Is there an alternative to an SEO agency retainer?
Yes, and the difference is not the price. It is that an agency reports the work and we report the comparison: half your pages rewritten, half left alone on purpose, the gap published with its range whichever way it went, and the next quarter free if the rewritten half finished behind.
An agency retainer buys hours and a monthly report. The report shows the work, then shows traffic, and leaves you to assume the one caused the other. Most of the time nobody involved knows whether it did, because nobody kept anything back to compare against.
What we do instead is narrower and stranger. We refresh the pages you already own, because that is where the evidence says the return is: the pages AI tools cite were mostly updated within the year, and unedited new content decays within months. We only ever work on half of them. The other half is written down, frozen, and left alone for ninety days, and the report at the end is the comparison between the two, with its range, published at a permanent link if you choose to publish it.
The guarantee follows from the method rather than the other way round. You pay for the first ninety days either way. If the pages we rewrote do not finish ahead of the pages we left alone, the next ninety days are free. Nobody can offer that without a control group, because without one nobody knows what "ahead" means.
It is not for every site. Under forty pages, a ninety-day comparison cannot give an answer worth acting on, and the free check says so before you have paid anything. An agency will take the account. We will tell you why we would rather not.
72% of pages cited by AI tools had been updated within the last year; only 42% had been published within it. Content older than three years is nearly absent.
7,683 dated pages, 47,097 citations across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity
Unedited AI articles peaked at two and a half months. Their share ranking in the top 100 fell from 28% to 3% over sixteen months and never recovered.
2,000 articles on 20 fresh domains, tracked 16 months
Only 37% of AI Overview citations come from the organic top ten, down from 76% a year earlier. 37% come from pages not in the top 100 at all.
863,000 searches, about 4 million cited URLs
The free check reads your own site and tells you what has gone stale, what competes with itself, and what we honestly cannot see without Search Console. No account, no estimate, about a minute.