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A white-label SEO provider I'd been evaluating pitched a prospective client with this line: "Traditional SEO is dead. We're pivoting 100% to AI search optimization, and you should too." They lost the contract. The agency that won?
A Fortune 500 client of mine fired their agency two weeks ago. Not because organic traffic dropped. Traffic was actually up 4% quarter-over-quarter. The problem? Their brand had vanished from every AI-generated answer in their vertical. ChatGPT recommended three competitors by name.
A client of mine fired their SEO agency in February after discovering something alarming: their site ranked #2 for a competitive B2B keyword, but their organic click-through rate on that term had collapsed by over 50% in eight months. The agency kept sending cheerful ranking reports.
A mid-size ecommerce agency I consulted for fired their entire content team in January. Not because the writers were bad. The team was producing 40 blog posts a month, hitting every keyword target, earning decent rankings.