I’ve watched two businesses go through the endless version of this and come out the other side with very little to show for it. That’s most of why I have a position on it at all.
If there’s a proposal sitting in front of you with a monthly number on it, here’s what I’d want you to know before you sign.
Let me be upfront, because I sell this work. SEO is worth investing in. Semrush is a real tool and I use it. My objection is narrow and it lands on one word, which is ongoing.
Three acronyms come first, because you’ll hear all of them in that sales call and what they mean changes what you’re being sold.
First, SEO, AEO and GEO
These three get used interchangeably and they don’t mean the same thing.
SEO is search engine optimization. Getting found when somebody types a question into Google.
AEO is answer engine optimization. The term started with featured snippets and voice assistants, and it’s now mostly used to mean showing up inside AI-generated answers.
GEO is generative engine optimization. It comes from an actual academic paper, published at a research conference in 2024, that tested what makes content more likely to be pulled into an AI-generated answer.
Here is what nobody selling you a GEO package leads with. Google’s own documentation says that optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO. Their words. They also tell site owners to review their guidance on evaluating third-party SEO advice before buying AEO or GEO services.
The industry doesn’t even agree on whether AEO and GEO are different from each other. Nobody has settled it, because nobody has produced work that’s demonstrably one and not the other.
When somebody quotes you extra for GEO on top of SEO, that is a fair thing to ask about.
What changed, and what didn’t
Ranking and being cited have come apart. As of March 2026, only 38% of pages cited in Google’s AI Overviews still rank in the organic top ten, down from 76% a year earlier (Ahrefs). Being on page one no longer means you’re in the answer.
What influences whether you turn up?
Being mentioned, more than being linked to. This surprises people who have been buying backlinks for years. Getting named in a roundup, a local news piece or an industry podcast is doing more for you now than a paid link. Backlinks still matter. They are no longer the lever.
Video. YouTube mentions came out as the strongest single signal across 75,000 brands (Ahrefs, Q1 2026).
Being where the models already look. Reddit, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google properties dominate what gets pulled into answers. A real presence there is worth more than another blog post.
Answering the question in the first two or three sentences, in a sentence that can be lifted out of context and still make sense.
Your business facts matching everywhere. Name, address, category, services, hours. Assistants repeat whatever is inconsistent, confidently.
A site that renders without JavaScript. AI crawlers largely don’t run it.
Two things being sold right now that don’t hold up: llms.txt files, which Google says its search doesn’t use, and AI-specific schema markup, which Google states plainly does not exist.
One caveat worth holding onto. Google still sends far more referral traffic than any AI assistant. This is a channel to be present in, not one to rebuild your business around yet.
What you’re probably being quoted
Back to that proposal. Most small businesses don’t need a retainer that runs forever. Some need real help for a defined stretch, and that’s a completely different purchase.
I’ve paid between $1,500 and $2,500 a month for SEO management. It can run higher than that.
For that, the deliverables are pretty consistent:
- Roughly two blog posts a month
- Getting you listed on a set of online platforms
- Somebody keeping an eye on your analytics and keyword tools
That is close to what both of those businesses got. Two posts a month, somewhere between twenty and thirty listings, general SEO maintenance and technical SEO. Twenty to thirty listings sounds like a lot until you look at what they are. This is a quality over quantity question.
The shape of it was the same in both cases. The first three months of the engagement were real. After that there was a sharp decline in quality, and it got sharper once we were pushed into their AI tool and what came back was AI slop.
None of that is fake work. Two of the three I’d push back on, for different reasons.
Before either of those though, be very careful of finding the one shot that fits all. A retainer promising you content, technical work, listings, reporting and strategy under one monthly number is usually one person doing five jobs at the depth of one. The single monthly number is what makes that hard to see.
Two blogs a month is execution, not strategy
Two posts a month tells you how much is getting made. It tells you nothing about whether any of it needed to exist.
The strategy is a separate piece of work and it happens once. Which questions your buyers are asking, which keywords matter, what gets published and in what order. For my clients that research already happened during brand development, and it gets written down in the annual marketing plan.
Once that exists, you have what you need to proceed. Everything after it is execution.
Who should be writing these?
Honestly? You should. And if it isn’t you, it’s either your website management team or your marketing team, because they already know the business. The posts that work carry something only your business knows, and an outside writer working from your keyword list doesn’t have that. They have the list.
The listings are mostly pay-to-play
This is the one I’d look at hardest.
A lot of the sites they’ll get you listed on are paid placements. The reason you can appear there this month is that anyone can, which is exactly what makes it worth so little.
Meanwhile there’s a whole set of things that cost nothing and get overlooked.
Your Google Business Profile is the obvious one, and it gets left half-finished. It’s the first thing in any local SEO setup. For a local business, a complete profile with your real hours, actual photographs, and a reply to every review costs nothing. It’s also what people check right before they call you.
Pinterest gets filed under social media and it behaves much more like a search engine. What you put there has a long life compared to a feed. If your work is visual at all, or product-based, or a service with a visible result, that’s a real channel sitting unused.
And LinkedIn articles. That one puzzles me. If your buyers are on LinkedIn, writing there puts your thinking right in front of them, and it doesn’t cost you a budget or anybody’s approval.
So why can’t you just use AI for SEO?
You can, and I do. There’s a condition attached though.
AI will support your SEO optimization and it will help you write blogs, once the strategy is already in place. What it won’t do is decide what to write or why.
The condition is time. Time to make sure your brand voice is genuinely honored, and time to make sure the article is engaging instead of fluff wrapped around keywords. That is most of what you’re paying an expert for.
The biggest challenge I’ve run into over the past three years working with marketing and SEO agencies is the overreliance on AI for copywriting. It frequently feels as if we’re working in reverse. Starting with AI copy, then adding some human feel to it and layering insight on top.
