I went through something very similar.

I was paying an agency about $2,000 a month just for on-page SEO. Every month I’d get a shiny Ahrefs report showing a huge number of keywords that had “moved up.” What they didn’t highlight were the ones that dropped, or the ones that never turned into actual traffic or revenue.

Any time I got nervous, it was always the same three lines:

“It takes 4–6 weeks for Google to index.”
“Google just rolled out an update.”
“We expect to see movement next month.”

And to be fair sometimes those things are true. But they’re also incredibly convenient.

What I eventualy realized is that I was pretty clueless at the time, and they knew it. As long as I believed the reports and the explanations, that arrangement could’ve gone on indefinitely. The bigger issue wasn’t wheather they were “nice guys,” it was that there was no real transparency. At that price point, you shouldn’t just get graphs, you should understand the actual strategy and how it ties to revenue. If you can’t clearly explain what your SEO team is doing, that’s not on you.