What it costs to be recommended.

There are three plans, and each one is a flat setup fee plus a monthly fee. On the 12-month program: The Mention is $750 a month, The Shortlist is $995 and The Answer is $1,500. The same programs are available with no minimum term at $975, $1,295 and $2,000 a month. List setup fees are $1,250, $1,750 and $2,500. A fourth program, The Authority, covers reputation-sensitive and multi-practitioner categories at $5,000 setup and $3,500 a month; it is scoped in conversation rather than sold off the page. All prices are in US dollars.

We publish every price on purpose. You should be able to work out whether this is a serious conversation before you spend an hour on a call with us.

Setup builds the foundation that everything else stands on. You have already had the 109-point diagnostic free by this point, so setup covers the build: the Genius Interview that extracts what you actually know, your schema and entity architecture, your foundation pages, your FAQ build, your citations presence and the site hygiene work that makes all of it readable to machines.

Publishing content before that foundation exists is like furnishing a house before the walls go up. The articles would still be good, and AI would still struggle to work out whose expertise it was reading.

Because the plan is the scoping. A more complex build belongs in a higher plan, so it never arrives as a surprise line item halfway through onboarding. You will not get a change order from us for something we should have understood at the start.

Through October 31, 2026, the setup fee on The Shortlist 12-month program is $250 instead of $1,750. It applies to that one plan; The Mention and The Answer keep their list setup fees. Three things are worth being precise about:

• The $1,500 comes straight off your setup fee, so you pay $250 to start instead of $1,750.
• Your first monthly payment begins once your foundation is built and ready to publish, not on the day you sign.
• If you change your mind before your Genius Interview, the $250 comes back to you in full.

List setup prices return on November 1, 2026.

No, and there is a reason for the floor rather than a policy behind it. Below $750 a month the work stops being real: fewer articles, no independent verification, generic content with no governed record behind it. That version would cost you less and damage your reputation, which is the opposite of what you are buying.

The Mention exists precisely so that a specialist in a genuinely small market can run the complete system without a $20,000 a year commitment.

Not in the usual sense, and the free part is arguably better. The 109-point Recommendation Check costs nothing, takes about an hour to present, and carries no obligation. You will see your score, the competitors AI is recommending instead of you, the specific queries where you are invisible, and a prioritized roadmap of what to fix first. If you decide not to work with us, you keep all of it.

We can discuss splitting setup across the first few months if that helps with cash flow. Ask us. We are flexible within reason, and we would rather structure the start sensibly than lose a business we can genuinely help.

The plan covers everything listed in the comparison table, including press distribution and citations, so the normal running of your program does not generate extra invoices. The exceptions are things you would specifically ask us to add, such as marquee placements beyond your included quantity or bolt-on work outside the core program. Anything like that gets quoted and approved before it happens.

No. Your rate is fixed for your term, at the price on your agreement. If our list prices change, that affects new agreements, not yours.

The plan follows how hard the recommendation is to win in your category, which comes down to three things: how many credible competitors are already visible to AI, how much scrutiny your category applies before somebody trusts you, and how many named experts the recommendation has to carry.

The Mention suits a genuinely narrow market. The Shortlist suits one concentrated market with a handful of established rivals. The Answer suits a competitive market that is still winnable. Authority suits categories where reputation itself is part of the search problem. The free Recommendation Check reads your actual market and tells you which one it calls for.

No, and this is the single most common mistake buyers make. A one-location law firm can genuinely need Authority, because the category applies enormous scrutiny and several practitioners each need their own credibility built. A multi-location operator in a quiet niche can do the entire job on The Shortlist. Size your plan to the difficulty of the recommendation problem and you will spend the right amount.

It is the same system at a lighter cadence. Every plan includes the Genius Interview, entity and schema architecture, core SEO, expert-led articles, digital PR, five-engine monitoring and monthly reporting. The Mention runs fewer articles a month and fewer press campaigns a year. It does not run a lesser standard, and nothing is switched off.

