What Your Clients Won't Tell You

Among the experts surveyed, close to a third acknowledged taking work slightly outside their expertise, on calls billed at $1,000 to $2,000 per hour.

It is a self-reported figure from one study rather than an audit of the industry, but it points at a real incentive, and at a second problem arriving on top of it: experts reading answers off a language model while the call is live.

This report synthesises client-side feedback only, the firms and individuals who hire expert networks, not the experts who get paid by them.

What follows is what clients actually say when they think no one is listening: on review platforms, incase studies, in industry research, and on LinkedIn. Some of it is encouraging. Much of it is uncomfortable. All of it is useful.