AI SEO Services: Scope, Timeline and What You Actually Get
AI SEO services make your business the source that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini cite when your buyer asks them a question. This page is the scope document: what we deliver, in what order, and what it looks like month by month.
If you want the argument for why this matters, that is on the AI SEO agency page. This one is the work order.
The engagement in one table
| Phase | When | What lands |
|---|---|---|
| Baseline | Week 1 | AI visibility measured across five engines, technical audit, competitor citation set |
| Foundation | Weeks 2 to 4 | llms.txt, schema, entity markup, crawler access, the fixes that gate everything else |
| Capture | Months 2 to 3 | Money pages built or rewritten against verified difficulty scores |
| Compound | Months 4 to 6 | Comparison pages, geography pages, internal link architecture, citation monitoring |
| Report | Monthly, throughout | Citation rate by engine, share of local voice, tracked conversions |
Month one: find out where you actually stand
Nobody can improve a citation rate they have never measured. So month one is measurement and the fixes that block everything downstream.
- AI visibility baseline. A set of prompts your buyers would really type, run against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Gemini. We record presence rate and average position inside the answer, separately, because they move independently.
- The competitor citation set. The domains cited instead of you. This is usually not the list of competitors you would have written down.
- Technical accessibility. Whether AI crawlers can reach your content at all. Blocked crawlers, JavaScript-dependent content and missing schema are common and quietly fatal.
- Keyword scoring. Every candidate term scored for real difficulty and cost per click before anything gets written. We do not build against guesses.
You get the baseline document whether or not you continue. It is yours.
Months two and three: build the pages that can win
Most sites do not need more content. They need the right pages, built against terms they can realistically reach.
The selection rule is simple and we apply it to our own site. A term has to be winnable at your current authority, commercially relevant, and not already covered by a page you own. Anything failing one of those three becomes an optimize-existing job instead of a new page, which is cheaper and usually faster.
- Money pages for the commercial terms you can actually rank for
- Rewrites of pages that already rank but fail to convert attention into clicks
- GEO structuring on every page: liftable answers, real headings, data tables, named authors, schema
- Internal link architecture so the new pages actually receive authority rather than sitting orphaned
Months four to six: compound it
- Comparison pages. Writing honestly about the alternatives your buyer is weighing. On one client these now carry the largest share of qualified traffic on a site of thousands of pages.
- Geography pages where you serve multiple markets, built before you need them rather than after.
- Citation monitoring. Weekly, so a drop is caught in days rather than at the quarterly review.
- Entity authority. Consistent structured identity for your business and your people across the web, which is what AI engines resolve against when deciding whether to trust you.
What is included and what is not
| Included | Not included |
|---|---|
| AI visibility tracking across five engines | Paid ad management, quoted separately |
| Technical fixes and schema | Full website rebuilds |
| Page writing and rewriting | Ongoing social media posting |
| Internal linking and site architecture | PR and media placement |
| Monthly reporting with tracked conversions | Guarantees of specific rankings, which nobody can honestly offer |
What it costs and what you own
- Flat monthly retainer, starting at $1,500 a month. Scope drives the number: how many markets, how large the site, whether paid and reputation work are in.
- No long-term contract. If it is not producing you should be able to leave.
- You own everything. Pages, accounts, data, tracking, from day one. No agency-held logins.
- A dedicated Slack channel, not a ticket queue.
How we know it works
One client, a medical courier operating across dozens of metros, now appears in over 90% of Google AI Mode answers for their core service term and roughly 9 out of 10 ChatGPT answers for their highest-intent term. A single customer won through one city page is approaching $3,000 a week in accounts receivable.
A national property tax appeal client is cited by ChatGPT as one of only two sources on their category’s main buying question. In one month their clicks rose 52% while click-through rate and average position improved at the same time, which is unusual, because growing sites normally dilute.
Frequently asked questions
What are AI SEO services?
AI SEO services are the work of making a business citable by AI answer engines. In practice that means measuring your current citation rate across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini, fixing the technical barriers that stop those engines reading your site, structuring content so it can be quoted cleanly, and building the pages that answer what your buyers actually ask.
How are AI SEO services different from regular SEO?
Traditional SEO earns a ranked link that a person clicks. AI SEO earns a mention inside the answer a model writes, which the person often reads without clicking anything. The underlying work overlaps, because pages that earn citations are usually strong organic pages too, but the measurement is completely different. Rankings do not tell you whether you were cited.
How long before AI SEO services show results?
Technical fixes and title rewrites can move within weeks. Citation rate typically starts shifting in months two to three. Competitive commercial pages take three to six months to mature. Anyone promising faster is describing luck.
How much do AI SEO services cost?
Leedly engagements start at $1,500 a month, flat rate, no long-term contract. Pricing scales with markets, site size, and whether paid and reputation work are included.
Can you guarantee I will be cited by ChatGPT?
No, and be careful with anyone who does. Model outputs vary between runs for the same prompt. What we can do is measure your citation rate honestly, move it, and show you the trend line. That is a real commitment. A guarantee is not.
Start with the baseline
The free scan runs the same first step we run on day one of a paid engagement: your current visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini, and the gap between the terms you own and the terms you should.