01 The three retainers
AI SEO pricing at this agency means one of three monthly retainers. Each carries a placement minimum in writing, because the product is backlinks earned from real publications and you should know exactly how many you are buying.
- Foundation, $3,500 per month: minimum 5 press placements, one product line, an AI visibility baseline plus the monthly report
- Growth, $6,500 per month: minimum 10 placements across multiple product lines or markets
- Leader, $11,500 per month: minimum 20 placements, run as a category ownership program
The per-placement math rewards scale: $700 per placement on Foundation, $650 on Growth, $575 on Leader. There are no setup fees at any tier, and the minimums are floors, not caps: strong months run over the number at no extra charge, because the figure in the agreement is what we staff for, not what we stop at.
02 What the money buys each month
The core deliverable is the placements themselves: backlinks and press mentions earned from real publications through PR campaigns. They are the lever because they feed all three channels AI systems use to learn trust: high-authority articles enter the corpora models train on, live retrieval cites those same pages in answers, and every link extends the citation graph engines read as reputation. The mechanism is unpacked in backlinks for AI trust.
Around that lever run the supporting workstreams: entity and citation cleanup so brand facts read consistently everywhere machines look, quotable content engineering so your pages survive extraction, and visibility tracking, a fixed panel of buyer prompts re-run monthly across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot, reported with competitor share of voice. The full program is described under AI SEO services.
Every report also includes the placement ledger: which articles ran, where they sit, and which AI answers cited or echoed them afterward. You should never have to ask what last month's retainer bought.
03 Why this is retainer work, not a project
A one-off AI SEO project is a contradiction. Engines re-crawl constantly, models update without notice, and competitors do not stop publishing because your audit finished. The inputs that drive AI visibility are cumulative: each placement, each corroborated fact, each citable asset compounds on the last, and the measurement only means something as a continuous series. An audit produces a document. A retainer produces a position.
The placements compound in a second way: each article is a permanent page in the citation graph, and next month's outreach lands easier because last month's coverage exists. Media momentum is real, and it is bought with consistency rather than bursts.
That cuts the other way too: if a vendor offers permanent AI visibility for a single fee, they are describing something the technology does not support. It is also why honest AI SEO pricing is always monthly. Treat a one-time AI SEO package the way you would treat a gym membership sold as a single visit.
04 The results timeline, honestly
Retrieval-side movement comes first. Crawl fixes, quotable pages, and early coverage can start producing citations and answer mentions within the first couple of months. Model knowledge moves slower, often two quarters or more, because it depends on training cycles nobody outside the labs controls. Expect the first report to be a baseline rather than a victory lap: where you and your competitors stand across the six engines before any coverage lands. And we will not guarantee that any specific assistant recommends you, because answers vary by prompt, user, and model version, and anyone promising otherwise is guessing on your budget. The honest budgeting advice is to fund two quarters or not start, because the expensive part of AI SEO is quitting right before the slow channel catches up.
What you get instead is evidence: a monthly report showing exactly what moved, measured the way we describe in measuring AI visibility. Hold us to it.