My agency charges ₹40,000 a month. How do I tell if they are actually doing anything?

Most founders I talk to cannot answer this, which is the whole problem. You are not short of reports — you are short of a way to check the reports without trusting the person who wrote them. Below is what you can verify yourself in about an hour, what a fair price actually looks like in India right now, and when the honest answer is to stop paying anyone.

Quick answer if you are skimming

• You do not need their report. Open Google Search Console and GA4 yourself — if you do not have admin access to both, that is the finding.
• ₹10,000–25,000/month buys a small-agency SEO retainer; ₹30,000–75,000 buys mid-tier; ₹35,000–80,000 buys a full-service package for a small business. Above ₹1 lakh should mean e-commerce or competitive B2B, not just “more posts”.
• Ads management is usually ₹5,000–20,000/month flat excluding spend, or 10–15% of spend. If they bill you one number that hides the split, fix that first.
• Impressions, followers and “keywords ranked” are not results. Qualified leads, cost per lead and revenue are.
• If you cannot name one decision you made differently because of last month’s report, you are buying activity, not marketing.

What is a normal monthly price in India right now?

What should I be able to see myself, without asking them?

• Google Search Console: clicks and impressions, 6-month view. This is the one number an agency cannot edit.
• GA4: sessions by channel, and conversions by channel. Not total traffic — channel split.
• Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager: your own login, admin role, billing visible.
• Your domain registrar and hosting. If the agency holds the domain, you have a hostage situation, not a vendor.
• If any of these are “managed by us, we will send a PDF” — that is the answer to your question.

Which numbers mean nothing?

• Impressions and reach on their own. Cheap to inflate, unrelated to revenue.
• “Keywords ranked” with no volume or position attached. Ranking #1 for your own brand name is not work.
• Follower growth with flat enquiries.
• “Website health score” from a crawler tool. It is a tool’s opinion, not a business outcome.
• Hours logged. You bought an outcome, not a timesheet.

They send a 20-page report every month. What should I actually read?

• Page one, and only if it carries: leads, cost per lead, and revenue attributed — against last month and against the same month last year.
• The “what we did” list. Check three items at random against the live site. Did the page actually change?
• The “what we will do next” list. If it is identical to last month’s, nothing is being learned.
• Ask for one sentence: “what did we learn that we did not know last month?” A good team answers instantly.

What should the scope document say before I sign anything?

• Deliverables as countable nouns: 4 blog pages, 2 landing pages, 12 creatives — not “content support”.
• Who owns the accounts, the ad account, the creatives and the domain, in writing, during and after.
• Notice period, and what you get on exit: raw files, account transfer, documentation.
• Whether ad spend is inside or outside the fee, stated as a number.
• Reporting cadence and the exact metrics, named. If the metric is not named now, it will be chosen later to look good.
• GST treatment, so your ₹40,000 is not quietly ₹47,200.

Should I be paying extra for “AI search” or GEO yet?

• As a separate line item for a small business, usually not yet. Most of what works is ordinary SEO done properly, because pages that rank well are the ones AI engines tend to cite.
• What is worth doing, and is nearly free: run 10–15 customer-style questions through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini once a month. Write down whether you appear, who appears instead, and which sources get cited.
• Make pages easy to quote: specific claims, real numbers, clear question-shaped headings, short answers, FAQ and Organization schema.
• Be sceptical of GEO “scores” and dashboards. A lot of the loudest GEO content is published by companies selling GEO tools.
• If an agency quotes GEO as a premium add-on, ask what they will do that they are not already doing under SEO. The answer is often nothing.

When is the honest answer “do not hire an agency at all”?

• Monthly ad budget under ₹15,000–20,000. Below that, Meta campaigns do not get enough conversions to optimise, so you are paying a management fee to run a campaign that cannot learn.
• You have not sold the thing manually yet. Nobody can market a product whose pitch you have not tested on 20 real buyers.
• Your problem is operations — stockouts, slow replies, a checkout that breaks on mobile. More traffic makes that worse, not better.
• You need exactly one job done. Hire a specialist freelancer for that job.

How do I leave without losing my assets?

• Before you give notice: make yourself primary owner on Search Console, GA4, Google Ads, Meta Business Manager, the domain registrar and the hosting panel.
• Export GA4 and Ads data yourself. Download creatives and source files.
• Then give notice in writing, with a dated asset-handover list.
• Do not announce the exit before the access transfer is done. This is the single most common way founders lose an ad account.

What I’d actually do

• Spend one hour today getting admin access to Search Console and GA4 in your own name. Every other question gets easier after that.
• Email your agency one line: “which number should I judge you on in 90 days?” Keep the reply. If there isn’t one, that is your answer — a free external audit, from them or anyone else, is only useful once that number exists.
• Give any new engagement 90 days against that one number, with the scope written as countable deliverables, then renew or stop. No rolling contracts.