There’s no pleasant way to say it. We had eight talented, expensive people and a suite of software tools that cost more than my first car. And I dismantled the whole department in a single quarter. It wasn't a cost-cutting exercise. It was a strategic execution. The old model was broken, propped up by monthly retainers, opaque reporting, and a collective delusion that activity equals progress.
Clients would pay us £7,000 a month, and for what? A 3,000-word blog post that a junior copywriter spent two days on, a handful of backlinks from sites nobody reads, and a technical audit that flagged the same trivial issues every six months. The model is built on outputs, not outcomes. It’s designed to justify the retainer, not to generate enterprise value. I decided we were done with it.
Let’s be brutally honest about the economics of a traditional SEO agency team. For a mid-sized UK agency, a team of eight might cost £400,000 a year in salaries and NI contributions. Add another £50,000 for the essential software stack: Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, Screaming Frog, and the rest of the usual suspects. Throw in management overhead, office space, and HR. You're easily looking at a £500,000 annual cost base.
To be viable, that team needs to service, let’s say, £1.2M in annual revenue. That’s roughly 15 clients paying our hypothetical £7k/month. The work becomes a frantic, shallow sprint across 15 different accounts. The goal isn’t to deliver transformational growth for any one client; it's to do just enough on all 15 to keep them from churning. It’s a hamster wheel of keyword reports, backlink begging, and on-page tinkering.
We saw this with a major UK activewear brand we worked with. They were obsessed with outranking Gymshark for a set of vanity keywords. We spent 18 months and over £150,000 of their money building links and 'optimising' collection pages. Domain Authority went up. Rankings for a few select terms improved. But did it fundamentally move the needle on revenue? No. The gains were marginal, incremental, and wholly disproportionate to the investment. The activity looked impressive in a monthly report, but the commercial outcome was negligible. We were optimising for metrics, not for money.
The most shocking realisation for me was where the time and money actually went. I audited our team's project management software. The data was damning. A staggering 75% of our team's logged hours were spent not on SEO, but on managing the process of SEO. Client calls, internal meetings, reporting, scheduling tasks, chasing approvals, writing emails. It was a bureaucratic swamp. The work wasn't the work. The process was the work.
We were paying intelligent, creative people to be glorified project managers. The value-creation part of their role—deep strategic thinking, identifying market gaps, creating remarkable content—was squeezed into the remaining 25% of their time. The agency model, by its very nature, defaults to process over product. It has to. It’s the only way to manage a portfolio of clients at scale without the wheels coming off. But it’s also the reason it produces such mediocre, incremental results.
Our Contrarian Take: SEO Is A Solved Problem
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that SEO agencies don’t want to admit: the fundamentals of search engine optimisation are a solved problem. We know, with a high degree of certainty, what Google wants. It wants high-quality, topically relevant content that satisfies user intent, from a source that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). It wants a technically sound website and a clean user experience. It wants to see your brand being talked about on other reputable parts of the internet.
That’s it. That’s the game. The 'secret sauce' is now common knowledge. The challenge is no longer figuring out what to do. The challenge is executing it at a pace, scale, and quality that humans simply cannot sustain.
This is where agentic AI enters the frame. An agentic system doesn't need project management. It doesn't have meetings. It doesn't get distracted or need motivation. It simply executes a defined strategic workflow, relentlessly, 24/7/365. The future of marketing isn’t about having smarter humans; it’s about building smarter machines and elevating the remaining humans to become true strategists who direct them.
Building The Machine: The 620-Day GEO Engine