I still remember the invoice: £38,500 for one month of 'SEO'. It wasn't a supplier invoice. It was the summed cost of my own team — salaries, software, and data — for a single client campaign that was going nowhere fast. The rankings were flat. The traffic was anaemic. The client was getting twitchy. And I was the one who had to stand in front of them and justify the expense.
That was the moment the agency SEO model broke for me. Not in theory, but in painful, stomach-churning practice. We were a successful agency, but success in the agency world often means mastering the art of plausible deniability. We were selling time, activity, and twenty-page reports, but we weren't selling what the client was actually buying: outcomes.
I looked at that £38,500 bill and realised we were trapped in a cycle of diminishing returns. We were hiring more people to produce more activity to justify fees that were delivering less and less impact. It was a model built for scale, but it was a scale of inefficiency. I decided to kill it.
To understand why I dismantled our team, you first need to understand the lie at the heart of the traditional agency SEO department. It’s a structure replicated in almost every agency in London, from the network giants to the boutique independents. It’s a factory floor model designed in a pre-agentic era.
First, you have the Head of SEO. They're on £80k-£110k. Their job is client management, strategy oversight, and PowerPoint creation. They spend most of their time in meetings, reassuring clients that the plan is working, even when the data says otherwise.
Under them, you have the SEO Strategist or Manager. Let's call it £50k-£70k. They do the 'real' work: keyword research, technical audits, and content planning. They are permanently swamped, juggling five clients and a dozen spreadsheets. Their primary output is a plan.
Then comes the assembly line. The Content Writer (£35k-£50k), tasked with churning out blog posts based on the Strategist's briefs. They are measured on word count, not on whether the content actually ranks. Next, the Digital PR or Link Builder (£30k-£45k), who spends their days spamming journalists with irrelevant pitches, hoping one in a hundred lands a low-quality link.
Add in £5k+ per month for the essential software stack — Ahrefs, Semrush, SurferSEO, a crawling tool like Screaming Frog, and a PR database like Roxhill. Before you've written a single word or built a single link, you are burning over £25,000 a month in operational cost, just to keep the lights on. For that £38,500 project, this was our reality. We were busy. We were producing 'deliverables'. But we were achieving nothing of substance.
The fundamental flaw is one of incentives. The model is built to bill for hours and activity. It rewards complexity and headcount. A ten-person team justifies a larger retainer than a three-person team, regardless of which one gets better results. Take a brand like Ocado. Their SEO will be run by a large, expensive team executing a vast, complex strategy. But how much of that activity truly moves the needle, versus simply justifying the agency's six-figure retainer? The structure is the strategy, and the structure is inefficient by design.
My contrarian bet was simple: could a fully autonomous, agentic workflow not only replace this expensive, bloated team but outperform it?
This wasn't about replacing people with a single AI tool. This is the simplistic, wrong-headed way most of the industry views AI — as a better typewriter. I wasn't looking for a tool to help my team write blog posts faster. I wanted to build an engine that made the entire team redundant. Not to save money, but to get better results.
An agentic workflow, by definition, is a system of interconnected AI agents that can reason, plan, and execute complex tasks without human intervention. Instead of a human analyst, a strategist, a writer, and an outreach specialist, you have a sequence of agents performing those functions autonomously.