What does an agency GEO retainer typically include?

Q: How many citation placements per month are realistic?

1-2 quality placements per month is a realistic target. Citation building is slower work than content production. Any retainer promising 5+ placements monthly is probably over-promising or counting low-quality directories that AI engines do not actually trust.

Question

Maciej Grabek · Accepted Answer

A working GEO retainer covers five things every month: prompt monitoring across the engines that matter to the client, content production tuned to be citable by AI engines, technical and schema fixes shipped to the client's site, citation-building outreach (third-party mentions on sources AI engines actually trust), and a monthly report that ties activity to visibility movement. Retainers that skip any of these five tend to lose the renewal in month 4 or 5. 1. Prompt monitoring The foundation. The agency runs a curated set of 25-200 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek on a regular cadence (weekly is standard, monthly is the floor). Each prompt is one the client's prospects would actually run - not vanity branded prompts. The agency tracks: whether the client is cited, where in the answer, alongside which competitors, and how that changes week over week. Example prompts for a B2B SaaS client selling sales-engagement software: "best sales engagement platforms for a 30-person SDR team", "Outreach vs Salesloft for outbound", "sales automation tools that integrate with HubSpot". Each one gets run across all 5 engines weekly. 2. Content production Most of the retainer's labor cost. Agencies producing 2-6 GEO-optimised pieces per month see the strongest visibility movement. "GEO-optimised" means: clear question-and-answer structure, real data and concrete examples (not generic claims), proper schema markup, internal linking to related entity pages, and topical depth that signals authority to engines that weigh source quality. Common pieces: pillar guides, comparison pages ("X vs Y"), industry-specific Q&A pages, listicle-style "best of" pages where the client can credibly be included. Pure brand-fluff content does not move the needle. 3. Technical and schema fixes Audit-driven. Common items shipped inside a retainer: Schema.org markup on Article, FAQPage, HowTo, Product, Organization, and Person entities where missing. Entity disambiguation via sameAs links to Wikidata, Crunchbase, LinkedIn company pages, etc. llms.txt and robots adjustments for engine-specific crawlers. Canonical and duplicate-content fixes that confuse AI engines about which page is authoritative. Page-speed and rendering fixes on pages engines need to crawl. 4. Citation building The least-discussed but highest-leverage component. AI engines cite a finite list of sources per answer; getting the client mentioned on the sources those engines actually trust is the moat. Tactics include: guest posts on industry publications the engines cite, contributed listicles, podcast appearances with transcribed show notes, expert quotes in journalist queries, and partner-content placements. This is slower work than content production. A retainer that promises 5+ citation placements per month is probably over-promising. 1-2 quality placements per month is a realistic target. 5. Monthly reporting Has to answer three questions: where did visibility move this month, why did it move (which activities drove the change), and what is planned next month. Reports that only show pretty charts and no narrative get clients eyeing the door by month 3. Strong reports include real engine excerpts ("here is what ChatGPT said about you this week vs last week") and at least one specific recommendation the client should action. What is sometimes included but does not have to be Reddit and forum monitoring (relevant for B2C and SaaS, less so elsewhere) Influencer and analyst briefings Direct outreach to wikis and review sites Brand-sentiment tracking on AI responses These are upsells or scope-creep risks rather than core retainer items. What should NOT be in a GEO retainer Paid media management, social media management, traditional PR, design work, and full SEO programs are separate services. Some agencies bundle them; that is fine as long as the GEO scope is documented separately. Without that, GEO becomes the line item the client cuts first when they want to renegotiate. Running it yourself before pitching it The fastest way to understand what belongs in a retainer is to run a baseline scan on your own agency website. See what the engines currently say about you, identify your own gaps, and use that exercise as the blueprint for what you will deliver to clients. You can trigger a free baseline scan in a couple of minutes.