An Honest Look At AI SEO Agency Pricing Models

A practical editing pass makes this concrete. Take a published page and highlight every sentence that could be quoted on its own and still be both true and useful. On most brand pages the highlighted portion is under a tenth of the text. Getting it to a third, without adding length, is usually achievable by moving conclusions forward and replacing three vague sentences with one specific one.

Citation happens at the level of a passage, not a page. A model attaches a source to a specific claim it lifted, which means the real unit of work is a paragraph that stays true and useful once it has been removed from everything around it.

The volumes will be small, so avoid drawing conclusions from a handful of sessions and let it accumulate over a quarter or two. Also compare against your branded organic traffic rather than all organic, since branded search is closer in intent and makes for a fairer comparison.

One Claim Per Sentence Compound sentences that bundle three ideas cannot be lifted without dragging in material that may not apply. A model faced with a passage where only part is relevant will often skip it in favour of a cleaner source.

One additional check is worth building into your product page template. Every page should be able to answer, in text, what the product is, what it costs, what size or specification options exist, what it is compatible with and who it is not suitable for. Most templates cover the first two and leave the rest to imagery or to a downloadable document, which removes exactly the details that a purchase recommendation needs.

A retainer describing ongoing optimisation and strategic guidance with no countable deliverable is a subscription to a relationship. It may still be worth having, and you should know that is what you bought.

One warning worth stating plainly: none of this means writing for machines. Content that reads as if it were assembled for extraction tends to get treated as low quality by both readers and systems. The goal is writing that a person would find unusually clear and direct, which happens to be exactly what a model can quote. structured data for ai search

Product recommendations are a harder case than service recommendations, because the answer has to be specific enough to act on. A model naming a product is committing to a name, usually a price band and often a comparison, and it needs sources confident enough to support that.

Name the Buyer, Not the Segment Marketing documents describe segments. Briefs need people. Who specifically buys from you, what situation are they in when they start looking, and what have they already tried before they arrive.

Making Any Model Safe Four clauses do most of the protective work regardless of structure. The prompt set and baseline archive belong to you and leave with you. Raw answers ship with every report. Scope is stated in countable units. And there is a defined review point with agreed criteria before the contract auto renews.

What the Evidence Actually Is The figure quoted most often comes from Opollo, which reported assistant referred traffic converting at 14.2 percent against 2.8 percent from conventional search. The sample was 312 business to business brands, attributed through UTM parameters, covering the third quarter of 2024 through the first quarter of 2025.

What to Do First Run five prompts describing a purchase your best customer would be making, from a signed out session, and see what gets named and cited. Then check whether your product data survives with scripts disabled, and whether your name and identifiers are consistent across every listing you can find.

Resist the temptation to interpret a single run. Competitors move around between runs, and a rival appearing above you once is not a finding. Run the same prompt several times, count how often each company appears, and only then decide whether there is a gap worth spending a quarter on. Reacting to one answer is the most common way effort gets spent on a problem that does not exist.

Discontinued products deserve deliberate handling rather than deletion. Removing a page severs the connection between existing reviews and coverage and your catalogue, and it leaves stale third party listings pointing at nothing. Keeping the page, marking it clearly as discontinued and naming the replacement preserves the accumulated evidence and redirects the recommendation rather than losing it.

If you will not name competitors, say that too, and understand it removes the highest performing content format from the plan. Better to have that argument in the brief than to have a comparison page written and then killed.

Define Success and Define Failure Most briefs specify what good looks like and never specify what would count as this not working. The second is more useful, because it is the one nobody wants to discuss in month eight.

If the budget is substantial, add the earned coverage work, which is the slowest and most expensive component and the one you genuinely cannot do quickly on your own. Buying that first, before the cheap fixes are done, is the most common way money gets wasted in this field. structured data for ai search