---
title: "An Open Letter to the Owner Whose Ads Agency Just Added an AEO Retainer"
description: "Your Google Ads agency wants another retainer to get you cited in ChatGPT. Before you sign, ask who edits your pages, what gets logged, and what the reporting actually buys."
url: "https://groas.com/post/an-open-letter-to-the-owner-whose-google"
image: "https://pub-87da24ecbbfc4c3bad6875f3aa013712.r2.dev/generated-images/c631c8e7-c8f4-44e7-9671-72e6719f70ef.png"
published: "2026-10-17T05:33:05.459Z"
modified: "2026-10-17T05:33:05.570Z"
---

October 17, 2026 · 9 min read

# An Open Letter to the Owner Whose Ads Agency Just Added an AEO Retainer

[Alexander PerelmanHead Of Product @ groas](https://groas.com/author/alexander-perelman)[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-433793253/)

![Cartoon of an agency rep showing an owner a fancy telescope aimed at his shabby shop, joking he'll pay monthly to watch it rather than have it fixed.](https://pub-87da24ecbbfc4c3bad6875f3aa013712.r2.dev/generated-images/c631c8e7-c8f4-44e7-9671-72e6719f70ef.png)

In this article

1. [First, ask what page could earn the citation](#first-ask-what-page-could-earn-the-citation)
2. [Your new fee should buy edits, not just observation](#your-new-fee-should-buy-edits-not-just-observation)
3. [Five questions to put beside the renewal](#five-questions-to-put-beside-the-renewal)
4. [Sign for the work, or keep the fee](#sign-for-the-work-or-keep-the-fee)

If you are the owner whose Google Ads agency just added $800 or $1,500 a month to “get you into ChatGPT,” do not sign the renewal until you know who will edit your pages. You already pay a percentage of ad spend. You do not need another bill for a PDF that tells you someone checked whether your name appeared in an answer.

I understand the pause. You want your business cited in ChatGPT and Perplexity, and you do not want to dismiss something important because the proposal sounds like jargon. But you also do not want to pay for a year of charts while your service pages still say almost nothing. **The question is whether the add-on buys work or a report about work that never happened.**

I used to write line items for account management. For years I managed Google Ads by hand for small ecommerce shops and home services companies, and some of the hours I billed went to checking boxes. I am not anti-agency. I am anti-waste. The distinction matters here because a good agency can do the work that earns citations. An agency selling you monthly monitoring as if it were that work is charging for the easy part.

The answer to “How do I get cited?” has three parts: [pages that answer your buyer’s actual questions](https://jetfuel.agency/how-to-get-your-brand-mentioned-by-chatgpt-gemini-and-perplexity/), a site those engines can fetch and parse, and other sites that confirm you exist. That means clear answers, useful detail, sensible headings and markup, plus relevant listings and links. It does not mean someone can buy you a place in ChatGPT.

The engines do not all find and present sources the same way. ChatGPT draws on search results and training data, Gemini draws on Google’s index, and Perplexity runs web searches with visible citations. So check whether your pages are indexed and fetchable before you pay to measure whether an assistant mentions them. [If your pages cannot be found, a visibility retainer will not fix that](https://jetfuel.agency/how-to-get-your-brand-mentioned-by-chatgpt-gemini-and-perplexity/). Perplexity’s visible citations make it a useful place to watch what changes from week to week.

Keep that simple test beside the proposal. If its deliverables are long on dashboards and short on page edits, you have learned what you would be buying.

## First, ask what page could earn the citation

Suppose your buyer asks ChatGPT about a commercial snow removal contract in Worcester, or asks Perplexity whether a tankless water heater makes sense for a family of five. Your homepage probably does not answer either question. A useful page would address the cost, timing, tradeoffs and things that go wrong: the details your estimators already explain on the phone.

I learned this running ads. The query that spends money is often specific, and the page that answers it has to be specific too. **If your site does not answer the buyer’s question, a monthly mention count cannot make up the gap.**

Most small business sites fail this first test. You get a services page with six bullet points and a contact form, but no answer about cost, duration or the choices a buyer has to make. A practitioner guide groups the work into authority signals, structured content and topical depth. That matches what I have seen: a detailed answer page with useful numbers gives an engine more to work with than ten thin location pages repeating the same pitch. Ask which of your pages the agency would improve first, and what the buyer would learn from the edit.

