Most of what an SEO agency does is analysis. That part just got a lot cheaper.
This is not an argument that agencies are a rip-off. Good ones earn their money. It is an honest breakdown of the three jobs in the work, which of them you can now do yourself, and which you should still pay someone for.
The three jobs inside an SEO retainer
Strip away the reporting template and every SEO engagement is the same three activities. They have very different costs, and until recently they were sold as one bundle because they had to be.
Measuring. This was always just a tool.
Where you rank, what moved, what your competitors hold, what Search Console says, whether the site is technically sound. A large part of a retainer is the agency's tool subscription passed on to you, plus the time to turn its screens into a PDF. You can hold this yourself for the price of a plan.
Deciding. This is the expensive part, and the valuable one.
Looking at all of that and working out what actually matters this month. Which keyword is close enough to be worth the effort. Whether a drop was Google or something you did. What to write next and when. This is judgement applied to data, it is what you are really paying for, and it is the part that has changed.
Doing. This still takes somebody's hands.
Writing the page, changing the title, fixing the technical fault, earning the link. An assistant can draft, brief and prioritise, and if it has access to your website through your own tools it can make changes too. But someone still has to decide it is right and ship it.
Why “just ask ChatGPT” has not worked so far
Plenty of people have already tried to replace the deciding part with an AI assistant, and got disappointing results. The reason is simple and it is not the model's fault: the assistant cannot see anything.
Ask it how to improve your SEO and it has no idea where you rank, what you nearly rank for, what your competitors hold, or what your Search Console has been trying to tell you for a year. So it returns the same generic advice it gives everyone: write good content, get some links, improve your page speed. True, useless, and indistinguishable from what it told the last person who asked.
The fix is not a better prompt. It is data. An assistant connected to your actual measurements answers a different class of question entirely, because it can name the keyword, the position, the gap and the date.
Don't know what these are? Don't worry, we've got you!
What you can genuinely do yourself now
- Diagnose a traffic drop. Rankings, the Google update timeline and Search Console compared in one pass, which is the work that used to justify a phone call.
- Decide what to write next. Built from your striking-distance keywords and the queries you get impressions for but have no page targeting.
- Prioritise technical fixes. Turning a list of 47 findings into the four that matter this month, in a brief your web company can act on.
- Keep a weekly discipline. The Monday review that everyone intends to do and nobody does, reduced to one question.
- Know whether AI assistants recommend you, which no agency was tracking for you two years ago because it did not exist as a problem.
What you should still pay a human for
Being straight about this matters, because a page that claims you never need help again would be selling you something.
- Earning links from real people. Relationships, PR, sponsorship, being genuinely worth writing about. No tool does this and no assistant can do it for you.
- Site migrations and replatforming. The mistakes are expensive, hard to reverse, and the sort of thing you only get right by having done it before.
- Manual penalties and recovery. Rare, high-stakes, and worth an expert.
- Genuinely brutal commercial markets. If your competitors employ full-time SEO teams, you are in a resourcing fight, and tooling alone will not win it.
- The writing itself, if you hate writing. Knowing what to write is now cheap. Writing something worth reading is still work.
What this costs
Plans start at £29 a month for three websites, 250 keywords tracked daily and 10 AI visibility questions, with unlimited competitors, the AI readiness scan, and security and domain health on every plan. The MCP connector, which is the part that lets your assistant read your data, is £5 per user per month.
Compare that against the measuring and reporting portion of a retainer, and then keep the money you were spending on the deciding part for the work that actually needs hands.