A web developer offered AI visibility to all 50 clients. Thirty said yes.
A solo website manager maintains around 50 WordPress sites on monthly care plans. Until this year, AI search had never come up in a single client conversation. Then two clients asked about LovedByAI by name, unprompted, within days of each other. He offered it to his entire book.
Verified LovedByAI partner, anonymised at their request.
01The result
Client opt-in
30 of 50
Roughly half of them on day one
Setup time per site
3 min
About six hours total since February
AI mention increase
+35%
Across 30 client websites, March to July 2026
- Partner
- Solo web developer · care plans and site maintenance
- Model
- Revenue share · clients pay LovedByAI directly, he earns recurring commission
- Live since
- February 2026 · 30 client sites
- Total time invested
- ≈6 hours, all in
- Time to first commission
- One day
02The conversation he wasn't having
The conversation he wasn't having
“I wasn't having AI conversations with clients at all. It just wasn't a topic.”
This is the ordinary state of a care-plan business. The work is backups, updates, uptime, the occasional plugin conflict: necessary, invisible, and increasingly hard to charge more for. Clients don't hear from you between invoices unless something breaks, which means the only news you ever bring them is bad news.
Then two separate clients asked him about LovedByAI specifically, by name, having heard about it elsewhere. That's an unusual thing to happen twice in a fortnight, and he read it correctly: the topic had arrived in his clients' world whether or not it had arrived in his. He reached out to the vendor rather than waiting for a third.
03He asked everyone
He asked everyone, not the likely ones
The instinct with a new offer is to test it on two or three receptive clients first. He didn't. He put it in front of all fifty.
What happened when he asked all 50
Each square is one client site under management. Opt-in figures as reported by the partner; all thirty are live in the platform today.
- 15
- Said yes on day one
- 15
- Said yes later
- 20
- Didn't take it
- 50
- client sites under management
Thirty said yes. About half came back the same day, which tells you something about how little persuasion the topic currently requires. Most clients have used ChatGPT. Most have, at some point, typed their own company name into it. The offer isn't asking them to believe in a new marketing channel; it's answering a question they've already privately asked.
The first commission landed within a day of the first message going out.
Client sites live, cumulative
February to August 2026. The February cohort is the four clients who moved immediately; the April step is the bulk of the book following.
04The economics
He doesn't charge for it. That's the point.
He adds no margin. Clients pay LovedByAI directly at list price — $29 to $59 per site per month depending on page count — and he earns a recurring share of that for the life of each subscription, currently running at about $4,000 a year across 30 sites.
Two numbers on this page look like they disagree, so it's worth saying plainly which is which. $4,000 a year is the run rate today, now that all thirty sites are live. About $1,500 is what he has actually banked so far, because for most of the six months he had four sites, then seven, then sixteen. The chart below is the money that landed. The run rate is what next year looks like if nobody cancels.
Recurring commission earned, cumulative
February to August 2026. Derived from the partner's reported run rate of about $4,000 a year across 30 sites, applied to the sites live in each month. Commission is recurring for the life of each subscription, so the line only goes one way.
Framed as a revenue play, that's modest. Framed correctly, it isn't a revenue play at all. What it bought him was a legitimate reason to contact fifty clients with something useful, a new deliverable on a care plan that had been static for years, and a monthly report showing numbers that go up. The commission is what the relationship pays out, not what the exercise was for. For a solo operator whose competitive risk is being seen as a commodity, that's the more valuable half.
“Three minutes a site. I've spent maybe six hours on this since February.”
05The risk
Across 30 client sites, nothing broke.
Worth stating plainly, because it's the fear that stops most people with client sites under management: across all 30 live installs, running the usual assortment of page builders, WooCommerce stores and incumbent SEO plugins, there were no conflicts and no rollbacks. Nobody's Friday was ruined.
What visitors see
What assistants read
<script type="application/ld+json">
"@type": "Organization", "name": …
"@type": "FAQPage", "mainEntity": […]
</script>
# llms.txt
What this business does, in one line.
Which pages answer which question.
## Answer-first summary
The point of the page, in the first sentence.
llms.txt, generated and kept current.“The team is amazing. Great support.”
06What the client sites did
What the client sites actually did.
Every client site is now picked up by an AI assistant about 14 times a day, up from 10.7 in March. That is a 35% increase per site across five complete months, averaged over the book so that adding sites doesn't flatter the number. The first ten days of August ran higher again, at 19.2, but a third of a month isn't a month and we're not going to headline it.
