Key takeaways
- Ask who writes the words. The gap between the senior people in the pitch and the writer assigned to your account is where agency relationships usually go wrong.
- Judge an agency on published work in your category, not on the deck. Ask for five recent live URLs and check who's credited on them.
- Case studies that quote traffic growth without a revenue, pipeline or traffic-value figure are the easiest number in marketing to inflate.
- On your final two, ask what they'd refuse to do for you. An agency that agrees with your whole brief has no judgment to sell.
You've sat through four pitches. All four showed you a content funnel diagram, all four mentioned thought leadership, and all four quoted somewhere between $5,000 and $12,000 a month, and nothing in any of those meetings told you which one can write about your product.
That's the problem with choosing a content marketing agency. The pitch is a genre, and after ten years of pitching against much bigger agencies I can tell you that performing it well says almost nothing about the work you'll get. What separates agencies is how they answer a handful of questions once the pitch is over, and those questions are below.
Ask who writes the words, and get a name
Plenty of agencies sell you senior strategists and staff your account from a freelance writer pool. That isn't automatically wrong, and good work does get made that way, but it becomes a problem when nobody tells you, because you priced the engagement expecting the people in the room.
So ask directly who writes the first version, whether they're employed or contracted, how many other accounts they carry and whether they'll still be on yours in six months. An agency with a clean answer gives it immediately. One that redirects to its process is telling you something too.
This matters more the more technical your product is. A generalist writer can produce a competent post about employee onboarding, but not a credible one about Kubernetes networking without a subject matter expert behind them, and your buyers will spot the difference in about two paragraphs. If you sell developer tooling or infrastructure, ask what happens when a topic goes past the writer's knowledge. The honest answer involves interviewing your engineers, and it's the first thing I'd expect any developer content marketing agency to say.
Read five live pages before you read the case studies
Case studies are the agency writing about itself, and published work is the product. Ask for five URLs published in the last six months for clients in a category like yours, then read them properly.
Does each piece take a position, or survey a topic without ever landing anywhere? Does it contain specifics like named products, numbers and dated events, or could any of their other clients publish it with a find-and-replace on the brand name? And does it sound like a person wrote it, or like something built to hit a word count?
That last check matters more every month. A lot of what agencies ship now is lightly edited model output, which reads fine, ranks for nothing and gets cited by no one. My rule is that AI can help shape a piece but should never supply its substance, which is the whole idea behind our Primary Source Content approach. If all five samples open with a definition of a term the reader already knows, you're looking at a content mill with a nice website.
Interrogate the traffic numbers
A case study headline like "organic traffic up 340%" is the easiest number in marketing to produce and the least useful one to receive. Traffic grows because a site started from nothing, because someone added a glossary that attracts students, or because one unrelated post went viral.
The follow-ups are simple. Traffic to what, and from which queries? Did it land on commercial pages or informational ones, and what happened to demo requests over the same period? An agency that measures its own work has those answers ready. It's why our dotCMS case study reports $172k+ in annual traffic value instead of a percentage, and why the Core dna work pairs its 227% traffic figure with the year it took and the 80% of new leads that came from organic search.
Then ask what they published for other clients that flopped, and what they changed afterward. Every agency with a few years of client history has misses, and the ones that can describe them are running an honest feedback loop. While you're at it, read their reviews somewhere they can't edit. Ours sit on G2 and are collected on our reviews page, criticism included, and I'd hold anyone on your list to the same standard.
Push past the AI search buzzwords
Your buyers are researching in chat windows now. G2 surveyed 1,076 B2B software buyers in March 2026, and 51% said they start software research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google, up from 29% in April 2025. Getting quoted in a generated answer isn't the same job as ranking, and structure, clear claims and being the primary source for a fact count for more than they used to.
The catch is that this has become the easiest thing in the world to claim, so push past the acronym. Ask how they'd structure a page to be quotable, how they'd measure whether your brand is being cited, and what they'd do differently for a query that returns an AI Overview. Google's own advice on hiring an SEO now suggests checking whether an agency's "GEO" advice lines up with Google's official guidance on generative AI features, which is a fair bar to hold them to. Vague answers are a reliable signal, because the topic is new enough that people either work in it or repeat what they read.
Ask where they build links, too. Google's spam policies treat buying links for ranking as link spam, and the site reputation policy covers third-party content placed on a strong domain mainly to borrow its rankings. The same Google page on hiring an SEO says plainly that you're responsible for the actions of any company you hire, so that risk lands on you, whoever sold it.
The shortlist question that decides it
Once you're down to two, ask each one what they wouldn't do for you. An agency with a point of view will tell you which of your ideas is a waste of money, which channel it wouldn't touch and which keyword it thinks you can't win yet, while an agency without one agrees with everything in the brief.
You're buying judgment. Every agency on your list can produce a competent 1,500-word post, so what you're paying for is someone who'll tell you when the plan is wrong, and that shows up in the sales process or not at all. Once you've picked, the contract terms and the first ninety days are their own job, and I've covered both in hiring a content marketing agency.
Ask for five URLs and a name before the next pitch
The agency worth choosing is the one whose published work and named writer still look good after the pitch is over. Before your next meeting, write down the five URLs you'll ask for and the name you want for whoever writes your first piece, and if an agency can't produce both inside a day, you've learned what you needed without spending anything. If you'd like to put us through the same test, book a discovery call and ask us for both.
Quick answers
Should I hire a specialist or a generalist agency?
A specialist if your product is technical or your buyers are practitioners, because content that doesn't hold up in front of an engineer costs you a deal rather than a weak post. The same goes for specialized jobs like a replatform, where a generalist won't know the redirect map is where rankings get lost (it's why we run SEO migration as its own service). A generalist is usually fine in broader categories where the buyer isn't judging your technical credibility through the content.
What's the difference between a content agency and a content marketing agency?
In practice, whether strategy is included. A content agency writes what you brief it to write, and a content marketing agency decides what to write, why and how it'll be found, then writes it. You're paying substantially more for that first half.
Do I still need an agency if we use AI to write?
Models have made producing text nearly free, so volume no longer sets anyone apart. What's scarce is a defensible position, original data and the judgment to know which topics are worth owning, which is why most teams using AI well still buy strategy and editing and just buy less production.
How do I check an agency's own SEO before hiring them?
Search for the terms they'd want to rank for and see whether they do. It isn't a perfect test, since some good agencies deliberately spend their capacity on clients, but an agency selling search visibility that has none invites the question of why.
Should I ask for a paid test piece?
Yes, as long as it's paid and briefed like normal work. A free spec piece shows you how an agency performs when it's auditioning, and a paid one on a topic you'd publish anyway shows you how it works on an ordinary Tuesday.
Is a ranking guarantee a red flag?
Yes. Google's own guidance says no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google, so an agency promising one is either targeting terms nobody searches or not being straight with you.
