Agency Decisions

What does an SEO retainer include?

Answer

A credible SEO retainer includes monthly technical SEO work (audits, fixes, structured data, page speed), content planning and production (briefs, editing, publishing), internal linking architecture, backlink work, monthly reporting with leading and lagging indicators, and increasingly AEO work (llms.txt, AI Instructions pages, schema for AI citation). Lower-tier retainers strip out execution and ship reports only.

Standard inclusions

Monthly technical audit and fixes. Keyword research and content brief production. Editorial content production (per the agreed page velocity). Internal linking updates. Schema markup implementation. Backlink outreach or digital PR. Search Console monitoring. Monthly reporting.

AEO additions (now standard at top retainers)

llms.txt and llms-full.txt setup and maintenance. AI Instructions page authoring. Schema engineering specifically for AI citation. Prompt tracking across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity. Citation harvesting on Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange. Wikipedia and Wikidata entity work.

What Spacemen Digital includes

The Spacemen Digital combined SEO + AEO retainer covers all of the above in a single engagement. The integrated structure compounds foundation work across both disciplines.

Want help shipping AEO into your site?

Run the free 50-signal AI Agent Readiness Check or book a free scoping call.

Score my site