The order should be the other way around. An outline. Brainstorming. Settling the goals and what resources need to be shared. Outlining further. A first draft. Revisions. Then you loop in the AI.
By that point the thinking is already done, and the tool is doing what it’s good at. Plenty of agencies are using these tools and a lot of them are not spending that time on your voice, which means you’d be paying a monthly retainer for output nobody checked against how your business sounds.
Brand voice is the part I’d protect hardest. It’s why I build voice systems for clients, written down, so the work sounds like the business no matter who’s producing it. I want my own articles to speak to the person reading them, not just to a search engine. Useful and human at the same time. Hopefully this one is managing that.
I use AI tools to proof my writing and to challenge it. That’s a different job than replacing the thinking behind it.
Why you probably need less of this than you think
By the time a real brand, website and marketing project wraps, a lot of the search work is already sitting in the site. The structure is right because it was designed that way rather than patched on afterward. The pages answer the questions they were built to answer.
Then there’s an annual marketing plan, and that changes the math completely. Once it exists you’re not guessing what to publish. The subjects and the reasoning are decided in advance, for a year.
I should be straight with you here, because I’d be recommending something I sell. I build these. Take it with that in mind, and know that the version somebody else builds you works exactly as well. What matters is that it exists and that you own it, not who made it.
So who is a retainer for?
There are agencies doing good work on a monthly basis, and some companies have the budget to blow on ongoing growth and get real value from it. My objection isn’t the work. It’s that for most small business owners it isn’t cost-effective.
Where it lands depends on the size of the business. This is a pattern I’ve seen across the organizations I’ve had the pleasure of supporting.
The entrepreneur with a limited budget. You’re doing this yourself. What you need is a plan and a defined stretch of real support, and three months is usually enough to get you standing on your own.
The small business owner. You need help making sure your online profiles are consistent with your website, and support implementing your SEO optimization. Six months is more realistic here than three.
The medium-sized business. This is the one where ongoing support makes sense. You don’t have a website department, you want to maximize your time, and you have the budget for it. You need help until you can build things out internally, and that’s a real reason to keep somebody on.
The large business. Frequently there’s already an internal team, whether that’s website management or marketing. If there is, your SEO belongs with them rather than with an outside retainer. Plenty of large businesses don’t have that team, and those are in exactly the same position as the medium-sized business.
The ongoing clients I support need help with the blogs, the email, and general SEO maintenance. That’s what it looks like when it’s worth paying for.
For everybody else, the variable is usually time. This is work you could likely do yourself if the calendar allowed it. If you’re reading your plan, agreeing with every word of it, and watching a whole quarter go by without doing any of it, that’s your signal. And it has nothing to do with whether you understand SEO.
What I’d look for then is something with an end date written into the agreement and a handoff at the finish. Three months of real support that leaves you able to keep going beats twelve months of somebody quietly running it on your behalf.
Website management and SEO are not the same purchase
These get bundled together, and they shouldn’t be, because you might need one and not the other.
Website management is keeping the site working. Platform and plugin updates, security, backups, uptime, fixing what breaks, and making the content changes you don’t have time to make yourself. New hours, a new team member, a price change, a page for a service you just added.
SEO work is trying to get you found. Content, listings, technical optimization, reporting.
There’s a split inside that second one, and it’s where the double-paying happens.
On-site SEO is everything living on your own website. Structure, titles, internal linking, your content, how the pages load.
Off-site SEO is everything happening away from it. Listings, mentions, links, your presence on other platforms.
Most SEO packages start on-site and then move off-site. And anybody doing website management is already doing the on-site half. That’s the overlap.
A lot of small businesses need the first purchase and are sold the second. If your site is live, correct and quietly working, and the real problem is that nobody has updated it in eight months, that’s a management problem, not a search problem.
I’d go further. For most of the businesses I work with, website management is the more beneficial investment, because it’s where your customer journey gets improved and where your email outreach and engagement get worked on. Those are the things that move money.
And if you already have a website management team, the on-site work is theirs. Ask before you pay two people to work on the same site.
What to ask before you sign anything
I’ve hired marketing agencies, SEO agencies and PR agencies, and I’ve managed all three. Copy was the hardest part every time, which is why I’d ask this one first.
How is the copy written, and how do you make sure my voice is honored? Who writes it, what they start from, and what happens when it comes back not sounding like you.
What exactly are the monthly deliverables? Not “SEO management.” A list. How many posts, which listings, what reporting, and who writes it.
What is the quality of the links you’re building? Anyone can get you linked from anywhere, which is what makes link building worth asking about rather than assuming. Ask what they’re aiming for and what they’d refuse.
Do you clean up as well as build? A site accumulates problems: broken links, redirect chains, orphaned pages, crawl errors, slow pages, and toxic backlinks pointing at you that you never asked for. Ask whether cleanup is part of the retainer or whether you’re only paying for new work on top of old problems.
What level of management do you do inside the platform? Position tracking, site audits, listing management, backlink audits, AI visibility tracking, and content briefs are all separate jobs inside one subscription. “We use Semrush” is not an answer.
What does the end of this look like? Somebody who has thought about it will describe a handoff.
What do I keep? The plan, the research, the keyword work, the account access. If what you keep is a monthly PDF and a dashboard login that stops working the day you cancel, ask what you were paying for.
None of this is urgent, and I’ll say that out loud. A retainer you sign in three months is the same retainer. And what you learn about your own capacity in those three months will tell you more than any proposal will.
P.S. Before you do anything else, go finish your Google Business Profile. Hours, photographs, a reply to every review. It costs nothing and it gets skipped.
