You sell AEO and SEO to clients every quarter. Meanwhile your own firm loses every ChatGPT prompt to Gary V, Neil Patel, and the same six agencies that already own the category graph. We run the fulfillment so your founder, your firm, and your case studies land inside the AI shortlist prospects actually read.
The March 2024 Google core update and the August 2024 helpful-content update took 40 to 60 percent off most agency websites' organic traffic. The RFPs that used to land through a blog post on topic clusters now arrive as a forwarded ChatGPT answer with three agency names on it. If your firm is not one of those names, the pitch never happens. The buyer already picked.
Cold outbound post-February 2024 Google and Yahoo sender rules is running at 2 to 4 percent reply rates for agencies, down from 12 to 18 percent two years ago. LinkedIn CPMs tripled. Paid demand-gen on LinkedIn ABM costs $180 to $420 per lead for SEO and paid social agencies. The cheapest channel that still compounds is also the one most agencies are not running on themselves.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini do not randomize agency recommendations. They pull from the same three signals every time a prospect asks which firm to hire.
The models read Adweek, Digiday, Ad Age, Campaign US, Search Engine Land, MarTech, Contagious, and Warc heavier than they read an agency's own blog. Trade-press mentions carry weight because the editor is not paid by the agency. Self-published content gets discounted on every agency prompt.
Your founder's Wikipedia, Wikidata, LinkedIn, podcast appearances, and Inc. or Entrepreneur bylines feed the engines an entity graph that resolves the firm to a real person. Agencies without founder-entity cleanup get cited less often because the model cannot disambiguate between three firms with similar names.
A Reddit thread in r/agency, r/PPC, or r/marketing where a real practitioner recommends your firm moves the needle more than a listicle on a DR 30 marketing blog. Slack communities like Superpath, Demand Curve, and The Marketing Millennials feed retrieval layers too. Agencies with active peer advocacy rank higher on narrow category prompts.
Every piece earns citations on its own. Stacked together they compound. Trade press feeds the entity graph. The entity graph feeds schema. Schema sharpens what the model pulls from your case studies. Reddit and Slack keep the signal fresh every month. Prompt tracking tells us which narrow vertical to go after next. Nothing ships as a one-off deliverable. Every layer plumbs into the next one.
We run your agency against 40-plus prospect prompts the way a CMO actually phrases them. Discipline plus vertical plus size: "best SEO agency for vertical SaaS Series A," "top paid social agency for DTC supplements 10M to 50M," "content agency for developer tools," "PLG growth agency for Series B." We score how often your brand gets named, which agencies beat you, and which citations are doing the work for them.
Most agency sites have a homepage hero, six service pages, a case studies grid, and a team page the engines cannot parse cleanly. Your content is there. The schema is not. Your founder writes thought-leadership posts that the models treat as unattributed because there is no Person markup tying the content to the entity. We rewrite the JSON-LD across every page the models actually pull from: services, case studies, team, pricing, and the Clutch and G2 for agencies profiles.
Your founder writes on LinkedIn every week and still loses thought-leadership prompts to Rand Fishkin and Neil Patel because their Wikidata and Wikipedia presence tells every model exactly who they are. We line up your founder's identity across Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crunchbase, Clutch, G2 for agencies, LinkedIn, and the bylines they already have on Inc., Entrepreneur, and Fast Company so every engine extracts one coherent person instead of a dozen contradicting mentions.
The models weight trade publications heavier than general business press when someone asks for an agency recommendation. We run a network covering Search Engine Land, MarTech, Adweek, Ad Age, Digiday, Campaign US, The Drum, Contagious, Warc, Marketing Brew, PPC Hero, and SEL Agency Insider and place your firm inside it every month. Case study teardowns. Campaign retrospectives. Category commentary from your founder. Contrarian takes on agency pricing, on-page versus off-page AI visibility, the death of link-building as a standalone service. Every article carries a dofollow backlink and sits on a domain the models crawl weekly.
r/agency, r/PPC, r/SEO, r/marketing, r/bigSEO, r/digital_marketing, r/content_marketing. Reddit sits inside every major model's training set and every live retrieval layer. A single thread where a real practitioner recommends your agency outperforms fifteen promo posts on a DR 20 marketing blog. We map the subreddits and Slack communities your buyers live in, build a real contribution schedule for your founder and senior strategists, and monitor every mention that moves the needle.
Every month we re-run your prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overview. You see where your agency ranks in the answer, which competitors the model named, what shifted since last month, and which narrow vertical to double down on next. If a specific prompt drops, we know within 30 days and route the next month's press and Reddit work at the exact gap.
A 2,800-word teardown, data report, or contrarian take anchors the month. We break every pillar into the shapes each engine rewards. Case study comparison pages for Perplexity retrieval. Numbered playbook lists for ChatGPT. Q and A blocks for AI Overview. LinkedIn founder threads. Video explainer for YouTube. Reddit tactical post. Podcast pitch for The Marketing Meetup or Call To Action. Newsletter-first syndication on Marketing Brew contributor. Every atom links back to the pillar so the citation stack reinforces itself.
Most agency founders weighing AEO are also looking at a Clutch sponsored listing, a new biz rep, or a PR retainer. Here is what each dollar actually returns.
| Instant Press AEO | Clutch Sponsored | New Biz Rep (commission) | Traditional PR Retainer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shows up inside ChatGPT and Perplexity answers | Directly optimized | Only when Clutch is cited | No | Outlet-dependent |
| Monthly trade-press features across real outlets | Included | No | No | Yes, at 4 to 6x the cost |
| Reddit and practitioner Slack signal | Included | No | No | No |
| Founder entity and Wikipedia cleanup | Included | No | No | Case by case |
| Case study schema and sameAs links | Every page | No | No | Not their job |
| Annual cost at base tier | $11,940 | $18K to $96K | 15 to 25% of every deal forever | $96K to $180K |
| Time to first measurable result | 30 to 90 days | Immediate, depth varies | 60 to 180 days | 90 to 180 days |
| Compounds or rents attention | Compounds | Rents monthly | Rents per deal forever | Compounds slowly |
Most AEO shops aiming at agencies are pricing the retainer at $4,500 to $8,000 a month with $3,000 to $5,000 in setup. We locked the rate at $995 while we onboard the first 12 agency founders of the quarter so early partners carry a durable advantage on their narrow vertical prompts.
That is roughly 78 percent off the starter retainer and skips the $3,000 setup. The rate holds for the first 12 agency founders this quarter, then returns to market. Agencies reselling to clients pay the same $995 per client seat.
Drop your domain and we score how often your agency gets named across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overview on the 40 most common prospect prompts in your discipline and vertical. Full report, no sales call, delivered in 24 hours.
Every agency founder I talk to has the same story. They sell their clients on content, on SEO, on AEO, on category authority. Then they look at their own Clutch profile, their own Wikidata presence, their own ChatGPT ranking for "best [their discipline] agency for [their vertical]" and realize they are losing every prompt to a competitor half their size. The cobbler's kids have always gone barefoot. The difference now is the models see the bare feet.
I run strategy on every agency retainer personally. I pick the narrow vertical prompts, review the trade-press pitches, read the prompt-tracker diff every month. The team stays small on purpose. The reason this costs $995 instead of $7,500 is that the agency markup is gone, not the work. And because the work itself is mostly what your agency already teaches your clients, most founders onboard inside a week.
Thirty minutes. We audit your agency inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini on the live call, show you exactly which prospect prompts you are losing, and tell you whether wholesale AEO is worth your budget. If it is not, we will say so.
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