AI Optimization Terms.

AI Optimization is the discipline of making your business legible to AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, and others — so they can recognise, cite, and recommend you when users ask questions in your space.

This retainer covers the structural, entity-level, and content-formatting work that makes that possible.

• Entity & schema build-out — schema.org markup (Organization, Person, Service, FAQPage, HowTo where relevant), maintained and expanded month over month;
• Answer-formatted content — restructuring of existing pages and production of new answer blocks (concise paragraphs that AI engines lift cleanly);
• FAQ schema farm — a curated, structured library of real questions your customers ask, schema-marked for citability;
• llms.txt maintenance — a file at your domain root that tells AI crawlers what content matters;
• AI crawler readiness — robots.txt rules, sitemap variants, response headers tuned for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, and Common Crawl;
• Citation monitoring (see §5) and a monthly report.

To be very clear about the edges:

• Not a guarantee of citation by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, or any other AI engine. We optimize for citability; the engines decide.
• Not a paid placement with any AI provider. There is currently no equivalent of "Google Ads" for AI engines.
• Not a replacement for SEO. AI engines draw heavily from search rankings. Pair this with SEO Growth for compounding effects.
• Not a quick win. Most of the lift shows up in months 2–4. Some verticals are faster, some slower; we set realistic expectations after audit.
• Not a measurable channel in the traditional sense. Citations don't generate trackable referrer traffic. We use proxy metrics (see §5).

The effectiveness of this retainer depends in large part on third-party AI platforms that we do not control: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, and any others that emerge. They can — and do — change crawling behaviour, citation policy, ranking weights, source weighting, and entire products, without notice.

We monitor those changes and adapt your setup. We are not liable for visibility losses caused by platform changes. We will tell you when something material changes and what we're doing about it.

Citation monitoring uses a combination of: branded query sampling across major AI engines, sourced-mention scraping where permitted by the engine, and direct API measurement where available.

The data is directional, not exhaustive. AI engines do not currently expose comprehensive citation data the way Google exposes Search Console. Our reports show:

• Citation count for tracked branded and unbranded queries;
• Citation breakdown by AI engine;
• Quote sentiment and accuracy (when our brand is cited);
• Comparator data (citation share vs. named competitors).

AI Optimization has a 3-month minimum term. After that, it continues month-to-month and can be cancelled with no notice. Billing runs monthly via Stripe in your local currency.

• Provide access to the site CMS (or an API) so we can update schema and content;
• Approve published content within 3 business days;
• Not deploy conflicting schema or robots rules on the same domain;
• Tell us about platform migrations, redomain plans, or other major site changes.

By default, we configure your site to be crawlable by major AI engines. If you don't want certain content used for AI training (this is a separate question from being citable), tell us and we'll deploy the appropriate combination of opt-out signals.

The crawlers ultimately decide whether to honour those signals. Where they don't, the remedy is with the platform, not with us.

The retainer optionally includes configuration and deployment of an AI chat widget that draws from your site's content and is grounded against it.

Subscription costs for the underlying LLM (e.g., OpenAI API usage) are not included in the retainer. You pay those directly to the provider. We'll guide budget estimation but are not liable for usage overruns.

The widget responds based on the content we configure. We cannot guarantee that an LLM won't occasionally produce an inaccurate or off-brand response. You are responsible for monitoring and flagging issues; we are responsible for tuning the configuration to reduce them.

Same as the SEO retainer: after the 3-month minimum, cancel any time; current month continues to completion; the next cycle doesn't run; FAQ schema, llms.txt, and entity markup stay on your site.

See the Refund Policy. Same first-week first-month mismatch refund as the SEO retainer. Other refunds are not available; the alternative-work guarantee applies mid-retainer.