Why Your Agency Recommends What It Sells
I’ve lost clients to bigger agencies.
Branding and website clients, mostly. Good businesses I’d started working with, who took a meeting with a larger firm and came away convinced that what they really needed was SEO and Google Ads. A lot of it.
Those agencies were better at selling than I was. I’ll give them that.
What they weren’t better at was understanding the business in front of them.
The hammer and the nail
There’s an old line about how, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
A traditional agency isn’t built around your problem. It’s built around a team. An SEO department, a paid media department, a production team, each with salaries that need a steady flow of signed work to cover them.
So the agency doesn’t show up asking what’s broken. It shows up with what it sells.
Nobody in that room is being dishonest, and that’s what makes it hard to see. The account manager believes in SEO. The ads team believes in ads. They’ve watched both work for other clients. When a business owner sits down across the table, the recommendation isn’t made up on the spot.
It was made when the agency hired its staff.
A firm with a video department finds that you need video. A firm with a paid media team finds that you need paid media. The recommendation comes from the org chart, and the contract gets signed before anyone has asked how the business actually makes money.
What it costs to find out later
Some of those clients came back to me. A year later, sometimes two.
By then they’d spent real money. Expensive ad campaigns. Full website redesigns. The activity was real. The results they’d been hoping for weren’t there.
Those were hard conversations. Nobody needed to hear “I told you so,” and nobody said it. They were hard because the damage was already done.
Undoing it would cost more than doing it right the first time.
The problem wasn’t effort. It was order. They jumped straight into building and production before anyone had settled what the business needed to say, or to whom. Everything got built on a foundation that was never poured.
The hammer is changing
Here’s the part that makes this more urgent than it used to be.
The tool those agencies sold hardest is the one changing fastest.
People don’t search the way they did a few years ago. They type or speak longer questions, the kind you’d ask a person, and more and more often they get the answer right on the results page without visiting anyone’s website.
When Pew Research tracked the actual browsing of 900 U.S. adults in 2025, people clicked a regular search result in 8% of visits when Google showed an AI summary, compared to 15% when it didn’t. And the longer the question, the more likely the summary: 8% of one- or two-word searches got one, versus 53% of searches ten words or longer.
SEO isn’t dead. But a playbook built on ranking for clicks is aimed at a behavior that’s shrinking.
Here’s what I think that means for a business owner. When an AI summarizes who does what in your market, it can only repeat what you’ve made clear. If your own website can’t say plainly who you serve and why you’re different, there’s nothing clear for anything to repeat.
Clarity used to help you convert once someone found you.
It’s becoming how you get found.
Where the big agency still fits
The big agency model serves some businesses well. If you’re spending serious money on media across several markets, or you have a dozen stakeholders who need account managers, reporting, and a full team behind every decision, a large agency can do things a small team can’t.
The problem isn’t size. It’s order.
A model that has to sell a solution before it understands the problem will keep selling the solution it’s staffed for. That was a costly habit when the ground was stable. When the ground is shifting every few months, it’s worse, because the thing you signed a twelve-month contract for may not be the thing that works six months in.
That’s where smaller teams have the edge now. Small isn’t a virtue on its own. The advantage is that a small team can start with the question instead of the answer, and change direction without restaffing a department.
AI makes producing things faster and cheaper every month. What it doesn’t do is decide what’s worth producing.
That’s the work that’s getting scarce.
The question to ask
If you’re sitting across from any agency right now, mine included, there’s one question worth holding onto.
Is this recommendation coming from my business, or from their org chart?
If they’ve proposed a solution before asking how you make money, who your best customers are, and why those customers choose you, you already have your answer.
If this sounds familiar, that’s what the Discovery Phase is for. It includes a focused diagnostic session and a written Clarity Brief you keep whether you work with me or not.
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