Most agencies should not. Some absolutely should, and the difference is measurable. Here are the seven questions, in the order that decides it. Answer them with the free audit and ten minutes of your own checking, before you talk to anyone who sells websites, including us.
Last updated: October 9, 2026
Can a crawler read the site without running JavaScript?
This is question one because it ends the discussion if the answer is no. Thirteen percent of the agency sites we audit hand a crawler an empty page. Those sites cannot be fixed by adding schema or writing content; the machine never gets far enough to see either. If your audit says the site needs rendering, switch. Not because your vendor is bad, but because the thing they built cannot do the job.
If the answer is yes, keep going. Most sites pass this one.
Does AI name you in your own market?
Run the seven prompts a buyer would type, through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google. The audit does this for you and shows who got named instead. Forty-three percent of agencies are never named once.
Never named is not by itself a reason to switch vendors. It is a reason to fix the things on the checklist, most of which are free and most of which your current vendor can do if you hand them the list. Named in most prompts is a reason to stay put and stop reading this article.
Are the fundamentals in the code?
Three yes-or-no questions for your vendor. Does the site emit InsuranceAgency schema? Does it emit Person schema for each producer with their license as a credential? Does robots.txt allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot?
Sixty-eight percent of agency sites have some schema; only 35 percent use the InsuranceAgency type; a meaningful share block an AI crawler by accident. A vendor who answers these three in one email is worth keeping. A vendor who cannot answer them, or answers with a paragraph about design, is telling you something.
Who logged in last, and when?
Open the admin. Look at the last edit date. If it is more than six months ago, your site is not being maintained, and the honest question is whether anyone in the agency will ever do it. Producers change, hours change, the new carrier appointment never made it onto the page. A stale site reads as an abandoned business to the machine.
This is the question that turns most switches. The agency is not unhappy with the vendor. It is unhappy with the job, and the job is the maintenance. Some vendors solve that with a ticket queue. We solved it by taking the login away entirely, which is either exactly what you want or a dealbreaker, and you know which.
Is there a page for every line you write?
A single services page listing auto, home, life and commercial gives AI nothing to cite. If your vendor’s template does not support one page per line with room for real local content, that is a structural limit, not a fixable one. If it does and you have never filled them, that is on the agency, and switching vendors will not change it.
What does leaving actually cost?
Less than the vendor’s cancellation email implies.
Your domain is yours. Your Google Business Profile is yours. Your reviews are yours. A competent replacement points the domain, keeps the same address and phone everywhere, and redirects the old page addresses to the new ones so nothing that ranked goes dark. The switch itself is a day of your time and a week of overlap. Anyone who tells you that you will lose your rankings is either describing their own migration process or hoping you do not check.
What you may lose is content, if it lives only in a builder you cannot export from. Ask for an export before you cancel anything. If the vendor will not provide one, that tells you the answer to question four as well. The step that actually goes wrong is email, since it almost always runs on the same domain; we walk through that in do you own your agency website.
What does staying cost?
The one nobody measures. Every month the machines recommend somebody else, that is a buyer who was ready to call and called the agency down the street. You do not see it on any invoice, which is why it is easy to carry for years.
If you want a number to hold your current site against, we published measured lead counts from four live agency sites, with the counting rules, in how many leads an insurance agency website should get. Count your own the same way before you compare.
Here is our honest position, since we sell a replacement and you should know where we stand. If your site passes question one and AI names you in most prompts, stay with your vendor and hand them the checklist. If it fails question one, or nobody has logged in since last year and nobody will, we build the replacement before you pay so you can compare it finished against what you have. $150 a month if it is better, $250 with monthly content. Nothing if it is not.
Run the audit first either way. It is the same three minutes whether you stay or go.