Delivery guarantee
What you do not pay for, if we do not deliver
If we do not deliver the work we agreed to deliver, for reasons within our control, you do not pay for the undelivered work. Here is exactly what that means and what it does not cover.
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The guarantee
If we do not deliver the work we agreed to deliver, for reasons within our control, you do not pay for the undelivered work.
That is the whole of it. It is narrower than the guarantees some agencies advertise, and unlike most of them it covers something we can actually be held to.
The reasoning
Why we guarantee delivery instead of results
A guarantee is only worth something if it covers a thing the person making it controls. We do not control Google, Bing, an AI assistant, your competitors, your market or your sales team. Guaranteeing an outcome that depends on all six would be a promise we could not keep, so it would arrive with a page of exclusions that quietly cancel it.
What we do control is whether the work happens: whether the audit is done, the pages are written, the build ships, the campaigns run, the reports arrive, and whether all of that happens on the schedule we agreed.
That is a narrower promise. It is also the one that protects you against the failure that actually happens most often — paying a retainer for months and being unable to point at what it bought.
The boundary
What a result depends on, and how little of it is ours
A promise is worth only the part the promiser controls. The work is entirely ours. The outcome is shared with parties who signed nothing and answer to nobody here, which is where the guarantee has to stop.
Ours, and therefore guaranteed
- Whether the audit is done and the pages written
- Whether the build ships and the campaigns run
- Whether reports arrive on the schedule agreed
- Redoing work that missed the standard we set
Not ours, and never promised
- Google and Bing, which change without notice
- AI assistants deciding what to cite
- Your competitors, acting independently
- Your market, and what it does next
- Your own sales process, after the lead arrives
Scope
What is covered
Every engagement begins with a written scope that names the deliverables and the schedule. The guarantee applies to that document. If a deliverable is not in it, it is not covered — which is why we write scopes in specific terms rather than as service categories.
- Deliverables named in the agreed scope
- Milestones and dates we committed to
- Reports and reviews at the agreed frequency
- Work we agreed to redo where it did not meet the standard we set
Exclusions
What is not covered, stated as plainly as the promise
A guarantee with hidden exclusions is not a guarantee. These are ours, in the same size type as the commitment.
- Search rankings, traffic, leads, sales, revenue or return on ad spend — we do not guarantee outcomes, only delivery
- Appearance or citation in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity or any answer engine
- Delays caused by waiting on your approvals, content, access or decisions
- Third-party platform outages, policy changes, account suspensions or algorithm updates
- Work that changed because you changed the scope, which we handle by re-scoping rather than by credit
- Media spend paid to advertising platforms, which is never ours to refund
- Results affected by changes you made to the site or accounts without telling us
Questions
Fair questions about the guarantee
Why do you not guarantee results?
Because we do not control them. Search engines change without notice, competitors act independently, markets move, and your own sales process affects whether a lead becomes revenue.
An agency that guarantees a ranking or a lead volume is either not being honest with you or has written the guarantee so narrowly that it will never pay out. We would rather guarantee something we can actually be held to.
What counts as "within your control"?
Work that depends only on us doing it: the audits, the pages, the builds, the campaigns, the reports and the schedule we agreed to.
It does not cover delays caused by waiting on your approvals, access we were not given, third parties we do not control, or scope you changed. Those are dealt with by adjusting the schedule, not by charging for work that did not happen.
How do I invoke it?
Tell us, in writing, what was not delivered. We will either deliver it within an agreed window or remove it from the invoice.
In practice this should never be a formal process. If we are behind, you should already know, because we will have told you before you noticed.
Ask us the hard version of this question
Bring a scenario to the call and ask whether the guarantee would cover it. A commitment nobody stress-tests is not worth much.
Prefer to talk it through? Book a strategy call
Last updated · Published on owner authorisation by Zubair Afzal