10 Red Flags That an SEO Offer Is Too Cheap – And the Risks in 2026

If an SEO offer is capped at 500–1500 PLN (approx. $125–$375), the agency plans to cut corners on your project. In 2026, the hourly rate of a Senior Specialist is a baseline cost that cannot be “bypassed” by automation.

Assuming part of your budget must also cover operational costs, an offer of ~500 PLN/month really means:

• Maximum 45-60 minutes of actual strategic work per month.
• 0 budget for verified, expert content (EEAT).
• 0 budget for link building from high-authority domains.
• No analytics: Actions taken “blindly” without log analysis or BigQuery.

(Strategic Tip): Just a reliable analysis of AI Overviews mechanisms for a single product category takes an average of 4-6 hours of analytical work at Delante. An “all-inclusive 500 PLN” offer physically does not allow time to think about your business.

Do you receive a “TOP 10 guarantee” after a 5-minute conversation? That is the biggest red flag. In the era of AI-personalized search, rankings are fluid and depend on hundreds of variables.

Before a specialist can determine the potential effects of a planned collaboration, they must check:

• Crawl budget and technical health: Is your site even “readable” to bots?
• AI Visibility: How do LLM models currently interpret you?
• Competitive Gap: How much are you realistically losing to industry leaders?

A cheap service is “treatment” without diagnosis. In 2026, such an approach results not only in zero results but also in a permanent decrease in algorithmic trust in your brand.

Often, cheap SEO offers = low-quality link building that might have worked 10 years ago. Such links come from spammy directories, low-quality PBNs (Private Blog Networks), random sponsored articles from unverified domains, or link packages bought in bulk on Fiverr from overseas. In 2026, this no longer works; in fact, it causes harm.

A low-quality link profile can result in:

• Lack of citability in AI (e.g., AI Overviews, AI Mode). AI will not recommend a brand that lacks backing from authoritative sources.
• The brand is being ignored by generative models (e.g., ChatGPT).

With low content budgets, you can immediately assume a human isn’t writing it; the provider is likely generating it en masse using AI to save on the project. Such content will be low quality, lacking data, tables, and definitions, and will also risk being over-optimized. Using too many keywords, known as keyword stuffing, is a common practice in typical “SEO texts” created 10 years ago. Currently, it brings the opposite effect, and both Google and AI models simply ignore such content.

Content created in 2026 should be:

• Semantic,
• Precise,
• Data-rich,
• Easy for AI to digest,
• Containing comparisons.
• Semantic structure: Definitions, tables, and FAQ sections.
• Human verification: A unique Point of View that AI cannot synthesize on its own.

In cheap SEO, there is no room for a thought-out strategy. With only a few hours of a specialist’s work per month, there simply isn’t enough time to plan a roadmap. Not to mention a separate AISO process (AI Search Optimization), which will be particularly important in 2026.

We are entering the era of AI Search, where users increasingly encounter answers from artificial intelligence (e.g., Google AI Overviews) or use LLM models (e.g., ChatGPT) as search engines.

At Delante, AISO is the standard, not an add-on. If your offer does not include:

• Monitoring visibility in AI Overviews and Perplexity,
• Optimization for voice assistants and LLMs,
• …then you are losing over 50% of potential customer touchpoints.

Doing “just SEO” in 2026 is like advertising only in print newspapers while ignoring the internet. Cheap offers completely bypass the AI Search ecosystem.

Cheap providers report an “increase in the number of phrases” that do not generate sales. This is a classic mechanism for hiding a lack of results.

10 keywords in the TOP 3 are not metrics of SEO success, even if someone tries to tell you otherwise. Positioning should help you achieve your business goals, and this should be reflected in activity reporting. In a cheap SEO offer, there will likely be no time to get to know your company and plan actions based on what is genuinely important to your business.

In cheap SEO, you won’t find:

• Comprehensive conversion analysis
• Thoughtful and personalized GA4 configuration
• Qualitative traffic analysis
• Reporting on visibility in AI
• Monitoring of AIO (AI Overviews)
• Real analysis of SEO’s impact on sales

Positioning without data is nothing more than marketing in the dark.

