You found a marketing agency! They have a nice website, good reviews, and their confident sales pitch convinced you. You signed a contract, paid an invoice, and handed over your brand and assets. Now content is showing up, your website is live, and everything looks just dandy.

But is it, really?

The marketing industry is not known for being transparent. With AI and easily outsourced work, it’s easier than ever for agencies to look like they’re doing more than they are, and harder than ever for clients to tell the difference. Here are four questions to ask before you assume everything is being delivered to you as promised.

Who Actually Built Your Website?

Web design is one of the most outsourced services in marketing, and most clients never know it happened. An agency sells you a website, takes your money, and then hands the work off to a freelancer on a gig platform like Fiver or a cheap overseas web design shop. The agency manages the relationship, marks up the price, and presents the finished website to you as their own work.

This isn’t always a disaster. Sometimes the work an agency outsources is OK. But often it isn’t, because the people doing the actual building have no relationship with you or your business, no understanding of your customers, and no accountability beyond delivering something that looks passable. They may not utilize best practices or good UX, and are probably not concerned about site sustainability and whether it can scale without a complete rebuild.

When something goes wrong (and something always goes wrong with a website eventually) you discover the problem. But the agency you hired doesn’t have the in-house expertise to fix it because they didn’t build it, the overseas developer is unreachable, and you’re stuck paying someone else to fix the work you already paid for once.

Before you hire anyone to build or redesign your site, ask them: does your agency build these websites, or do you work with outside helpers who have no real relationship to you? A good agency will answer that question without hesitation. A vague or evasive answer might clue you into something important.

Who (or What) is Actually Writing Your Social Media?

There is a significant difference between an agency that creates your social media content and an agency that generates unedited and unrefined content. The first requires someone who understands your business, your voice, your customers, and your community. The second requires a simple prompt and thirty seconds to copy and paste it.

AI-generated content is not necessarily “bad.” It can be a real time-saver. But if used exactly as it first comes out of the platform, it is obvious to anyone who knows what to look for. The writing may be smooth, but it’s also generic, seemingly enthusiastic but also empty feeling. It hits the right topics but doesn’t say anything that is specific to your business. The same social post with minor variations could belong to any one of your competitors.

There are other obvious signs too. AI loves to use the em-dash, a punctuation mark employed by the average human writer rarely if at all. Emoji patterns often feel off-brand and awkward. Phrases may look polished and grammatically correct but don’t necessarily sound like a human wrote them. If you read the social posts your agency wrote for you and they seem like they were written by someone who knows nothing about your business, they probably were.

Ask your agency to tell you about how they create content. Who writes the posts? Do they try to learn or create your voice? What does the review or editing process look like before a post goes live? If the answer involves lots of automated actions and little human judgment, that’s a good thing to know.

Is Your Content Actually Yours?

A lot of designers and agencies save time by creating templates for their content and distributing a variation of the same post, newsletter, or blog topic across their entire client list. If you’re a roofing company, you might be sending the same seasonal maintenance tips email blast that every other roofing, window, or shingle company they work with sends.

This is a problem. Generic content doesn’t accurately reflect your business. It doesn’t build a relationship with your audience. It can actually hurt your SEO results if search engines are seeing the same content duplicated across lots of sites.

Your marketing should be specific to you. Your social posts should sound like your business. Your newsletter should talk about what’s happening in your area. Your blog should say something your competitors aren’t saying too because your agency took the time to understand what makes you different.

If you think your agency might be using the same content for multiple clients, ask them. Your business deserves to have content that’s specific to you.

Is Your Website Actually About Your Business?

This is easy to miss because websites can look slick and professional while actually being pretty generic. Some agencies and web designers work from a rigid template layout, swapping out the logos, colors, and contact information while leaving the basic structure, content, and messaging nearly identical from one website to another.

In some industries this is a very pronounced practice, where entire sectors share websites that are clearly built from the same mold. We recently found a client’s site to contain contact info, identifying information, and anecdotal content from one of their primary competitors. Their marketing agency represented both companies and had simply copied and pasted content between the two sites without checking to make sure all appropriate information had been changed. If your website could pass for your competitor’s site except with a different logo on it, something has gone wrong.

Your website should reflect your actual business. It should illustrate your specific services, your real differentiators, your genuine voice, and accurate information about how you operate. It shouldn’t borrow language from a template that was written for a generic example of your industry. It shouldn’t describe services you don’t offer or omit the things that make you the best hire.

Look and read through your own website with fresh eyes. Does it sound like you? Does it accurately describe what you do and why someone should choose you over someone else? If it doesn’t, you should ask why.