The agency that gives away the thinking

An agency that refuses to enter awards discovers that an AI system looks at award shortlists when recommending agencies. It is a small, almost comic predicament. Candour has made a point of avoiding the trophy circuit. Now one of the systems it studies appears to treat that circuit as useful evidence. What should an honest search agency do with an inconvenient result?

That question gets close to the appeal of Search with Candour, the weekly podcast published by the Norwich agency. Search marketing is full of people explaining what everybody else should change. Here, the advice sometimes comes home.

The missing Monday

Mark Williams-Cook started the show in 2019. Its early episodes tackled subjects such as Google Shopping, browser tracking and algorithm updates. These were the moving parts that made a marketer’s Monday more complicated than Friday had suggested. A recurring show gave that uncertainty a place to go.

There was a break before Jack Chambers-Ward took over. In a Majestic panel discussion, Jack described maintaining the weekly schedule after the handover. The January 2022 season opener introduced him as co-host. Keeping a show going required someone to own it.

Jack’s qualifications are entertainingly varied: an astrophysics degree, voice-acting training and comic-book writing. He also hosted Sequelizers, a podcast about repairing bad movie sequels. Williams-Cook heard it before recruiting him. By October 2026, Apple Podcasts listed 381 Search with Candour episodes. The archive is substantial enough to browse by problem rather than consume in order.

Beautiful is only half the brief

The podcast belongs to a business with a longer history. Candour Agency Ltd was incorporated in 2013 under the name Applin & Co Ltd. The agency announced its move from ApplinSkinner to Candour in 2018. The new name expressed a working preference for frankness and collaboration.

The rebrand followed a useful piece of customer research. Clients expected attractive work from a design agency and commercially effective work from a marketing agency. Candour had been building its digital marketing team alongside its design operation. Bringing those demands together gave the business a clearer proposition.

Today its services cover SEO, digital PR, AI-search optimisation, branding, and website design and development. Its customer list spans an insurance broker, a veterinary telehealth platform, a family attraction and an artificial-plant retailer. What connects those customers is the journey from being discovered to giving someone a reason to act.

The podcast is free; agency work is paid. Candour describes monthly SEO engagements alongside audits, migration support and recovery work. A listener can take an idea into an internal meeting. A client can ask the team to diagnose the site, plan the changes and help deliver them. That is a sensible division between education and execution.

The useful work is often unglamorous

Consider Ryno, a decking and paving systems business. It needed to move both its content and its domain. Candour measured the share of traffic coming from searches without the brand name: 25%. Those visits faced more competition and deserved particular attention.

The team mapped redirects and recommended moving content and domain in separate phases. If something went wrong, fewer simultaneous changes would make the problem easier to locate. Candour reports that traffic recovered within three months, with clicks up 20% year on year between January 2024 and January 2025. The tactic worth copying is the separation, rather than expecting the same percentage.

With Vetster, the work used three routes: responses to journalists, pitches drawn from existing blog articles, and campaigns built around data. Qualified veterinarians supplied the expertise. Existing content supplied material that could be reused. Candour reports 238 pieces of coverage over six months and a 23% increase in monthly brand searches.

For Alan Boswell Group, it combined research, revised content and a pillar-and-spoke structure around landlord insurance. Its case study reports a 340% increase in online leads. These are agency-reported outcomes, but the mechanics are concrete: connect related pages, answer commercially relevant questions, and make expertise easier to find.

The awkward award problem

AI search adds another discovery route. Candour offers visibility audits, technical assessments, strategy and ongoing monitoring for systems such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. Its public explanation treats this as an extension of SEO, built on clear information and accessible websites.

That brings us back to the trophies. In a BuzzStream interview, Williams-Cook described researching searches for UK SEO agencies and finding AI-generated follow-up queries seeking award lists. The finding complicated the agency’s positioning. He did not announce that Candour would enter awards; he identified a signal its existing policy could leave unused.

“We don’t believe in long contracts”Candour, on how it works with clients

For a business owner, the useful lesson is to investigate what an intermediary actually consults. Your preferred description of your company may have little influence if the system builds its answer from somebody else’s page.

Steal the discipline, budget the work

The related Core Updates newsletter uses a practical editorial test: select news that could alter someone’s work. That is a transferable habit. Read an episode’s topic and chapters, choose a relevant question, then turn the discussion into something your team can test.

Free listening still consumes time. Implementation requires staff attention, technical access and, for PR, available specialists. Candour’s own guidance warns that reactive outreach can waste money when a brand cannot answer quickly. Creative campaigns need resources; earned coverage follows a publisher’s schedule. An interview cannot resolve the particular faults in your website.

The agency’s culture offers another clue to its approach. Its values include sharing mistakes and inviting challenge. In February 2026 it announced Great Place to Work certification, using anonymous employee feedback to examine the workplace. Search with Candour lets an audience hear that willingness to discuss the work. Its most useful invitation is simple: bring a problem, listen carefully, and leave with a better question.