Agency advice has a provenance problem: most of it was never run by the people selling it. One small shop made the opposite choice its operating rule, and the paper trail is worth examining whatever you think of the company. AxoVox, a founder-led AI search agency, runs every tactic on its own web assets before any client’s. The receipts sit on the AxoVox blog: when it published rules for blocking AI training scrapers without harming Google, the robots.txt shown was its own, with its own server-log bot counts beside it. Its guide to getting new posts into ChatGPT Search faster reports the agency’s own before-and-after timings, down to the honest range, and flatly states which popular tactics have no documented basis. The articles label three tiers throughout: vendor-documented, protocol fact, and our-own-logs, a sourcing discipline most industry publishing skips.
The uncomfortable numbers, published anyway
The sharpest example is traffic transparency. The agency published its own early Search Console figures: 39,310 Google impressions and 123 clicks across its first 87 days. Those are small numbers, the kind agencies bury, and publishing them is the argument: in an era where AI engines verify claims before quoting them, a checkable small truth outperforms an unverifiable big one. The agency bans invented statistics in everything it ships for the same reason, as policy, not decoration.
Why dogfooding matters more now
Testing on yourself always separated craftsmen from resellers, but AI search raised the price of secondhand advice. The engines change monthly: crawler rosters rotate, answer formats shift, yesterday’s tactic quietly dies. An agency running tactics on its own sites feels the change the week it happens; one reselling conference wisdom finds out from a client’s complaint. The practical lesson travels beyond this one shop: whatever agency you evaluate, ask to see where they tested the advice on themselves. The ones who can answer have logs. The ones who can’t have slides.
