Monthly SEO services for Google and AI answers

A retainer is a working month with a fixed shape. In the first week we send the plan. Through weeks 2 and 3 we fix, write and publish. In week 4 we measure, and the report reaches you within 5 working days of month end.

The work splits 4 ways:

• Technical upkeep. Crawl errors, broken internal links, redirect chains, slow templates, indexing problems and schema that has drifted from the page text.
• Pages. New pages for questions your buyers ask, and rewrites of pages that rank on page 2 or collect impressions without clicks. Each one opens with a direct answer, cites its sources and shows when it was last updated.
• Entity work. The same company name, description and founders on your site, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile and directories. Our entity SEO entry explains why that matters.
• Measurement. Rankings, Search Console, the AI visibility panel and, most of all, leads.

GEO, short for generative engine optimization, means getting cited in AI answers such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Most of it is the same work done well. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode have no additional requirements beyond a page being indexed and eligible to show a snippet (Google's AI features guidance (opens in a new tab)). What changes is the writing: answer-first sections, specific numbers and named sources an AI answer can lift.

If you have never had an audit, start with a one-off SEO and GEO project. The retainer then works through its findings.

Our retainers cost $3,000 to $8,000 a month. For market context, an Ahrefs survey of 439 SEO providers (opens in a new tab) (updated August 2024) found that agencies charged an average of $3,209 a month, and that the most common retainer band across all providers was $501 to $1,000.

Most of our fee pays for writing. A researched, sourced page with a review from your subject expert takes us 6 to 10 hours from brief to publish. Monthly reports and technical checks take far less.

What moves a retainer within that band:

• How much technical repair the site needs before new pages can rank.
• Whether we publish straight into your CMS or hand drafts to your team.
• The number of markets, languages and product lines covered.
• How many subject experts we need to interview each month.

Not included at any level: paid search or social ads, social media management, bought links and general digital marketing, which we do not sell. If the site itself is the problem, a rebuild is quoted separately as a web design and development project.

Enough for a CFO to answer 2 questions in 5 minutes: is search producing leads, and what did the fee pay for. Ours has 6 parts:

1. Leads and pipeline from organic search and AI referrals, taken from your CRM.
2. Search Console clicks, impressions and average position for tracked queries, by page.
3. AI feature impressions from Search Console's generative AI performance report, which covers AI Overviews and AI Mode and reached all sites on August 31, 2026 (Google's announcement (opens in a new tab)).
4. Citations in Copilot and Bing AI summaries from the Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance dashboard (opens in a new tab), with the grounding queries behind them.
5. Results from the AI visibility panel.
6. Work shipped, with dates and links, and next month's plan.

Tracking how often ChatGPT mentions you is possible, with limits. No engine gives a complete count of brand mentions, Bing's figures are a sample, and answers vary from one run to the next. So we run a fixed panel of buyer prompts 3 times in each engine every month and report a mention rate and the URLs cited, alongside referral sessions from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com in GA4. The trend over several months tells you more than any single run. Our AI visibility entry covers the method in more detail.

What we leave out: third-party authority scores treated as goals, keyword counts with no traffic behind them and ranking screenshots taken from one location.

Plan on 6 months before judging a retainer. Technical fixes can show in Search Console within weeks, once Google recrawls the affected pages. Rewrites of pages already sitting on page 2 usually move sooner than new pages. New pages for competitive B2B queries take longest, often several months on a newer domain. AI citations depend on the same index, because Google's AI features only draw on pages it has indexed and can show as a snippet.

That is why our minimum term is 6 months, then month to month with 30 days' notice. A shorter contract mostly buys setup. A longer lock-in protects the agency more than it protects you.

Google's own advice is blunt: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google" (Do you need an SEO? (opens in a new tab)). We commit to work shipped and to leading indicators we can both see, and we report plainly when a target misses.

For how AI answers choose their sources, read our guide to getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews.

When the monthly work would not move anything. That happens in 4 cases.

The site needs rebuilding. If templates are slow, URLs are a mess or the CMS fights every edit, a retainer spends months patching. Rebuild first, then retain.

Nobody on your side can approve content. Every page needs a subject expert's review before it goes live. If drafts wait 6 weeks for sign-off, you pay for work that never ships. Name an approver before you sign.

You already employ a strong writer who knows search. Buy the audit and a quarterly technical check, and keep the writing in-house. It costs less and the knowledge stays with you.

Your buyers do not search. Some deals come only through referrals and long relationships, and search work will not change that. We will tell you so on the first call.

We also do not guarantee rankings or AI citations, and we do not buy links. Buying links that pass ranking credit breaks Google's spam policies and puts the whole domain at risk. If a proposal from anyone promises page 1 within 30 days, ask exactly how they plan to get there and what happens to the site afterward.