How to Vet a Technical SEO Agency

Why This Post Exists

Most “technical SEO agency” content on the web is written by agencies selling themselves, dressed up as advice. We wanted to write the version we’d actually want to read if we were hiring one — including the uncomfortable questions that filter out agencies who are good at the sales call but thin on the actual technical work.

This matters more now than it did two years ago. As we covered in AI Overviews Explained, a huge share of “technical SEO” work today is really about whether AI systems can retrieve and cite your content at all — not just whether Google ranks you. And as we broke down in AI Visibility vs. Traditional SEO Visibility, an agency can get you to #1 in classic search while you remain completely invisible in AI Overviews. A lot of agencies still don’t know the difference between those two outcomes — which is exactly why vetting matters.

The 7 Questions Worth Asking

1. “Can you show me a crawl log analysis you’ve actually done — not a template?”
[VERIFIED] Log file analysis (checking what Googlebot and AI crawlers actually request versus what gets served) is one of the most reliable diagnostic tools in technical SEO, and it’s also one of the easiest things to fake with a generic slide deck. Ask to see raw findings from a real project, not a sanitized case study graphic.

2. “Do you check whether our content is actually present in the raw HTML, or only after JavaScript renders?”
[VERIFIED] This is the single most common blind spot we see — including, as we’ve written about candidly, one we found in our own site. An agency that doesn’t ask this question upfront likely isn’t auditing at the level modern AI retrieval requires.

3. “What’s your process for validating schema markup — and do you show me the errors, not just the score?”
[VERIFIED] Google’s Rich Results Test is free and public. Any agency should be running it live in front of you, not just reporting a pass/fail summary after the fact.

4. “How do you distinguish between traditional rank tracking and AI citation tracking?”
This is a direct test of whether the agency understands the shift we detailed in our AI visibility comparison piece. If they only talk about rank position, they’re likely still selling a 2019-era service with a 2026-era price tag.

5. “Can you walk me through a redirect chain or canonical tag issue you’ve actually fixed?”
Technical fluency shows up in specifics. Vague answers about “improving crawl efficiency” without a concrete example are a signal to dig further.

6. “What does your reporting actually measure — and can I see a sample report?”
[VENDOR CLAIM] Many agencies report vanity metrics (impressions, “visibility score”) that vendors’ own tools generate automatically, without independent verification. Ask what’s actually being measured and how, not just what dashboard it comes from.

7. “What happens if the audit finds nothing wrong?”
A credible agency will tell you sometimes the technical foundation is fine and the real gap is elsewhere — content, backlinks, or positioning. If every agency you talk to finds the same expensive problems, that’s worth noticing.

A Quick Gut-Check Table

Sign of a real technical shop	Sign of a template-driven vendor
Shows you raw crawl/log data	Shows you only polished dashboards
Distinguishes AI citation from rank position	Talks only about “ranking #1”
Can explain a specific fix in plain language	Uses jargon without concrete examples
Comfortable saying “nothing’s broken here”	Always finds a reason to sell more work

The Takeaway

The technical SEO agency market is crowded with two very different kinds of providers: ones who can run a real audit and show their work, and ones who resell a templated report. The questions above are the fastest way to tell them apart in a single call — and increasingly, the AI-visibility questions (not just the classic-SEO ones) are the ones that separate agencies who’ve kept up from ones still selling last decade’s service.

If you want to see what a real technical + AI-visibility audit actually looks like, book a technical audit call with Alneeko — we’ll show you our process live, including the crawl data and schema validation, not just a summary slide.

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