Is It Out of Scope? — SEO & marketing
Is auditing a newly acquired competitor's site out of scope for an SEO retainer?
Usually yes. Auditing a different domain — its backlink profile, content, and technical SEO — is a distinct research deliverable beyond the retainer's original site scope, even for the same agency.
This is one of the more natural-sounding out-of-scope requests, since auditing sites is literally what an SEO team does — just not, by default, for a domain the retainer was never scoped around.
Is it out of scope?
Usually yes. A real audit of a newly acquired domain — backlink profile, technical health, content overlap with the primary site, keyword cannibalization risk — is comparable in effort to onboarding a new client, not a quick add-on to existing reporting.
Clause typically implicated
Clause typically implicated
Out-of-scope clause→ — The retainer's scope is defined around the original domain — auditing a newly acquired, separate domain is additional work outside that definition.
Example contract wording
Example contract wording (illustrative, not legal advice)
The retainer's scoped around [primary domain] — auditing the acquired site properly means a full backlink, technical, and content review, plus checking for overlap or cannibalization risk with your existing site. That's a meaningful piece of work I'd want to scope and quote separately, likely as a one-time audit.
How MarginFlow flags it
MarginFlow checks whether the domain named in the request matches the contract's extracted target domain and flags requests naming a different, newly mentioned domain as outside_scope, with a suggested charge reflecting a full audit rather than incremental reporting work.