Then ask whether an engine can fetch that page. A good answer does little for you if a robots.txt rule blocks it or the content sits in JavaScript a crawler skips. Clear headings, a direct answer near the top, FAQ or Article markup where it fits, and pages that load cleanly for GPTBot and PerplexityBot all belong in the work plan. You do not need to learn schema to ask who will implement it.

Do not let the agency collapse every outcome into one “AI visibility” score, either. [Being mentioned, getting a linked citation and receiving a visit are different things](https://www.techradar.com/pro/how-to-track-your-brands-visibility-in-ai-search-results). You can be named without a click. You can be cited on one answer and absent from the next. The log should tell you which happened, not hide all three behind an upward arrow.

The third part happens away from your site. A software company might need complete G2 and Crunchbase profiles; a local service business might need a chamber or trade association listing, a supplier link or local press. Those signals help confirm that your business exists beyond its own sales copy. If you have almost no third-party footprint, rewriting a page is not the whole job. Ask who will pursue the relevant listings and links, rather than merely report that they are missing.

If you want to see how those pieces fit together without signing a retainer, the [30-day playbook for one marketer working about 40 hours](https://groas.com/post/one-marketer-30-days-no-agency-my-playbo) lays out the sequence: pick 25 buyer questions, write or rewrite the answers, fix fetch issues, then add the listings. That is the work. Everything else is commentary on the work.

## Your new fee should buy edits, not just observation

Say you spend $20k a month on ads and pay 15 percent to manage them. That is $3,000 a month before the new line item. Now the renewal adds $800 for AEO monitoring, or $1,500 for what the agency calls a program. The name does not tell you which one you are getting.

[Agency AEO add-ons are commonly priced from $500 to $3,000 a month](https://www.airanklab.com/blog/best-aeo-trackers-agencies-marketing-teams), with basic monitoring and reporting at $500 to $800 and broader programs with content and fixes at $1,500 to $3,000. The tracking tool underneath can cost around $79 to $250 a month. That does not mean the entire difference is profit; people still need to choose prompts and interpret what they see. It does mean you should ask why a reporting-only scope costs what it does.

You can start watching without that retainer. Put 10 to 30 real buyer questions in a sheet, run them through ChatGPT and Perplexity each week, and record whether your business was named, linked or absent. If you want to automate part of that routine, an n8n job can read prompts from Sheets and call the Perplexity Sonar API. At roughly $5 to $14 per 1,000 requests, 25 prompts a week cost low single digits a month in API requests. **You should not pay $800 a month merely for someone to run prompts you could run yourself.**

Execution is different. Someone has to turn a thin service page into a useful answer, add appropriate markup, fix a crawl block, publish the cost guide you have been avoiding and approach the local sites that might link to you. That takes hours and judgment. For context, [small business AEO retainers can run $1,500 to $5,000 a month for work across 5 to 15 pages](https://www.stackmatix.com/blog/aeo-services-pricing), while entry-level trackers cost about $20 to $100 a month and pro tools around $100 to $300. If your proposal charges program prices but names only tracker deliverables, you are paying for execution and receiving observation.

I used to tell clients that reporting proved progress. I was wrong. Reporting proves you looked. A PDF saying your business appeared in 12 percent of answers, up from 9 percent, does not tell you which page earned a citation or what to change next. [The same prompt can produce different answers on different runs](https://teachaitools.blog/blog/best-ai-citation-tracking-tools-2026), so a single run dressed up as “share of voice” is theater. A useful log records the question, repeated checks, any cited URL and the page edit that preceded a change.

Read the scope line by line. Who edits the pages? How many? Which technical fixes are included? Which third-party mentions will they try to earn, rather than just monitor? Automation has made the watching cheap. It has not written the answer page for you.

## Five questions to put beside the renewal

You do not need to pick a fight on the call. You need answers specific enough to survive it. Ask these five questions before you sign:

1. **What does AI say about my business today?** Ask the agency to run 10 real buyer questions through ChatGPT and Perplexity before it quotes you. You should see where you were named, where a competitor was cited and where neither appeared. If it cannot show you [who gets cited before the work begins](https://www.lilachbullock.com/best-aeo-geo-consultants-small-business/), it is selling a map without looking at the road.
2. **Which pages will you touch in month one?** Ask for URLs, not principles. An answer should identify the pages to rewrite or publish, the markup to add and any crawl problem to fix. “Monthly monitoring and recommendations” is not another way to say “we will do those things.” [Get the pages and fixes named in the first-month scope](https://www.lilachbullock.com/best-aeo-geo-consultants-small-business/).
3. **What will you log, prompt by prompt?** Answers wobble from run to run. Ask how many buyer questions the agency will check, how often it will repeat them, and whether it separates a brand mention from a linked citation. Then ask whether you can see the cited URL and the edit associated with each movement. A blended score will not tell you what to do on Monday.
4. **Do you guarantee a spot in ChatGPT?** The answer should be no. [No one can promise you a specific placement in ChatGPT or Perplexity on a timeline](https://www.lilachbullock.com/best-aeo-geo-consultants-small-business/). A guarantee is not a show of confidence. It is a reason to close the proposal.
5. **Where does the work live?** Your pages should live on your site, in your CMS, under your ownership. Your log should remain available to you. Doorway pages on the agency’s domain, bought mentions and reviews it controls do not leave you much to keep if you leave.

Listen for verbs in the answers: _edited, published, fixed, earned, logged_. Those describe execution. _Monitored, observed, tracked, reported_ describe watching. You need some watching to know whether the work is helping, but it should not swallow a $1,500 add-on. This [letter to an owner paying for an AI visibility report](https://groas.com/post/an-open-letter-to-the-business-owner-who) looks at the same split from the invoice side.

## Sign for the work, or keep the fee

If your agency shows you the baseline, names the pages it will improve in month one, admits it cannot promise a spot and logs edits alongside citation movement where you can see them, sign. You are paying for a program, not a screenshot habit.

If it hedges, decline the add-on. Run your 25 buyer questions weekly in a sheet. Rewrite one answer page at a time using real numbers from your jobs. Fix anything blocking a crawler, then claim the relevant listings that show you exist. You can pay someone to do that work, but make the work the purchase.

If you want that execution without hiring for it, groas is built around the same order: pages written, technical fixes made and actions logged with the reason behind them, plus a weekly report on where you were named and what moved. **Execution first. Reporting second.** Your renewal should meet that standard too.

Sincerely, someone who used to write those line items.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### Should I pay my agency's AEO retainer, or is it just monitoring reports?

Before signing, check whether the scope is long on dashboards and short on page edits. A reporting-only retainer charges for observation rather than execution, and the proposal name alone does not tell you which one you are getting. Ask which pages will be rewritten, which markup will be added and which crawl fixes are included.

### What does it actually take to get a business cited in ChatGPT or Perplexity?

Three things: pages that answer your buyer's actual questions, a site those engines can fetch and parse, and other sites that confirm you exist. That means clear answers, useful detail, sensible headings and markup, plus relevant listings and links. No one can simply buy you a place in ChatGPT.

### Do ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity pull sources the same way?

No. ChatGPT draws on search results and training data, Gemini draws on Google's index, and Perplexity runs web searches with visible citations. Because of that, check whether your pages are indexed and fetchable before paying to measure whether an assistant mentions them. A visibility retainer will not fix pages that cannot be found.

### What kind of page is most likely to earn a citation from an AI assistant?

A detailed answer page that addresses a specific buyer question, including the cost, timing, tradeoffs and things that go wrong, gives an engine more to work with than ten thin location pages repeating the same pitch. Most small business sites fail this first test with only a services page of bullet points and a contact form.

### Can I track whether my business shows up in ChatGPT and Perplexity myself?

Yes. Put 10 to 30 real buyer questions in a sheet, run them through ChatGPT and Perplexity each week, and record whether your business was named, linked or absent. If you want to automate it, an n8n job can call the Perplexity Sonar API, with 25 prompts a week costing low single digits a month.

### What is the difference between a mention and a citation in AI search results?

A mention names your business, a citation links to it, and a visit means someone actually clicked through. The three are different outcomes: you can be named without a click, and be cited on one answer and absent from the next. A log should tell you which happened rather than hide all three behind a single upward arrow.

### How should an agency log AI citation tracking so the results are actually useful?

The log should record the question asked, repeat each check because answers wobble from run to run, and note any cited URL. It should also connect movement to the page edit that preceded it. A single run dressed up as a share-of-voice score tells you nothing about what to change next.

## Pay For Results, Not For Hours

Businesses buy the outcome, agencies resell it, and groas answers for it either way.

[See If You Qualify](https://groas.typeform.com/to/xC1bQNUT)

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