Retainer
On-call engineering. The Sprint compounds when it's maintained, and decays fast when it isn't.
The Retainer protects the Sprint investment. Schema regressions sneak in on every CMS update, every plugin install, every component refactor. Without monitoring, an entity graph that took six weeks to architect can go invisible to AI engines in two weeks of unsupervised drift.
Standard tier ($10K/mo) covers regression monitoring, AI citation tracking, monthly pair sessions, and a Slack channel with 24-hour response. Enterprise tier ($25K/mo) adds dedicated weekly cadence, 4-hour incident response SLA, custom RankLabs dashboard with alerts, and multi-domain / international support.
Three-month minimum because the monitoring needs that long to surface meaningful regression patterns. Most retainer clients renew through 12+ months because the cost of letting schema decay is higher than the cost of maintaining it. The math: a $10K/mo retainer is cheaper than a $70K Sprint redo.
Foundation includes
- Schema regression monitoring · CI-integrated
- AI engine citation tracking · 5 engines
- Monthly engineering pair sessions (60 min)
- Slack channel · 24-hour response SLA
- Quarterly architecture reviews
- Incident response · breakage triage
- Schema migration support for major site changes
Enterprise adds
- Dedicated weekly cadence (60 min)
- 4-hour incident response SLA (vs 24h on Standard)
- RankLabs dashboard access with custom alert configuration
- Multi-domain / international entity graph monitoring
- Quarterly executive read-out
- Direct engineer-to-engineer Slack escalation
What’s not included
- New schema architecture work (that's Sprint scope)
- Major migrations beyond schema (separate engagement quoted)
- Content team support / editorial review
What the Retainer actually consists of
Each line item below is its own deep-dive page. Open the ones that matter to your decision. Skip the rest.
- // component 01Schema regression monitoring
RankLabs and your CI watch for schema breakage on every deploy. When something regresses, I see it before your traffic does.
Read the deep-dive - // component 02AI citation tracking
Continuous monitoring of your citation share across five AI engines. We watch the trend, not just the snapshot, so drift gets caught early.
Read the deep-dive - // component 03Monthly pair sessions
60 minutes a month with your engineering team to review what regressed, what moved, and what's worth shipping next.
Read the deep-dive - // component 04Slack channel with SLA
Direct Slack access to the engineer who shipped your Sprint. 24-hour response on Standard, 4-hour on Enterprise.
Read the deep-dive - // component 05Quarterly architecture reviews
Every 90 days we step back from incident response and ask whether the @graph design still fits the business as the site has evolved.
Read the deep-dive
Why a 3-month minimum?
Schema regression patterns take 30-60 days to surface. A one-month retainer doesn't generate enough signal for the monitoring to be useful. Three months is the minimum useful window.
What's the difference between Standard and Enterprise?
Pace and SLA. Standard is monthly cadence + 24h response. Enterprise is weekly cadence + 4h response. Enterprise gets dashboard access and multi-domain support. If you have a single domain and your AI search is stable post-Sprint, Standard is right. If you're multi-domain, regulated, or have sub-day RTO needs, Enterprise.
What happens when I cancel?
30-day notice. You keep all dashboards, reports, documentation, and the schema implementation in your codebase. None of it is rented.
Can I upgrade Standard → Enterprise mid-month?
Yes. Pro-rated for the partial month, full Enterprise rate the next month forward.
Stop pouring budget into a broken foundation.
If your SEO retainer hasn’t compounded, your AI citations have stalled, or your last technical audit ended in a deck nobody read, that’s not a content problem. It’s an engineering problem. The same engineer who diagnoses ships the fix.