I work for a healthcare brand, which i joined recently. We never had any structured data on website. When i checked with SEO agency, they say structured data is useless and they will not work on adding them.
Help me understand this please...
After watching this play out across multiple brands, here are the patterns. They show up together more often than not.
GEO, AEO, retrieval confidence, semantic completeness, brand citations, AI Overview optimization. Real concepts, often used to cover for not doing the basics. Ask them to walk you through meta tags, internal linking, and schema on your top ten pages. If they pivot back to AI Overviews instead of answering, you have your answer.
Sounds modern. Usually means they didn't do keyword research. Real intent strategy still requires a keyword universe mapped to funnel stages. Without that, "intent" is a way to avoid being measured.
They call it "replicating top-ranking structure." It's actually a guarantee you'll never outrank anyone, because you're producing a slightly worse version of what already exists. Originality and depth are what move pages up. Mimicry keeps you where you are.
The site already has hundreds of pages doing nothing. Updating, consolidating, and re-optimizing them is where the fastest ranking gains live. But it's invisible work that doesn't fill a content calendar, so the agency keeps publishing new posts that also do nothing.
Bought links, PBN networks, spammy directories. Moves authority scores for a quarter, then Google catches up. Disavowing the damage drops your domain authority and costs months of recovery. For YMYL categories, this is brand-level harm.
Because of these agencies, the genuinely good ones now have to spend their first three meetings proving they're different, and that's the real cost.