If you are asking this question, you have probably been asking it quietly for a few months. The reports arrive, the numbers are green, and you could not explain to anyone what was actually done.
That feeling is worth taking seriously. Here is how to find out, without needing to understand SEO yourself.
Ask what shipped, not what improved
This is the single best question. “What changed on my website last month?” Not what improved. What changed. Pages rewritten, pages added, technical fixes made, links earned.
Real work produces a list of specific things with dates against them. If the answer is a paragraph about ongoing optimisation and monitoring, you have your answer.
Look at what the report is measuring
There is a family of metrics that reliably appear when there is nothing better to show:
- Impressions. These rise on their own and mean nothing commercially.
- Keyword rankings for terms nobody searches, or for your own brand name, which you would rank for regardless.
- “Domain authority” style scores from third-party tools. Google does not use them.
- Total traffic, unsegmented, so a rise in irrelevant visitors reads as progress.
The metrics that actually matter are boring: enquiries, calls, bookings, revenue, and rankings for terms with buying intent behind them.
A report designed to be understood tells you what happened. A report designed to be renewed tells you the numbers went up.
Six questions to send them
- What specifically changed on my site in the last 90 days?
- Which pages are bringing in enquiries, not just traffic?
- What are we deliberately not doing, and why?
- If I stopped paying today, what would I keep?
- How are we showing up in AI answers, not just in the rankings?
- What does the next 90 days look like, in specifics?
The fifth one is the most revealing in 2026. Most agencies are not tracking it at all, and a growing share of searches now end in an AI answer rather than a click. If nobody has mentioned it to you, half the field is going unmeasured. That’s the point of is SEO dead in 2026.
The three-month rule
SEO is genuinely slow, and that is not an excuse in itself. The first few months really are groundwork. But slow does not mean invisible. Within three months you should be able to point at specific work that was done, even if the results are still building.
If you cannot point at the work after six months, the problem is not that SEO is slow.
Before you fire anyone
Check one thing first: whether the accounts and the work are in your name. The site, the analytics, the search console, the content. If a change of agency means losing your history, that is a separate problem to solve before you make the call, and it is worth solving either way.