Be the Answer Your Buyers See, Everywhere They Ask

Search split into surfaces, and one rate covers all of them

For most of its history, search optimization meant one thing: rank a page in a list and earn the click. That single surface has fractured into several. Classic rankings still exist, but above and around them sit featured snippets, People Also Ask panels, AI Overviews, voice answers, and the generative shortlists that ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini compose when a buyer asks for a recommendation. Each surface rewards different work, and the brand that wins across them is rarely the one paying the most; it is the one whose content is structured to be extracted and whose entity is clear enough to be trusted. We built our practice around that reality, running answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization, and classic SEO as one integrated program at a flat forty-five dollars an hour. The rate is the same whether the work is a snippet restructure, a schema graph, or a citation baseline, because the discipline is the same: make your brand the clearest, most trustworthy answer to the questions your buyers actually ask.

Why the hourly model beats the retainer for search work

The agency retainer exists to smooth agency revenue, not to serve the client. It charges the same each month whether the work was heavy or light, hides how many hours actually went into delivery, and creates a quiet incentive to do the minimum that keeps the invoice unquestioned. Worse, it routinely lets a senior sell the work and a junior deliver it. Our structure removes all of that. You approve a written estimate before anything starts, you see task-level time logs on every invoice, the person who scoped your work is the one delivering it, and because billing is hourly against approved scope there is nothing to cancel if you want to pause. Most programs run somewhere between fifteen and forty hours a month depending on competition, and we recommend a number after auditing your site rather than before, so the figure reflects your actual situation rather than a package we needed to fill. Transparency is not a marketing line here; it is the operating model.

What integrated AEO, GEO, and SEO looks like in practice

Running the three disciplines together is not a bundle; it is a single program that reinforces itself. Classic SEO earns the crawlability and authority that make a page eligible for extraction and citation at all. Answer engine optimization then wins the specific extracted slot, the snippet or the Overview citation, through question-mapped structure and validated schema. Generative engine optimization gets the same well-structured, well-sourced pages named inside AI answers by ensuring they are retrievable, quotable, and backed by consistent entity signals. A page rebuilt for one of these surfaces almost always improves on the others, which is why treating them separately, or worse, buying them from three different vendors, leaves most of the value on the table. We measure all three against fixed baselines and report them together, so you see not just rankings but answer ownership and citation share, with the raw evidence attached to every number.