction. It tells owners to grant an agency read access only at the audit stage, and specifically not write access. That is Google telling you to start from ownership and lend access, rather than the reverse.
How does Flownomic score?
Four of seven, and we would rather say that than round it up. Here are the answers, all checkable on this site right now.
Price: published. Plans are $999, $1,499 and $1,999 a month on our pricing page, with add-ons listed at their own prices. No ranges, no “starting at” with the real number withheld.
Minimum term: published. Our terms say plans are month to month with no long-term contract.
How to cancel: published. You cancel by emailing us. The change takes effect at the start of your next billing month and you keep the month you have paid for. There is no notice period to serve.
Early termination fee: none, and none is published because none exists. Fees already paid are not refunded, which is also in the terms.
Account and content ownership: partial, and this is a gap. Our terms say that when service ends we hand back access to your accounts and you keep the content we delivered for the months you paid for. That is true and it is thinner than it should be. It does not name the assets one by one, which means you are trusting a sentence rather than reading a list. We are fixing that wording, and until it is published you should hold us to the sentence that exists.
A named client beside their numbers: no. We have a public client review that names the company, and we publish our own dated search numbers in these articles. We do not currently publish a named client next to that client’s results, because we have not asked for permission to. That is our omission, not theirs.
Review count and rating: no. We do not show a review count on the site, and the honest reason is that we have one Google review. Writing “5.0 stars” next to a single review would be technically true and misleading, so we do neither.
That is a genuinely mixed scorecard. It is strong where the contract is and weak where the track record is, which is what you would expect from an agency that is deliberately transparent and not yet old.
Does a good score mean they are good at the work?
No, and this is the limit of the whole exercise. Publishing your terms proves you are willing to be held to them. It proves nothing about whether the work moves the needle.
The disclosure check is a filter, not a ranking. It removes the agencies you cannot evaluate without a sales process, and it tells you what the exit looks like if you are wrong. Everything about quality still has to come from the questions Google lists: what results do you expect and in what timeframe, how do you measure success, what is your experience in my industry, will you tell me every change you make to my site.
One addition for 2026, and it is now in Google’s own hiring page: if an agency sells AEO or GEO work, ask whether their advice matches Google’s published guidance on generative AI features. That guidance is unusually blunt. It says the ordinary rules still apply because these features sit inside core Search ranking, that there is no special markup that gets you into an AI answer, and that for a local business the Business Profile is one of the real levers (Google Search Central). An agency selling you a secret AI technique is selling something Google says does not exist.
What we would actually do
Open three agency websites and give yourself ten minutes each. Look for the seven facts. Do not read the service pages at all on the first pass, because every agency’s service page says the same things.
Then call the ones you could still compare afterwards, and ask them about the facts they did not publish rather than the ones they did. An agency that cannot tell you its cancellation terms over the phone is telling you something.
If you want to see where you actually stand before any of those calls, our free visibility audit checks your Google Maps position, your reviews against your closest competitors, your profile, your phone site speed and one AI answer about your business. It takes about two minutes and you get the findings whether or not we ever speak.
Related reading: month to month or a 12-month SEO contract goes deeper on the term itself, what a local SEO retainer includes covers the monthly scope, and how to verify an SEO agency’s results is about the proof rather than the paperwork.