PondralPitching the work
Lead with the audit, not the deck. A free baseline audit on the prospect's actual brand — three engines, ten queries, real findings — closes faster than any case study. The audit is the pitch.
Frame AEO as adjacent to SEO, not a replacement. Most prospects already have an SEO retainer; positioning AEO as a complement (different methodology, different deliverables, different KPIs) avoids the "are you saying my SEO agency is wrong?" derailment.
Scoping the retainer
Per-brand pricing scales cleanly. Most agencies land at $3–8K/month per brand for a Growth-tier scope: monthly audit, prioritized gap list, four pieces of source content per month, and a quarterly methodology review.
Build the deliverable around the score trajectory, not the activity log. Clients care that their grade went from C+ to B+, not that you wrote four blog posts. Lead every report with the chart.
Reporting
Use white-labeled exports. Your clients should see "[Agency] AEO Report" not a Pondral logo. Every plan above Free supports this.
Report on three numbers: overall score, citation share-of-voice, and gap-closure rate. These map cleanly to traffic, brand, and execution — the three things every CMO actually cares about.
- The audit is the pitch.
- Score trajectory > activity log.
- Three KPIs: score, share-of-voice, gap-closure.