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Free check · 6 items · before you sign

Are you buying apparatus, or buying a document?

Six questions answered before signature. The output is the contract clause to add for the state you are in — because every gap on this list is one sentence, and all of them are cheaper now than at the first readout.

6 items Returns a contract clause Priced against 29 postings No email

No email required. Nothing is sent anywhere — your answers stay in this browser.

0 of 6 answered

The Consulting Deliverable Check

Answer these before signature. Item 2 fires regardless of your total score — a results page you have not verified can be geo-anchored to one city.

Item 1

Can you name, today, the one measurement your team will still be running in month seven without the consultant present?

If the answer is “the deck”, you are buying a document.

Item 2

Have you pulled your own head term's live top ten and confirmed there is no local pack before treating it as a national picture?

Ours came back with a local pack at position 5 and a Wichita, Kansas URL at position 6 — from a “United States” fetch.

Item 3

Is the retrieval gap list — top-10 ranking pages with zero AI citations, by URL — a named deliverable in the statement of work?

Named, with a format and a refresh cadence.

Item 4

Does the contract require impressions and clicks reported on separate lines, with two owners and a written rule that a click decline alongside a citation rise is acceptable?

That last clause is the one that protects the work.

Item 5

Is the evaluation window set at 45 days or more, agreed before kickoff?

Agreed before, not negotiated at the first disappointing readout.

Item 6

Have you priced the engagement against the published band for the equivalent internal hire, and against what each one actually covers?

Scope, not just cost. One person cannot carry eight specialisms.

Your numbers (optional)

These three produce the comparison rows: your retrieval gap, your window, and your price against the hire band.

Your result
Read the method
What you are being scored against

Our own numbers, from our own estate and a 29-posting corpus

We scored Buying a document on our first pass, and Unverified on item 2 — the head-term pull we started from turned out to be geo-anchored to Wichita.

MeasuredWhat it is
14 of 17Top-10 pages with zero AI citationsOur own estate: 17 pages ranked in Google's top 10 (average position 10 or better), and 3 of them were cited by an AI engine. · Indexable, 7 September 2026, n = 223 pages
median 6.81 days, P90 37.10 daysHow long citations lag publicationThis is the reason a 45-day evaluation window beats a 30-day one: at 30 days you are reading the lag, not the result. Third-party measurement, not ours — and we hold it second-hand, so treat it as directional. · Profound, 2026, as reported in LinkedIn's 2026 AI Search Visibility guide
$176K–$221KMedian advertised band for the equivalent internal hire16 of the 29 postings disclosed a band. Public postings only, mixed geographies and seniorities: it shows what employers ask for, not what the market pays. No employer is ever named. · Indexable job-req corpus, n = 29 public postings, June–August 2026
local pack at position 5What a national head-term pull actually returnedA "United States" fetch resolved to one city: a Wichita, Kansas URL sat at position 6. Re-pull before planning against any head term. · Ahrefs, live SERP, September 2026
at least 543 queries / 7,038 impressionsPage-one queries that earned zero clicks in 28 daysEight queries earned any click, and all eight were brand or navigational. "At least" is deliberate: the export caps at 500 rows per slice, so this is a floor, not a census. · Indexable, 28-day Search Console window to 6 September 2026

One domain, one 90-day window, one 28-day scan; the corpus is public postings only, mixed geographies and seniorities, and no employer is ever named. A case study, not a law.

Every gap on this list is one sentence in a contract

Added before kickoff they cost nothing. Added at the first readout they are change requests, and by then the engagement is already reporting on the wrong thing.

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