AI mentions per site, per day
Across the partner's 30 client sites, March to August 2026. Averaged per site so adding sites doesn't inflate the figure. February is omitted as a three-day partial month; August covers 1 to 10 August.
View as table
| Month | AI mentions / site / day |
|---|---|
| Mar 2026 | 10.7 |
| Apr 2026 | 14.4 |
| May 2026 | 17.4 |
| Jun 2026 | 14.9 |
| Jul 2026 | 14.4 |
| Aug 2026 | 19.2 |
LovedByAI
This partner's account · mentions against visits
The partner's own dashboard, across the whole book. Mentions on the left axis, visits on the right, both trending up through July.
Mentions are only the first half. Across these sites LovedByAI recorded about 1,650 AI-referred visits — real people arriving from an assistant rather than a search results page. Around 1,550 came after April, running at roughly sixteen times the rate of the months before it, and twenty-two of the sites now pull AI-referred traffic every month.
07How he sold it
How he sold it to his clients
One fact does most of the work, because the reasonable client objection is we already pay someone for SEO.
URLs ranking in Google's top ten for a query
URLs cited by AI assistants for that same query
12% are in both. The rest are cited without ranking there at all.
The overlap says that SEO work isn't quietly covering this. It's a different surface, read by different machines, and at the moment most sites aren't formatted for it.
How he puts it to a client
“Your site was built for Google. AI reads it a different way, they need context and natural language, and don't run things like JavaScript. This plugin fixes that in the background, it's cheap, and the numbers move. Can I send you a brochure?”
Thirty clients said yes to an email. Here is one you can send, written the way he describes the conversation rather than copied from his outbox. The thing that makes it work is that it's easy to say no to.
A template you can steal
Subject: something new I'd like to put on your site
Hi [name],
Two of my clients asked me about this in the same week, which is usually my signal that I'm behind on something.
When someone asks ChatGPT for [what you do], it answers by reading websites. Yours was built for Google. AI reads differently: it wants context and plain language, and it doesn't run a lot of the JavaScript your pages rely on. So at the moment it tends to read someone else's site instead of yours.
There's a tool that fixes that in the background. It doesn't touch your design, your speed, or anything a visitor sees. It takes me about three minutes to switch on, and it's [$29–59] a month paid directly to them, not to me.
I'm not going to tell you this transforms your business this quarter. The numbers are still small. But it's cheap, there's no risk to the site, and the pages that are readable now are the ones getting quoted later.
Want me to turn it on? If not, genuinely no problem, and I'll raise it again if it grows into something bigger.
[you]
“It gave me a reason to pick up the phone. Half those calls turned into a conversation about their SEO plan that I hadn't been able to start in years.”
That is the part that doesn't show up in the commission line. AI visibility was the opening, and several of those openings turned into wider conversations about search work the clients had stopped thinking about.
08Q&A
The questions other developers ask him.
Answered with what actually happened across his fifty client conversations and thirty live sites.
Will my clients actually pay more?
Do I have to write content or learn schema markup?
Will it break a client site?
I've only got six clients. Is it worth it?
Do clients stay, or do they cancel in month three?
How do I prove to a client that it's working?
Does this cannibalise the SEO work I already bill for?
What's the catch?
Start with your own client list.
The free scan takes 60 to 90 seconds per site and needs no signup. Run it across your book: it's exactly what this developer did before he emailed anyone.
About this case study. The partner is a real LovedByAI partner. Their name and client details have been anonymised at their request; the figures have not been changed.
How this was measured. Mention and referral figures come from LovedByAI's own telemetry for the sites in this partner's account, covering 1 February to 10 August 2026. An “AI mention” is one request for a page from an AI search or on-demand assistant agent (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Claude-Web, Claude-User, YouBot). Bulk AI training crawlers are excluded: they are much larger in volume and not indicative of an assistant answering a live question. Per-site-per-day figures are averaged over active site-days so adding sites does not inflate the rate. February 2026 is excluded from the mentions chart as a partial month (three days of data); August 2026 covers 1 to 10 August. Opt-in counts, time invested and commission are as reported by the partner; the cumulative commission chart applies that reported run rate to the sites live each month rather than reading per-month payouts.
On earnings. Commission figures describe one partner's results and are not a projection. What you earn depends on how many sites you bring and what your clients subscribe to.