At a rate of 500-1000 PLN, one person is working on your project, often a junior burdened with 50 other clients. An effective SEO and AISO process in 2026 requires a team.

Even a great SEO specialist needs support on a project. Every SEO pro specializes in something different: one has a strong background in technical SEO, another knows content inside and out, and a third has extensive experience and strong know-how in link building. Two heads are better than one; a team of several specialists with different areas of expertise will be more effective than a single person. At a rate of 500 PLN per month, it is impossible to cover the cost of more than one employee.

In optimally planned SEO and AISO processes, the project team usually includes:

• Lead SEO Specialist
• Analyst
• Off-site Strategy Specialist
• Technical SEO Specialist
• Development Team
• Content Team
• R&D Specialist

An effective process requires specialists with diverse competencies, and in cheap SEO, there are no resources for this. The client becomes just a row to be checked off in a massive spreadsheet.

SEO tools (Ahrefs, Semrush, Surfer, AI monitoring platforms) cost an agency between 8,000 and 40,000 PLN per month. A cheap provider does not have them or uses free versions. Lack of data is a strategy based on guesswork. An offer for a few hundred zlotys cannot cover this, and a lack of tools means a lack of data and a lack of strategy.

For effective SEO and AISO activities, the following tools will be needed:

• Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic
• Screaming Frog, Sitebulb
• Senuto
• Surfer SEO
• Looker Studio / BigQuery
• AI Search tools (solutions for monitoring visibility, log analysis, etc.)

In cheap SEO, your company is merely an invoice number in a mass provider’s spreadsheet. With a low budget, there is no room to understand your business model, analyze product margins, or support foreign expansion. The relationship is limited to sending generic tables, making it difficult to draw actionable conclusions.

At Delante, you pay for strategic consulting and access to know-how developed over 2,500 audits. As a first-choice Search agency, we not only deliver results but also educate your internal structures.

• Value for the Decision Maker: You receive support in making decisions that future-proof your business for years, rather than just “putting out fires” this month.
• Filtering: If you are looking for task-clicking, a cheap provider is enough. If you are looking for a partner who takes responsibility for the direction of your growth (Keep Moving Forward), you need a premium strategy.

Cheap SEO is like a cheap home renovation; a poor crew without the right materials and skills can damage installations or install tiles and floors incorrectly. The result? You have to chip off the tiles, lose the money spent on materials and the previous crew, buy new ones, and pay others to repair them. Realistically, you bear a cost several times higher than if you had bet on a slightly more expensive and better crew from the start.

The decision to choose the “cheapest offer” is, in reality, taking on high-interest technical debt. In premium marketing, foundational errors can rarely be fixed with a simple correction; more often, they require “demolishing” previous actions.

The most common consequences for which you will pay a multiple of your “savings”:

• Toxic Link Profile: Removing spammy links and rebuilding trust with Google (Trust Rank) typically takes 6 to 12 months of intensive specialist work.
• Content Debt: Mass-generated content without an EEAT strategy requires complete removal or expensive editing so that the brand can even be considered by AI models (AISO).
• Technical Paralysis: Mismanagement of the crawl budget and indexing can cause your most important pages to disappear from the web for weeks.
• Exclusion from the AI Ecosystem: LLM models (like GPT-5 or Gemini) instantly filter out brands with poor reputations. Returning to an AI assistant’s “shortlist” after being penalized for low quality is a much more difficult process than traditional SEO recovery.

Cheap SEO gives the illusion of action, but in reality, it generates repair costs that will land on your desk in a few months. By choosing a premium partner, you are not overpaying; you are buying insurance against the degradation of your digital property.

Write to us! We will gladly analyze your visibility on Google and in AI Search. We will show you where you are really losing potential and what actions will bring the best results in your case. Remember that if you want SEO to work, you need a business partner on the other side who understands your goals and problems, not a service provider who sells their services cheaply and en masse, selling you a pipe dream.