Here’s something a little weird about netpagetwo.com: there’s no case studies page.
We had one for eleven days. Then on June 6, I took it down. The URL where it used to live now serves a “Field Notes” page filled with honest observations from the first month of running this brand.
If you landed here from a search that mentioned case studies and you’re wondering what’s going on, this post is for you. It’s also for any agency operator who’s ever stared at their own case studies page and wondered whether the metrics on it are pulling more weight than they should be.
The original case studies page was the result of about forty minutes of work on the morning after launch.
Three cards. Each one had a client logo, a metric (“+340% organic traffic in 90 days”), and a one-line summary of what we’d done. Below them, a CTA to book a fit call. Standard agency template. Nothing about the page would have looked out of place on a hundred other B2B agency sites.
The problem was that each card was a composite.
The first one pulled real metrics from a client at the parent agency from two years ago and presented the work as if NetPageTwo had done it. The second was an aggregate of two engagements, with the numbers rounded toward the more impressive of the two. The third had real work attached to an estimated metric I couldn’t fully defend.
I shipped it anyway, because launching a B2B agency website without a case studies page makes the brand look invisible. Every B2B agency has one. Without it, NetPageTwo looked like it didn’t exist yet.
Three reasons stacked up over the eleven days, and at some point I couldn’t keep dodging any of them.
The first one is the simplest: this brand is thirty days old. I signed my first NetPageTwo client on June 12. Real SEO and AI search work takes sixty to ninety days to show measurable lift. There is no honest way to write a case study for a NetPageTwo engagement before September.
The second one is more uncomfortable. Even though every metric on those cards was real somewhere, none of them belonged to NetPageTwo. A prospect reading “+340% organic traffic” reasonably assumes NetPageTwo produced that result. The metric came from work I did at the parent agency in 2024 for a client in a different vertical. To surface the actual attribution, a prospect would need to ask three clarifying questions, and most prospects don’t ask.
The third one is the one that made the removal urgent.
AI engines aren’t fooled by composite case studies. When ChatGPT or Perplexity crawls a page with metrics that don’t appear anywhere else on the web (no LinkedIn post from the client, no third-party verification, no public testimonial), the engine quietly treats those metrics as unverified. The page generates almost no AI citation traffic because the engine deweights it. So the page I’d built as social proof was actually signaling low trust.
The first two reasons were the kind that costs sleep. The third one is what tipped the decision.
The URL /field-notes/ now serves the page where /case-studies/ used to live. The header reads “Field Notes: Early observations from the first 90 days.” Below it is a chronological list of every honest, observation-based post I’ve published since launch.
If you scroll the page right now, you’ll see things like:
None of these are case studies. They’re written observations from inside the work. The substance they provide is the same thing case studies are supposed to provide (evidence that the operator knows what they’re doing) but through a different mechanism. Instead of showing prior results, they show current thinking.
Honestly? A few reasons, and one of them surprised me.
Field Notes don’t require me to lie. A thirty-day-old brand can’t have case studies. Saying that out loud and writing honest observations instead is more credible than the alternative. The prospects who would have valued a polished case studies page enough to make a decision based on one self-select away. The prospects who actually want to know how I think stick around. Both are fine outcomes.
Field Notes also produce AI citation traffic in a way case studies don’t. They contain specific observations, specific dates, specific numbers. AI engines extract from specifics. The Field Notes are already getting cited in ChatGPT responses for queries like “what does the first month of a new SEO agency look like” or “should I hire a productized SEO subscription.” Case studies almost never get cited at all.
The surprising one: the Field Notes also work as a hiring signal for future clients in a way I didn’t predict. A prospect who reads three Field Notes in a row gets a real sense of how I think. The voice, the framing, what I’ll say no to. Case studies hide all of that behind metrics. Field Notes expose it. The prospects who decide they want to work with NetPageTwo after reading Field Notes show up to the fit call pre-qualified in a way case-study readers never were.
In September 2026, the first client engagement will hit ninety days. At that point, I’ll have real, attributable results that I can defend.
When I bring the case studies page back, two things will be different.
Every result I publish is work I personally shipped as the operator, attributed to NetPageTwo. No composites. No engagements where I can’t say specifically what shipped, what changed because of it, and which metrics I’m pointing to.
And every metric will be third-party verifiable. Either the client confirms it on a LinkedIn post I can link to, or the data comes from a public source like Google Search Console with the domain visible, or the case study doesn’t get published. The bar is “could this be challenged and would the data hold.”
If no September engagement passes both filters, the case studies page stays down. Field Notes remain the proof mechanism until something exists that actually clears the bar.
You won’t find polished case studies on this site today. You’ll find about sixty honest pieces of writing about how I think and what I’ve actually been observing in the first month.
If exposed thinking is enough for you to evaluate fit, the fit call is on the calendar and you can book it. If polished case studies are what you need to feel safe signing with an agency, we’re not the right fit yet. Both responses are correct, and I’d rather you reach the second one before you sign than after.
If you’re running a young brand (under 90 days) and you have a case studies page with composite metrics, mixed attribution, or testimonials you can’t fully defend, that page is probably hurting you in two ways. It opens you up to a sharp prospect asking the wrong question at the wrong time. And it’s getting deweighted by every AI engine that crawls it.
The fix isn’t better case studies. The fix is removing the case studies page and writing real observations instead. Then earning the right to publish real results when they actually exist.
If you want to talk through what your version of Field Notes might look like, the fit call works for that conversation too.
Related reading:
– Why we publish a post a day
– First 7 days of inbound: what came through, what didn’t
– What the first four fit calls taught us
– About the operator
