Every AI agency pitch deck has a number in it. A percentage saved. A count of clients served. A multiple returned.
Almost none of them come with a way to check them.
That is not always dishonesty. A lot of it is habit. Marketing writes a number once. Nobody runs it again. By the time it reaches your sales call, it has been repeated so often it sounds like a fact.
Your job before you sign anything is to turn each claim back into a question. Not "is this true" in the abstract. "What would I need to see to believe this line?"
Below is the question for each type of claim you will actually meet. And what a real answer looks like, next to a dodge.
ROI and percentage claims
"We deliver a strong ROI." "Clients see meaningful time savings." These are the most common lines in this industry. They are also the hardest to check from a deck alone.
ROI is a ratio of two numbers you cannot see. What the client spent. What improved because of it.
Ask three things.
What is the baseline this percentage is measured against, and who measured it? The agency, or the client?
Is this figure an average across every client? Or the best result, picked out to lead the pitch?
Can they show you the calculation, not just the output?
A real answer names the metric. Something like "support tickets resolved without escalation". It gives the before value, the after value, and the time window. A dodge restates the percentage in a new sentence and moves on.
If a number cannot be recalculated by someone outside the agency, treat it as marketing copy. Not evidence.
That is a general rule, not just ours. It is also why we keep a public claims registry for our own numbers. Anyone can re-run the command that produced them rather than take our word for it.
Client counts and "trusted by" claims
"Trusted by dozens of businesses" is a headcount claim. Headcount claims are cheap to inflate, because almost nobody asks for the list.
Ask for it anyway. Not full case studies. Just names, or a breakdown by category you can sanity-check.
A roster far larger than the agency could plausibly service should prompt a follow-up question. Ask what "client" means in that count. A one-off call, a monthly retainer, and a free trial can all get bundled into the same number.
Then ask whether the count is active clients right now, or every client the agency has ever had. Including the ones who left soon after signing.
Both are fair things to say. They are different claims. An agency confident in its numbers will tell you which one you are looking at, without being asked twice.
Testimonials
A testimonial with a first name, a stock photo, and no company is not evidence. It is a placeholder nobody swapped out.
Ask for the person's LinkedIn. Or ask to speak to one reference client directly. A legitimate agency has done this before and has an answer ready.
An agency that gets cagey when you ask has told you something. Even if it never says it out loud.
We keep named testimonials off our own site until we have real, permissioned ones from finished work. Same reason. A name you cannot check, attached to a quote, is worse than no quote at all.
Case studies and outcome claims
Case studies sit in a genuinely awkward spot. Most agencies cannot name the client, because most client contracts have confidentiality clauses. That is normal, not a red flag by itself.
What matters is whether the claim inside the case study is still checkable with the name removed.
"This client saved several hours a week" should come with the task, the period, and how it was measured. If the agency cannot answer those follow-ups without the client's name, the anonymising is hiding the mechanism, not just the identity.
That is the part worth being wary of.
Guarantees
A guarantee is only as real as what happens when it is not met.
"We guarantee results", with no defined number and no defined consequence, is not a guarantee. It is a sentence.
Ask three things. Guaranteed against what pre-agreed number? Measured by whom? And what happens contractually if it is missed: a refund, extra work at no charge, or nothing at all?
If the answer to the third one is vague, the guarantee was never a real commitment. It was a persuasion device.
A pattern we ran into ourselves
While building our own checking process, we came across an agency carrying a different ROI number on its homepage than on its case-study page. Both read as the same client engagement. Neither page linked to the other. Neither cited a source.
Probably not dishonest. Most likely one page got updated and the other did not.
But it is exactly the kind of thing a quick cross-check catches and a first read-through does not. If an agency cannot keep its own numbers consistent across its own pages, notice that before you rely on any of them.
A free way to run this check yourself
We built a short, free tool for exactly this: the AI claims checker.
Paste in the claims from a pitch deck or a website. It walks you through the same questions above, one claim type at a time. You leave with a specific list of what to ask for, instead of a vague feeling of doubt.
No sign-up. Not gated behind a call.
What we do differently, and how to check that too
We would rather you hold us to the same standard than take our word for it.
Every number-bearing claim we publish is recorded with its source and the exact method to re-derive it, and we will hand that over for any figure you ask about. If a number of ours cannot be checked that way, we do not publish it.
That is a low bar. It should be the bar for anyone you are about to pay.
Want a second pair of eyes on an agency's pitch before you sign? Or to run this same checklist against your own shortlist, with someone who does this for a living?
Talk to us. Bring the deck. Bring the numbers that made you suspicious. We will work through them together, no obligation either way.