Competitive force, not two extra articles. The Answer moves press from four campaigns a year to twelve, adds four marquee placements a year, tracks your named competitors month by month, moves strategy reviews to quarterly and runs a deeper competitor and recommendation intelligence layer.

The Shortlist is the right answer when a handful of rivals are visible and steady consistency will pass them. The Answer is the right answer when the category is genuinely contested and the deeper evidence base is what decides it.

When reputation is part of the search problem. That usually means a high-trust category such as legal, financial, medical or high-stakes advisory work, several named practitioners who each need credibility built individually, claims that have to be defensible under scrutiny, or territory wider than a single city. The Authority can absolutely be one location. What makes it The Authority is complexity, not geography.

It is not sold off the page, because the build genuinely has to be scoped: how many experts, how much territory, how much claims risk. The list price is public, $5,000 setup and $3,500 a month, and the conversation starts the same place everything does, with the free Recommendation Check.

Yes, and clients do. If your market turns out to be more contested than the diagnostic suggested, or your business expands into new territory, we will tell you and we will move you. The foundation work carries over, so you are not paying to rebuild anything.

Talk to us. Within a term the agreement sets what happens, and we will always rather find the arrangement that keeps the work honest than hold you to a volume your market cannot absorb. If a plan is oversized for what you actually need, that is our scoping error to fix.

Multi-location groups, franchise networks and enterprise builds are a scoped conversation rather than a plan on a page, because the entity architecture alone changes shape at that size. Our enterprise page covers how that works, and the Recommendation Check is still the right starting point.

Yes. If you need leads next week, this is the wrong instrument, because AI visibility is infrastructure and it compounds over months. If you compete primarily on price, the trust signals that make this work matter less in your category. And if the diagnostic says your market only justifies The Mention, we will quote you The Mention even though the larger number would suit us better.

Because that is honestly how long the work takes to compound. Entity signals have to be built, published, indexed and then absorbed by models that update on their own schedules. A three-month engagement would take your money and finish just as the evidence started to land.

If a year is more commitment than you want to make, the flexible program exists for exactly that reason. It is the same system with no minimum term, at a higher monthly rate.

Nothing in the work, and everything in the runway. Both run the identical program with the identical quantities and the identical quality floor. The 12-month price is lower because a year of committed runway is what lets us plan, publish and compound properly. The flexible price is higher because you can stop with 30 days' written notice, and that optionality has a real cost on our side.

Yes. Every 12-month term includes a one-time two-month pause with 30 days' written notice. The term extends by the length of the pause, so you still receive twelve fully delivered months. Businesses have quarters that go sideways, and we would rather hold your place than watch you cancel something that was working.

There is a defined buyout available after six paid months, and we walk you through those exact terms before you sign, not when you want to leave. If the work genuinely is not moving by month six, we will be the ones raising it. We are not interested in taking money for something that isn't working.

No, and we would rather explain why than pretend otherwise. We guarantee execution: the work gets done, on cadence, to the published quality floor. We do not guarantee specific outcomes, because the models, your competitors and your market all move independently of us. What we promise is readiness, and a monthly report that shows you precisely what is changing.

You do. The articles, the pages, the schema and the profiles all live on your site and belong to your business. The one thing that stays ours is the tooling that produces them.

On The Answer: twelve expert-led articles a month, each scored through the Integrity Gate with schema implemented, twelve press campaigns a year plus four marquee placements, ongoing core SEO and entity maintenance, a monthly visibility probe across five AI engines with named-competitor extraction, your monthly branded report, direct access by email and Slack, and quarterly strategy reviews.

The other plans run the same list at their own quantities. The comparison table above sets out every line.

It starts with your Genius Interview, which extracts the specifics you know and generic content never contains: the real numbers, the actual constraints, the judgment calls you make that a competitor could not fake. Our system drafts from that governed record, checks the facts, runs editorial review and scores the result. A human gates every piece before it publishes.

What makes it citable to AI is information gain, meaning it says something the models do not already have a thousand versions of.

