The centerpiece of nearly every AI-SEO retainer is a dashboard that shows how often ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini name your brand — your Share-of-Citation. That dashboard is an automated measurement. It's the thing CitedAudit does, on demand, for the price of a single agency invoice line.
What you're actually paying a retainer for
Strip a GEO engagement down and there are three line items: the visibility dashboard, the monthly report, and the done-for-you work. The first two are software. The third is real labor — but you're often paying software margins for it, on a contract that renews whether your number moved or not.
| What you get | GEO / AI-SEO agency | CitedAudit |
|---|---|---|
| AI citation measurement (4 engines) | Yes — as a live dashboard | Yes — same engines, on demand |
| Competitor Share-of-Citation benchmark | Yes | Yes — ~12 brands in your category |
| Prioritized fix-list you can act on | Sometimes — inside the deliverable | Yes — the whole point of the audit |
| Indexation verified, not just submitted | Rarely disclosed | Yes — we confirm pages got indexed |
| Proof the method works on real sites | Case studies, often un-audited | Yes — our own portfolio, in public |
| Contract / minimum term | Usually 3–6 months | None — one-time |
| Cost to know where you stand | $3,000–$7,500 / month | $149 once · $29/mo to keep watch |
| Ongoing content production for you | Yes — this is the real labor | No — we hand you the plan, not the pen |
The dashboard is the product they're reselling.
An "AI visibility platform" is exactly what CitedAudit runs — multi-model probing, Share-of-Citation, competitor gaps, per-engine breakdown. When an agency charges a retainer for access to a dashboard plus a monthly export, you're renting the meter. We just sell you the reading, and the list of what to fix, for a flat fee.
The fix-list is the part that actually moves the number
A score with no next step is a bill. The reason CitedAudit exists is the second half: the ranked, specific things to change — crawlability, schema, answer-style content, the exact prompts and sources the engines pull from — so your number climbs. That's the same work an agency scopes, written down so you (or your existing developer) can execute it without a new monthly line item.
When an agency really is the right call
We're not here to pretend agencies do nothing. Hire one when:
- You want the content and technical work done for you every month and don't have the hands in-house.
- You're running many brands or domains and need managed operations across all of them.
- You want a named account manager and a standing relationship, and the retainer pencils out against that labor.
If instead you want to know your number and the exact fixes — without a contract, this week — that's the gap CitedAudit fills. Plenty of teams start with the $149 audit, do the fixes themselves, and only hire out the pieces they can't.
We prove it on our own sites first
Every claim here is measured, not asserted. We run the same audit across the sites we own and publish the results, moving numbers and all. TaxStand went from cited in 0% of AI answers to 13.1% — dead-last to #2 in its category — and the whole climb is documented with real numbers. The rest of the portfolio is on the Proof Lab, updated automatically.
Get your number and your fix-list for $149.
Start with the free check — your AI-readiness score and top fixes in about two seconds — then run the full audit when you're ready. No contract, no minimum, no renewal you forget to cancel.
Check my site free → See a real resultPricing ranges for GEO/AI-SEO agencies reflect publicly listed monthly retainers and are provided for comparison only; individual agencies vary and many do valuable work. CitedAudit measurement covers ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Perplexity, and Gemini across a fixed set of category buyer-intent prompts. Share-of-Citation results cited above are real and reproducible with the same prompt set; the sites measured are our own properties, disclosed as such.