Sin #1: FAQ sections with no schema markup
This is the easiest one to spot and probably the most common. An agency selling "AI SEO services" will have a beautifully designed FAQ section at the bottom of their service page. It'll have a nice accordion. It'll answer questions like "What is AI SEO?" and "Why does it matter?". It'll look great.
And it'll have zero structured data behind it. No FAQPage schema. No JSON-LD. Nothing an AI search engine can extract or cite. It's a visual FAQ pretending to be a structured one.
This matters because FAQPage schema is the single most important AI SEO technique on the planet right now. Google explicitly flags pages with proper FAQPage markup as eligible for rich results. AI search engines treat marked-up Q&A as ready-to-cite content. It is the ABC of GEO. An agency selling AI SEO without using FAQPage schema on their own service page is like a chef selling cooking lessons from a kitchen that doesn't have a stove.
How to check: right-click any FAQ section, hit "View Page Source" (or Ctrl+U), then Ctrl+F and search for FAQPage. If nothing comes up, the FAQ is decoration, not infrastructure.
Sin #2: The fake portfolio
You'll see this one a lot. An agency homepage with a "Portfolio" or "Our Work" section showing six neat little project tiles. Each one has a project name like "Volex" or "Astro" or "Eagent" — names you've never heard of, that don't appear anywhere else on the internet, attached to nice-looking stock photography of laptops, tablets, water bottles, or someone sketching wireframes on an iPad.
Run a reverse image search on those photos. Every single one is a royalty-free stock image that's used by hundreds of other websites. The "project names" are made up. There is no Volex. There is no Astro. The agency hasn't actually built any of these things — they've just decorated their homepage with the appearance of having a portfolio.
Real agencies, when they have actual client work, show actual screenshots of actual websites, with the actual client's name (with permission), and a one-paragraph case study explaining what they did. If an agency's "portfolio" doesn't link to a single live website you can click through to and see, it isn't a portfolio. It's wallpaper.
Sin #3: Testimonials with stock-photo faces and made-up names
The corollary to the fake portfolio is the fake testimonial section. You know the format — four happy customers, all smiling at the camera, all with little quotes saying how brilliant the agency was. "[Agency Name] completely transformed our website! The team was super responsive!" Etc.
Run those photos through a reverse image search too. They're stock photos, every single one. The names are made up. The "Founder & CEO" job title (it's always "Founder & CEO," for some reason) refers to no actual company that exists. Sometimes the same stock photo appears on three different agency websites under three different names.
This isn't a small thing. It's deliberate fraud, dressed up as social proof. And it tells you everything about how the agency views its customers — as marks to be tricked, not relationships to be built. If an agency is willing to invent fake customers to win your business, what else are they willing to invent once they have your money?
Sin #4: The broken stat counter
This one makes me laugh every time. You'll be on an agency homepage and you'll scroll past a section that says something like:
0+ Projects Complete
0+ Happy Clients
0+ Years of Experience
0% Client Satisfaction
Those are supposed to be JavaScript animated counters that scroll up to a real number when you scroll past them. But the JavaScript is broken — or was never wired up properly — so they just sit there showing zeros. Forever. To every visitor.
This is on real agency homepages. Live, today, in 2026. From agencies that are charging real customers real money for "digital growth" services. They have not noticed that their own homepage is showing 0% client satisfaction. They have not fixed it. They have presumably been told by visitors and chosen to ignore it.
If an agency cannot keep their own homepage stats counter working, what do you imagine they're going to do with your website?
Sin #5: Dollar pricing on UK websites
I've seen this on multiple UK agency sites this year. Agency is registered in the UK. Phone number is a UK mobile. Address is a UK postcode. Talks about "UK businesses" all over the homepage. And then you scroll to the pricing section and the packages are all in US dollars. $49.99/month. $89.99/month. $149.99/month.
What this tells you is that the agency copy-pasted a website template (probably bought on ThemeForest), changed the logo and the headline, and forgot to localise the pricing. They couldn't even be bothered to swap the currency symbol on the homepage of their own business. That is the level of attention to detail you're paying for.