It is our quality floor, and it is the same on every plan. Every piece is scored from 0 to 100 across accuracy, information gain, structure and voice. Nothing publishes under 80. If a piece cannot clear the floor, it goes back rather than out, because a weak article published under your name costs you more than a missed slot.

A standard campaign is a professionally written release distributed through a syndication network of 500 or more outlets, which gives AI independent surfaces that confirm who you are. A marquee placement targets recognizable mastheads, and it carries considerably more weight for exactly that reason.

We describe these as distributed and placed, never as earned editorial coverage, because that distinction matters and plenty of agencies blur it. Specific publications depend on story fit and availability, so no individual publication is guaranteed unless it has been confirmed.

Core SEO is included in every plan: search and competitor research, technical SEO, on-page work, content strategy, internal linking and a GA4 and Search Console performance loop. Better SEO helps AI recommendations, because the retrieval layer AI reads is still largely search.

What we do not do is sell you Google rankings as the outcome. Rankings improve as a byproduct of the work. If aggressive Google expansion is specifically what you want, that is a separate managed program rather than something we quietly fold into the retainer.

The Genius Interview is the real ask, and it is worth the calendar space. After that, most clients spend an hour or two a month reviewing what we send. Strategy reviews are twice a year on The Mention and The Shortlist and quarterly on The Answer and Authority. You are buying the removal of a marketing job from your week, so if the program starts generating homework for you, tell us and we will fix it.

Yes. You see everything before it goes live and we publish nothing you are uncomfortable with. We do encourage trusting the process once you have seen a few months of it, because anything that clears the Integrity Gate has already met a standard most agencies never apply.

Yes. We implement schema, publish pages and articles, fix site hygiene issues and own your indexing. You keep full access and full ownership throughout. If your site is genuinely too fragile to build on, we will say so during the diagnostic rather than three months into a program.

Usually not. An outdated site with a solid technical base is workable, and a beautiful site with no entity architecture is often the weaker starting point. The diagnostic tells us which situation you are in, and we will tell you honestly if a rebuild has to come first.

The Mention, The Shortlist and The Answer each build one named expert. The Authority covers up to three, each with their own profile, schema and attributed work. If your business genuinely sells on the strength of several individuals, that is a real signal to have The Authority conversation rather than a reason to upsell you.

Foundation work lands in the first six to eight weeks and you will see it in the diagnostic re-run. Movement in AI answers typically follows over the months after that, because different engines refresh their picture of your business on different schedules. Gemini reads the live web and reflects change quickly. ChatGPT leans more on training data and takes longer to absorb you.

Anyone promising you AI recommendations in thirty days is describing a mechanism that does not exist.

A monthly probe across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Grok, tracked over time. The Answer and Authority get all seven of our named metrics, including Visibility Score, Prompt Coverage, Recommendation Rate, Citation Rate, Competitor Share of Voice, Factual Accuracy and Indexing Health. The Mention and The Shortlist get the core three. Every plan gets the GA4 and Search Console loop, so search performance sits alongside the AI picture.

Execution. The work gets done, on the cadence you bought, to the published quality floor, with a report each month showing exactly what happened. We do not guarantee rankings or specific AI recommendations, and we will not pretend the models are controllable when they are not.

Yes, and it works best when everyone knows who owns what. We handle entity architecture, AI visibility, expert content and authority building. Plenty of clients keep an agency running paid media or conversion work alongside us. What causes problems is two parties silently editing the same schema, so we agree the boundary at the start.

It is raw material, which is a better starting point than nothing. The usual problem is that it is unstructured, not schema-connected, or written in a form AI cannot extract cleanly. We audit what exists, upgrade what can be upgraded and fill the gaps rather than starting your archive again from zero.

Then the head start matters even more. Entity authority compounds, so a business that started building evidence a year earlier is not a year ahead, it is a year of accumulated citations, press and structured proof ahead. That is also the honest argument against waiting for the category to settle down.

The Recommendation Check. It is free, it takes about an hour to present, and it carries no obligation. You will see where you stand across 109 checkpoints, who AI is recommending instead of you, and which plan your market actually calls for. Then you decide whether you want us to do anything about it.