Adding AI visibility to an agency retainer

Your clients are starting to ask whether ChatGPT recommends them. Some have tried it themselves and did not like the answer. Some have been pitched by someone promising to fix it. Either way, the question is arriving at your desk, and “we handle SEO, and that covers it” is not a complete answer.

The good news for an agency is that most of the work that improves AI visibility is work you already know how to do. What is new is the measurement, and the discipline of reporting it honestly. This guide covers both, and the two ways an agency can use Responsii to do the measuring.

Why it belongs in the retainer

A buyer who asks an assistant for a recommendation gets a paragraph naming a few businesses. If your client is not in it, nothing in their analytics, their rank tracker or their call tracking records the loss. That makes it a reporting gap in the retainer you already run: a channel your client cares about, that your current dashboards cannot see.

It is also a channel where the inputs overlap heavily with local SEO — listings, reviews, on-page clarity, local links and mentions. Adding it is less a new service line than a new lens on work you are already billing for, plus some work you may not have prioritized before.

How to report on it honestly

This is where agencies can lose trust fastest, because AI visibility is easy to report flatteringly. A few rules keep it credible:

• Lead with organic mention rate. That is the share of answers, to buyer questions that never contain the client's name, in which the client is named. It is the number that says whether AI is sending them strangers.
• Keep branded questions separate. Questions that include the client's name almost always mention them. They are useful for checking accuracy — right services, area, phone — but blending them into the headline inflates it by construction.
• Separate “not mentioned” from “not tested”. If an engine errored or timed out, that answer is a gap in the measurement, not a miss for the client. Count it as neither.
• Report the trend, not the latest run. Answers vary between runs. One month's movement is weak evidence; several months in the same direction is a finding.
• Show who is named instead, and why. Competitor share of voice and the sources the answers drew on turn a disappointing number into a work plan.
• Never promise a position. Nobody controls what an engine says. Promise the work and the measurement, not the outcome.

The work you can sell

Once you can see which sources the answers lean on for a client's category and city, the work follows from it. Most of it maps onto skills an SEO or local-marketing team already has:

1. Listings and consistency. Identical name, address and phone across the Google Business Profile, Yelp, the BBB, industry directories and the rest; service areas that match reality.
2. Review programs. A steady flow of recent reviews on the platforms that actually come up in the client's answers, and replies to them.
3. Getting onto cited sources. Pitching the local roundups, city guides and trade directories that keep appearing in answers — classic digital PR, aimed by evidence.
4. On-site clarity. One page per service saying what, where and for whom; FAQ content built from real buyer questions; LocalBusiness schema markup.
5. Technical access. Making sure robots.txt and security settings do not block AI crawlers such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot.
6. Community presence, done properly. Where forums or Reddit threads are cited, helping the client contribute genuinely under their own name — not astroturfing, which gets removed and reflects on you.
7. Accuracy fixes. Tracking down the outdated listing behind a wrong phone number or retired service that an engine keeps repeating.

Two ways to work with Responsii

Responsii does the measurement: up to 40 buyer questions built from each client's category, asked across every AI engine we support every month, with organic mention rate reported apart from branded questions, accuracy checking, competitor share of voice and citation sources. The higher plans add prioritized recommendations and drafted content. Plans are Visibility at $79 a month, Coaching at $149 and Authorship at $299, with $15 a month for each additional location. Agencies can work with us in one of two ways.

Refer clients and earn a lifetime share

As an approved partner, you get a referral link. Your client signs up and pays Responsii directly, and you earn a share of every invoice they pay for as long as they stay a customer — not a one-off bounty. The share steps up with the number of your referred clients currently paying:

• Bronze, 1–5 paying clients: 20% lifetime.
• Silver, 6–20 paying clients: 25% lifetime.
• Gold, 21 or more paying clients: 30% lifetime. Co-branded reports at Gold are in build, not yet available.

Commission is calculated on what the client pays before tax and paid on the last day of the following month; balances under $100 roll forward. The full rules are in the partner terms.

Run clients yourself on an agency account

If you would rather operate Responsii for your clients, an agency account puts every client under one login, each with its own reports, plan and history, on one monthly invoice. You pay list price less a discount on the whole invoice, set by how many of your clients have a paid plan: 20% for 1–5 clients, 25% for 6–20, and 30% for 21 or more. There is no commission on clients you manage and pay for — you simply pay less. What you charge your clients for your services is up to you; Responsii's name stays on the reports. The details are in the agency terms.

Which fits

Referral suits clients who want their own subscription and their own login, and agencies that would rather not carry the billing. An agency account suits agencies that already run the work and want the measurement inside their own workflow, on one invoice. You can do both: the agency account for clients you manage, referral links for businesses that prefer to sign up directly. Both are covered on the agency page.

Start with one client

The simplest way to see whether this belongs in your retainers is to try it on a client you know well. The free audit runs eleven buyer questions for a business — nine that never use its name and two that do — across two AI engines and emails the result, with no account and no card. It is a reasonable first conversation to have with a client.