The Evidence Standard
What We Won't Sell You
Every agency has a services page. This is the opposite.
These are things we could charge you for. Plenty of agencies do. We don't, because when we went looking for the evidence behind them, the evidence pointed the other way.
If someone has sold you one of these, you're not stupid. They're well marketed. They're just not supported.
1. Guaranteed rankings
Nobody can guarantee a search position. Anyone who does is either not telling you the truth, or quietly guaranteeing terms nobody searches for.
We guarantee the work. Every input, in writing, with a credit if we miss. And at month six, if we've delivered everything and it hasn't moved, we re-diagnose or part ways. That's in the contract.
2. "AI SEO" and GEO packages
The peer-reviewed benchmark on this, C-SEO Bench, published at NeurIPS in 2025, tested the standard tactics and found they produced close to zero gain, frequently had a negative impact, and that ordinary retrieval ranking was significantly more effective. A separate study found the rewrites actually reduced how often pages were retrieved at all.
Make sure AI crawlers can reach your site, which is the one lever with real evidence behind it, then do the organic work properly. That is what determines whether an AI cites you.
3. llms.txt files
A study of 137,000 domains found 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests in a month. Of the requests they did get, AI crawlers were 1.1%. SEO audit tools were 21.7%.
The file is mostly being read by other SEO tools.
Nothing. It takes ten minutes if you want one, and we'll add it for free. We won't put it on an invoice.
4. Schema markup, sold as a ranking factor
From Google's own structured data policy page, word for word: a structured data manual action means a page loses eligibility for rich results, and "it doesn't affect how the page ranks in Google web search."
Schema earns you the stars, the FAQs, the extra real estate. It does not move your position.
Ship it properly, for eligibility, and describe it honestly.
5. Click manipulation, CTR bots, "NavBoost hacking"
The leaked documentation everyone quotes for this also shows the system counts distinct users and de-duplicates by voter token. And under oath in the Google antitrust trial, the engineer who built it was handed the proposition that clicks are the most important signal and answered: "The most important, that observation, no."
It also breaches Google's terms.
Earn the click, and make sure the page answers the question so nobody bounces back.
6. Fifty backlinks a month
Google's own method for combining links treats sources that share a footprint with a maximum, not a sum. It was designed specifically so one publisher can't vote fifty times. Fifty links from a network score roughly like one.
One genuinely independent placement a quarter, and the rest of the budget into mentions and reviews, which are counted separately and which almost nobody is working.
7. "E-E-A-T optimization"
There is no E-E-A-T patent. It's guidance for Google's human quality raters, a description of what good looks like, not a mechanism you can optimize against.
Build the actual trust signals: real reviews, real credentials, real authorship. Those show up in mechanisms that are documented.
Why tell you this?
Because you've probably paid for at least one of them.
And because an agency that will tell you what doesn't work is more useful than one that agrees with everything you suggest. We'd rather lose the line item than the trust.
See what we do sell.
The services that survive the evidence test, and what each one is actually for.
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