By the third agency pitch, the pattern gets familiar: confident claims and thin specifics, then a contract sliding across the table before the questions get hard. The useful discovery is that most false claims share a weakness — they collapse under a single follow-up question. Six are worth memorizing.
"We're HIPAA certified"
No such certificate exists. The federal office that enforces HIPAA does not certify or endorse products, and it has said plainly that private "certifications" do not absolve anyone of their legal obligations. So this claim does not exaggerate a real credential; it names a document that cannot exist, which tells you the vendor either does not know the rules of the industry they are selling into or is betting that you don't. The nearby claim that can be real is an audit with paperwork behind it — a genuine SOC 2 report carries an auditing firm's name and a date, and a vendor who has one will send it under NDA without flinching. The follow-up: "Send me the report." Then watch what arrives.
"We guarantee page one of Google"
Nobody outside Google controls Google's results, and Google says so itself — its own guidance on hiring search-optimization help warns that no one can guarantee a top ranking. What a vendor can honestly sell are inputs: pages that load fast and content that answers the questions your customers actually type, on a structure a crawler can read. Those inputs make ranking more likely. They do not make it promisable, because the platform belongs to someone else and changes without notice. The follow-up: "Which part of the ranking system do you control?" There is only one true answer, and it is "none of it," said quickly.
Four nines of uptime from a four-person shop
Do the arithmetic at the table. A 99.99 percent uptime promise allows about fifty-two minutes of downtime per year — roughly one minute per week. Keeping that promise requires redundant infrastructure and a human paged awake at 3 a.m. every night of the year, which is why the companies that genuinely operate at that level staff whole teams for it. A small shop quoting four nines has not done this arithmetic, and that tells you how their other numbers were produced. The honest small-shop version names the hosting provider, describes what happens when something breaks, and states when a human responds — without decimals.
"Our AI doesn't make mistakes"
The strongest evidence against this claim comes from the top of the market, not the bottom. In 2024, Stanford researchers tested the AI legal-research tools sold by LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters — purpose-built systems, grounded in real legal documents, marketed on the promise of eliminating fabricated answers. In the study, later published in a peer-reviewed journal, one tool produced false information on roughly one query in six, the other on roughly one in three. The vendors disputed parts of the method, and even read generously the conclusion holds: grounding an AI in real documents reduces fabrication and does not eliminate it. A vendor claiming zero has either never measured or is hoping you won't ask. The follow-up: "What is your error rate, and how did you measure it?" A real answer contains a number and a method. "That doesn't really happen with ours" is not a measurement.
A price with no scope
A number quoted before anyone has examined your call volume, your documents, or your current setup is not a price. It is bait, and the hook is the second invoice. A real price is attached to a scope: what is delivered, what is excluded, what happens when something outside the scope appears, and what month two costs after month one's discount expires. The absence of a scope is not sloppiness — vagueness is where change orders are farmed. The follow-up: "What is not included in this number?" An honest vendor answers immediately, because they have thought about it. An evasive one has also thought about it.
A testimonial you cannot call
Logos and five-star quotes cost nothing to typeset. A reference costs something real: a customer willing to spend ten minutes on the phone. You are not asking to audit a client list — one name and one number, and a conversation with a person who was told to expect your call. A vendor with satisfied customers can produce that. A vendor with a wall of glowing quotes who cannot produce a single callable human has told you where the quotes came from.
Apply all six to us
This page would be worthless if it exempted its author, so, on the record: Hub City Web holds no compliance certifications, and if that ever changes you will get the paperwork, not the adjective. We do not guarantee rankings. We do not publish uptime figures. Our private AI work is described on this site as capability and architecture rather than track record, because it has not yet been delivered to a paying client — we would rather print that sentence here than have you discover it in a meeting. And because of that, we cannot hand you a callable reference for it, which is exactly why you will not find AI testimonials on this site. Bring the six questions to our meeting too. If any answer goes vague, apply the standard.
Where to start
Put the six follow-up questions in your phone's notes before the next pitch — they work on any vendor, including us. Then watch the direction the answers move. Under questioning, a truthful vendor becomes more specific: names, dates, numbers, documents. The other kind becomes more general. The direction of travel tells you nearly everything the pitch was built to hide.