How we ranked these, and what the evidence cannot tell you.
We read public customer reviews written between September and November 2026 and the client surveys we could trace to the publisher. We kept a complaint only when many independent people described the same thing, or a survey backed it. We do not name any company we read about, because individual reviews are one customer's account of one supplier.
Three limits matter. Review sites attract angry customers, so they show the shape of a failure and not how often it happens. The reviews we could read cover large vendors and small web shops, not careful boutique agencies. And we could not open Reddit, so no forum quote is used here. Treat this as a map of what to check, not a verdict on the whole industry.
The market signal: many clients are close to leaving.
The clearest number comes from the Setup 2024 Marketing Relationship Survey. Setup is the research publication of Squarespace, a website platform, and it surveys clients and agencies. It is a survey publisher in this article, not a company we reviewed. The survey covered more than 400 brands and was written up in January 2025. It found that 40% of clients expected to switch agency partners within the next six months. Dissatisfaction with delivery had risen to 48%, up 14 points. Clients also felt less understood, up 10 points on the year before.
We read the published write-up, not the full report. We use these figures as a signal about mood, not as a forecast of what your agency will do.
1. Paid, and cannot see what it did.
The most repeated complaint is a bill that arrives every month with no result a person can point to. Reviewers describe no calls, no leads and no clients, sometimes over years, and a supplier that cannot say what was done instead.
The fix is to agree the proof before the work starts. Ask which two or three numbers will move, who measures them, and whether you can open the source yourself. A monthly PDF is a summary written by the party being judged. Live data from the tool that recorded it is harder to bend. We show one example in our Epic case.
See how that looks in practice in our Epic reporting case.
2. Locked into a contract.
Many reviewers say they could not cancel, were told to pay out a long term, or found a cancellation ignored. The pattern is the same: easy to join, hard to leave.
Ask for the notice period in plain words, what happens to your ad accounts, site and files at the end, and whether the term renews on its own. Month to month with a short notice period is a reasonable thing to ask for.
3. Charges you did not expect.
Reviewers report being billed for services they did not use, for periods when nothing was running, or at a higher plan they never approved. Whatever the cause, the lesson is simple: a price should be the price.
Ask for every recurring cost in the quote, including tools, ad management fees and hosting. Ask who can change the plan, and that any change needs your written yes.
4. Sold one thing, delivered another.
Clients describe a gap between what the sales team promised and what the delivery team did, and some describe leads or work that did not match what they bought. The person who made the promise is rarely the person who keeps it.
Ask who sold it and who will build it, and put the promised scope and outcome in the contract, not only in the pitch deck.
5. Nobody answers.
Repeated unanswered requests and being passed between departments appear again and again. The earlier Setup 2023 survey of more than 300 marketers found the top client wish was for the agency to communicate more effectively.
Ask for one named contact and a reply time you can hold them to, for example one working day. Then test it during the sales process. How they answer before you pay is the best preview you will get.
6. The team changes after the pitch.
A smaller group of reviewers say their account manager changed several times, or that effort fell once the first months passed. The senior people pitch and others deliver. The evidence here is thinner than for the five above, and we found no first person account of juniors replacing seniors, so we treat that last part as unproven.
Ask who exactly will work on your account, and how you will be told if that changes.
7. Reports that do not tell you the truth, or anything at all.
Clients say they pay a lot and cannot tell what was done, or that the numbers in a report do not match what they see themselves. The survey figures we found on this come from a vendor with something to sell, so we do not quote them.
Ask for access to the source tools, such as Search Console and your analytics, from day one. Ask for a short list each month of what was done and what changed, tied to enquiries or sales, not impressions.
8. The website never gets finished.
Reviews of small web studios describe projects abandoned after long delays, sites that did not work at handover and code that stayed with the builder. These vendors are small and low rated, so they show how a failure looks, not how common it is.
Ask for a launch date, a payment schedule tied to milestones, and written confirmation that you own the code, content and domain. If a build has already stalled, our rescue check is a place to start.
If that has already happened, read our rescue check for abandoned sites.
The newer worry: AI took the clicks, and everyone sells an AI fix.
Owners now ask two things. Is search still sending visitors, and is the agency selling an AI package that proves nothing? On the first, the best primary evidence is a Pew Research Center analysis of the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025. When a results page showed a Google AI summary, people clicked a link in 8% of visits, against 15% when it did not. Clicks on a link inside the summary itself were 1%. Only 18% of the searches in the study showed a summary.
Read that with its limits. It is US adults, mostly informational searches, and it compares visits with and without a summary, so it shows a pattern and does not prove that AI caused a drop in any one site. Other studies of informational queries point the same way, but none of them tells you how local or buying searches behave in your market.
On the second worry, trade press in 2026 quotes practitioners calling unproven AI search packages snake oil, and notes that how AI tools pick their sources is still largely a black box. A Gartner analyst, quoted in April 2026, said CMOs still are not seeing cost savings in agency fees from AI. The honest position is to ask any agency selling AI visibility what they measure, where you can see it and what they will not promise. Nobody can guarantee a place in an AI answer.
Eight questions to ask before you sign.
Put these to every agency, including us. Write down the answers and keep them with the contract.
- Which two or three numbers will move, by when, and who measures them?
- Can I open the source data myself, from day one?
- What is the full monthly cost, including tools, ad management and hosting?
- How do I leave, and what notice do you need?
- Will I own the domain, the ad accounts, the code and the content at all times?
- Who sold this, who will do the work, and how will I be told if that changes?
- Who is my one contact, and what reply time is in writing?
- What will you not promise, and why?
Who wrote this, how and why
Who: Written by the DLVX team under founder Wil Delvaux. DLVX sells the kind of work discussed here, so we have an interest in the topic.
How: Figures come from our published price list and the sources linked on the page, with the checked date shown. Research and drafting use AI assistance, and a person at DLVX checks the facts before publishing.
Why: Buyers ask these questions before a project starts. We wrote the answer down so it can be checked and cited.
Sources and downloads.
Sources are linked directly. Market prices and engine answers can change, so use the checked date when citing this page.
- Setup (survey publisher, Squarespace), 2024 Marketing Relationship Survey write-up, 7 January 2025
- Setup (survey publisher, Squarespace), what clients want from agency partners, 26 March 2024
- Pew Research Center, Google users and AI summaries, 22 July 2025
- Public review sites, first pages of customer reviews, September to November 2026 (vendor pages not linked, we do not name vendors)