Dear SEO company vultures — please stop emailing small businesses with your trash

★★ signal-medium r/smallbusiness · ↑ 294 · 💬 123 · 2026-03-12 · kw: hours every day · open on reddit ↗

Tool

none

Issue

Small business owners receive 10-100+ unsolicited cold emails daily from SEO agencies using scraped contact lists with template messaging, overwhelming inboxes and wasting operational time.

Cost

unstated

Recommendation

Google and Microsoft should treat scraped-list cold email blasts as phishing; inbox filtering tools to auto-detect patterns; manual spam folder management

extracted with

anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5 · 2026-05-08

Body

If you run a small business, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. Every single day my inbox gets flooded with emails like: >I noticed your website is getting some traction recently...but Or >I noticed you have been optimizing your online presence but we can help do a no obligation audit to see where it can go even further You didn’t “notice” anything. You scraped a contact email from our website or a directory and blasted out the same template to thousands of businesses. And somehow **no spam filter on earth seems capable of stopping this**. It’s a constant stream of the same message from different domains, different Gmail accounts, and slightly different wording. Small business owners already spend half their day dealing with real operational problems. We don’t need a daily barrage of low-effort cold emails pretending to be personalized outreach. If a business actually wants SEO services, they will go find a reputable firm. Cold-emailing small businesses every day with fake “audits” isn’t marketing — it’s spam. Please fuck right off. If you were good, we would have found you and hired you already. Sincerely, Every small business owner with an email inbox EDIT: I see this has resonated with my fellow small business owners. The analog version of SEO companies are cleaning companies but somehow I am less annoyed by them.

Top comments (9)

[score=1] AutoModerator

**Friendly Reminder** r/smallbusiness is a question and answer subreddit. Ask a question about starting, owning, and growing a small business and the community answers. Posts that violate the rules listed in the sidebar will be removed. **Please do not conduct market research on our community.** We are not your focus group and asking us about our pain points, needs, what is hardest about X, etc. is not asking about how small business works or for real help with running your small business. These posts are subject to removal and given the community's disgust with the constant spamming of these posts you might just destroy your brand and contaminate your company search results. Seeing this message does not mean your post was automatically removed. If you asked about pain points or are directly or indirectly promoting a product please remove your post. Come back to post an honest question or give a knowledgeable response to someone else's question and leave your company name in your own profile. We can tell if you know what you're doing and the community can reach out if they need to. **We welcome honest question posts, especially from newcomers.** Thank you for your post. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/smallbusiness) if you have any questions or concerns.*

[score=66] Sherifftruman

Always think it’s funny when they call me and they’re like no one can see your website, and I ask them how did you find me?

[score=23] youngdude70

The worst part is they all use the same three templates with slightly different sender names. I started keeping a spreadsheet of every cold outreach domain that hits my inbox and reporting them in bulk — it actually reduced the volume by maybe 30% after a few weeks. The real fix would be if Google and Microsoft actually treated these scraped-list blasts the same as phishing, because functionally they are the same thing. Have you tried any of the inbox filtering tools that auto-detect this pattern, or do you just manually nuke them?

[score=18] commoncents1

many dont have any opt out link, and if they do, its really to confirm its YOU and you get on more lists. others just say reply with a "remove". same thing, you just get confirmed you are real and will get spammed more. so they all get into the spam folder

[score=30] [deleted]

[deleted]

[score=10] StoneCypher

my favorite is sending them an email back "by what means do you believe you know about my website's traction?"

[score=35] Buddy_Kane_the_great

Better that than being called… “Am I speaking to the buisness owner”. Some days when I’m bored I do set up a call with their reps. Waste my time I’ll waste yours. Petty but sometimes the mood strikes me

[score=9] thumperj

I'm not a violent person but these people certainly trigger some violent thoughts.... The pretend shit drives me insane. The other is the note at the bottom "Hey, let us known if you want us to STOP sending you more shit every day!" You fucks. You presumptive fucks.

[score=7] scubahana

I do SEO for a living. I also refuse to do shit like that because when I receive it I immediately never want to do business with them. And who the fuck advertises SEO services to another SEO agency?? Hard to claim you know your market if that's what you're trying to pull. I'm with you.