Sin #6: Templated city pages with copy-paste content
This one is sneakier and you have to know what to look for. The agency has a "Service Areas" section linking to pages like /service-areas/london, /service-areas/manchester, /service-areas/birmingham, and so on. Each city gets its own page. Looks great for local SEO.
Click through to two or three of them and read the actual content. It's identical. The exact same paragraph, just with the city name swapped. "[Agency Name] supports businesses in Manchester with high-performance websites…" then on another page "[Agency Name] supports businesses in Birmingham with high-performance websites…" Same words. Same structure. Same everything.
Google catches this trivially and treats it as thin duplicate content. It actively hurts the agency's ranking rather than helping it. They're doing local SEO badly enough that it's making things worse. And worse than that — if you ever hire them to do local SEO for your business, this is the work you'll receive. Templated rubbish with your town name pasted into someone else's paragraph.
Sin #7: Claiming a "Framework™" that doesn't exist
You'll see this on most agency service pages. They'll have a section called "Our Framework" or "The [Agency Name] Method™" — usually with a little ™ symbol next to it for credibility. Then they'll list four or five generic steps like:
- Discover & Plan
- Design & Develop
- Deploy & Optimise
- Deliver & Support
That's not a framework. That's just "we do a job and then we finish it" with extra words. There's no proprietary methodology, no novel insight, no actual differentiation. Anyone could write those four steps without thinking. The trademark symbol is decorative — they haven't actually registered anything because there's nothing to register.
Real agencies with real methodologies show their work. They publish detailed guides, they break down their actual process, they explain what they specifically do that others don't. The trademark symbol on a generic four-step process is the corporate equivalent of a bloke at a party telling you he's a "thought leader."
Sin #8: Talking about AI search without doing AI search
This is the main event. The whole reason this post exists.
You'll find an agency with an entire page dedicated to "AI Search Optimisation Services." Beautiful headline. Lots of buzzwords — AEO, GEO, AI SEO, semantic search, entity optimisation, the works. They'll talk about how AI is changing search. They'll mention ChatGPT and Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. They'll say their proprietary framework helps you stay visible in AI-powered search environments.
Then you check their actual page and it has:
- No FAQPage schema
- No definition boxes
- No comparison tables
- No statistics with sources
- No llms.txt at the root of their domain
- No AI crawler permissions in their robots.txt
- No author bylines
- No structured data of any kind beyond generic Open Graph tags
Their own AI SEO service page is invisible to AI search. The page they wrote to sell AI search optimisation services is the worst possible advert for their AI search optimisation services. If you can't even optimise your own page about optimisation, why would I let you optimise mine?
The 90-second test
OK, here's how to spot all eight of these in 90 seconds on any agency website. Open the agency's main service page (or AI SEO page if they have one) and run through this:
- Right-click → View Page Source → Ctrl+F "FAQPage". If nothing, sin #1 confirmed.
- Reverse image search the testimonial photos and portfolio images. Stock results = sins #2 and #3.
- Look at the stats counter section. If it shows zeros or hasn't animated, sin #4.
- Check the pricing currency. UK agency with $ pricing = sin #5.
- Click two service-area pages. Identical content with city name swapped = sin #6.
- Look for "Framework™" or "Method™" claims. Generic 4-step process = sin #7.
- Visit thedomain.com/llms.txt. 404 = they don't actually do AI SEO. Sin #8 confirmed.
That's 90 seconds. You can do it on the next agency that pitches you. You can do it on the one that's pitched you already. You can do it on Draxiq if you want — try it on draxiq.com and see what comes back.
Why I wrote this
Not to dunk on anyone specific. The patterns above are spread across most of the UK web agency market — it's not one bad apple, it's the orchard. I wrote this because real businesses are making real spending decisions based on agency websites that are essentially theatre. You deserve to know what to look for.
And if you do want to see what an agency that actually does this stuff looks like — instead of one that just talks about it — you're already on it. The Draxiq AI Search Optimisation page has all eight things the others are faking, plus a live animation of the schema being built and an AI engine citing draxiq.com as a source. The proof is the page.
— Graham
