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Newspage Raw

Are you planning to sack your SEO agency and web devs and do it all yourself?

ended 07. October 2026

With AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT now able to check a website and say what needs fixing, some business owners are asking whether they still need to pay outside specialists.

We want to hear from you:

  • Are you considering doing your SEO and website yourself, or have you already made the switch?
  • What's pushing you: results slipping, the cost, or mistakes you've spotted with AI that your SEO or web team didn't?
  • Or do you think owners who ditch the experts will regret it?

Responses by tomorrow AM please.

4 responses from the Newspage community

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Tony SanchezVerified
Founder at Bridging Loan Directory
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I wouldn’t sack an SEO specialist or web developer simply because AI can now identify problems. What has changed is that business owners can challenge their advisers far more effectively.

I use AI regularly to look at SEO, content structure and website issues. It can flag things I might otherwise have missed and, importantly, helps me understand what I should be asking a specialist to fix.

That changes the relationship. You’re no longer completely dependent on someone telling you what is wrong with your own website.

But identifying a problem and implementing the right solution are different things. I’m happy using AI to investigate, prioritise and sometimes make straightforward changes, while still using specialists where the technical risk or expertise justifies it.

For me, AI hasn’t replaced experts. It has made it much harder for mediocre expertise to hide.
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Dave HuggettVerified
Founder at Lucid Foreign Exchange
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I've been running AI agents across my own site for several weeks now and the results have been genuinely impressive. Better rankings, much quicker fixes and above all a lot less money spent. What surprised me most was what it exposed about the SEO agency I'd been paying. It flagged significant errors and flaws the "experts" had missed for months, some of it showing worrying contradictions against what I'd been billed for. This was in the detail in the setup and structure of my website where things were far from optimised, especially relating to Ai search.

I don't thing its a case of ditching human support entirely. AI is brilliant at the mechanical work and diagnosing issues, but judgement, strategy and accountability are where a good human provider will still earn their fee. If you're paying a lot and getting little back though, run an AI audit on your own site first and you'll quickly find out whether your agency is earning its keep. That's worth knowing before you renew.

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Harvey DhillonVerified
Founder & CEO at Zmartly
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Some owners who ditch their SEO agency and web developer will regret it, and they'll be the ones who only counted the fee. Cancel the agency and the saving shows up in your accounts. The hours you then spend on the website yourself never appear there, because nobody sends you an invoice for your own time. So the real price of doing it yourself is whatever those hours would otherwise have earned you, in calls returned, quotes sent and paid work done. A change you make yourself can also go wrong, and putting it right then costs more of your hours or a specialist's bill, on top of any sales lost in the meantime. Before you cancel, put a price on an hour of your own time, count the hours the job really takes, and set that against the invoice. If doing it yourself still wins once your own hour has a price on it, that's a sound decision.
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Debbie PorterVerified
Managing Director at Destination Digital Marketing
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I would advise anyone thinking of sacking their SEO expert or web designer and replacing them with Claude, to think again.

If you’re a subject matter expert in anything at all, then open up your favourite AI tool and ask it to write you a blog on a topic that you know inside and out. Then count the errors.

It is easy to ask ChatGPT, Claude et al, a question and get an outputted answer and think to yourself, “that looks legit”. However, and frankly, you aren’t the best person to judge this. AI is notoriously confident at outputting well polished answers, but when questioned on details, will completely capitulate. In all aspects of life, if you want an honest answer to your questions, don’t ask a sycophant.

I have seen people destroy their websites within a matter of weeks by blindly following AI suggestions. It is always the human-being experts that have just been sacked that are then enlisted to get them out of the hole they dug themselves into. Ignore this warning at your peril!