Before you sign another year, get a picture of how the market sees the business that does not come from the agency. If they wrote the scorecard, the renewal is a ritual. An independent pass takes a day after payment and does not turn into their next scope.
When is a renewal the wrong default?
When you cannot point to a baseline from last year that someone else wrote.
If the only report in the folder is theirs, you are renewing on trust plus activity metrics.
That is normal. It is also how retainers quietly outlive the work.
What can you see without logging into their ads account?
A lot. The site, the public search results, whether AI systems name you, the review profile, the competitor set, the hiring and trust signals on the open web.
That is the same data a serious buyer already uses.
Outerview stays on that side of the wall on purpose. If a finding needs their Google Ads login, it is their job, not the baseline.
What should the next brief contain?
Three things: where you trail named competitors, what is broken that a visitor can already see, and what can wait.
Urgency and effort, not a 40-slide recap of impressions.
If you cannot write that brief in a page, you do not have a baseline yet.
How does an independent audit change the conversation?
It gives you a document the agency did not author.
You can renew, switch, or cut scope against it. We do not sell the implementation, so the findings are not a disguised proposal. About is the independence rule. Methodology is how the scores are made.
How long have you got before the contract rolls?
As long as the notice period.
The audit itself is 24 hours after payment. A$5,500 inc GST in Australia, US$4,000 on the US page. One fee. No retainer. If the renewal is this month, order first and hold the signature until you have the file. The sample shows what the file looks like. You can still renew. You just renew against a baseline.