Their SEO conversations had stalled. AI visibility restarted them.

The trigger was a client asking the question directly — why doesn't ChatGPT know about us? — and the founder realising two things at once. The honest answer was that nothing in the SEO retainer was addressing it. And it was the first question a client had brought to them unprompted in a long time.

So they took it to a pilot group of 32 clients and 20 of them said yes. Not a campaign, not a price rise: a call, a short explanation, and a new line on the next invoice. The agency expects to buy more licences shortly and take it to the rest of the book.

Doing it by hand wasn't an option. Generative Engine Optimization done manually is schema markup written per page, content restructured per template, an llms.txt maintained by whoever remembers to maintain it. That's consulting: billed by the hour, different every time, impossible to put on a rate card. An agency can sell it to three clients. It cannot sell it to twenty.

The actual book is 14 sites on Business and 6 on Pro. So: $1,000 a month in software, $5,800 a month billed to clients, $4,800 a month in gross profit — or $57,600 a year. None of that comes from a partner discount. It's the gap between what software costs and what a service is worth to a client, which is the gap agencies have always sold into. Wholesale tiers begin at 50 sites and would widen it further, but nothing here depends on reaching them.

The number worth pausing on isn't the margin, though. It's the fifteen hours. This is a line of business generating five figures annually that consumed a little over a working day of labour to stand up. The margin only means something because the workload behind it is close to zero, and that is what resellers are actually trying to find out.

One caveat worth being straight about, because agencies think about it and rarely say it out loud: charging $350 for software that costs $59 and installs in five minutes only holds up if you're selling more than the install. What the client is paying for is somebody who understands what AI visibility is, reads the monthly numbers, explains what moved and why, and stays accountable for it. The software is the delivery mechanism. The retainer is still the retainer.

Almost nine in ten pages an assistant quotes are not the pages you got to the top of Google. Ranking work and AI visibility are different surfaces read by different machines, and the second one is mostly unclaimed.

For an agency, that is the whole pitch, and it is a pitch to a client who already believes in the category. They are paying for search visibility. This is search visibility on a surface their current retainer does not reach, which is why it opens a conversation instead of relitigating an old one.

That is the part the margin doesn't capture. Twenty of thirty-two clients took a call about something new, and several of those calls turned into the first proper review of their search strategy in years. An agency that had nothing new to say for two years now has a monthly number that moves and a reason to pick up the phone about it.

Worth keeping honest about scale, though. 379 referred visits across twenty sites over four months is about 5 a site a month. That is real, it's compounding, and it is not yet replacing anybody's organic traffic. The case for moving now is that it costs almost nothing and the sites that are legible today are the ones being quoted while everyone else waits.