What Should You Expect for $399 a Month? The Answer Watch, Item by Item

Monthly retainers in this market are vague on purpose. Ongoing optimization. Continuous visibility management. You find out what you bought in month three, when you realize nothing has been published.

So here is what to expect for $399 a month, stated plainly. You get measurement and research: your board re-run weekly against the same frozen questions, your competitor set tracked, and one named move each month chosen from your own evidence. You do not get us publishing to your website.

Below: the short answer, what a month actually contains, what is in and what is out, who should not buy this, and how the prices fit together.

What should you expect for $399 a month?

Expect four re-runs, a comparison, and a decision. The board that your audit produced gets re-run weekly against the same question set, the results get compared to the previous month, and a person tells you the one move worth making.

The frozen question set is the part that makes the rest mean anything. If the questions change between months, the comparison is meaningless, so the set is fixed at the start and stays fixed. That is also why the re-run is weekly rather than monthly: the same question asked twice in a day can return different names, so one reading a month would be mostly noise.

What you do not get is someone writing and publishing on your site. That is a deliberate line, not an oversight. We research, measure and specify. You publish. Where that line sits between tools, audits and done-for-you work is laid out in monitoring tools versus done-for-you AI visibility.

What actually happens in a month

A month is a loop, not a project. The same four stages run every month, and the only place the work changes hands is at the end, when the move goes to you to publish.

ONE SUBSCRIPTION MONTHFOUR STAGES, ONE HANDOFF

1. Weeks 1 to 4 We re-run the board The same frozen questions, across the AI tools, four times in the month. Same questions every time, or the comparison means nothing. AnswerHalo
2. End of the month We compare it to last month What moved, what did not, and which competitors entered or left the answers you care about. AnswerHalo
3. The read A person says what it means One move for the month, chosen from your own evidence, with the reasoning and the losing question it is aimed at. AnswerHalo
4. The handoff You publish the change The page, the profile edit, the ask for a mention. We research and specify it. You or your web person put it live. You

The loop restarts the following month, against the same frozen questions, twelve times a year.

Three stages are ours. The fourth is yours, and it is the one that changes what an assistant can read about you.

AnswerHalo answerhalo.com

CLICK TO ENLARGE

The numbers in that figure are real rather than illustrative: four weekly re-runs inside a month, twelve months in a year, and one named move per month. What nobody can put a number on is when an answer changes as a result, which is covered in the limits below.

What is included and what is not

The clearest way to read a retainer is the column that says who does it. Here is the whole thing, including the parts we do not do.

The last row is the one to weigh against other quotes you get. Google's documentation on AI features in Search states plainly that its usual guidance applies and that there are no additional requirements or AI-specific markup, which is another way of saying there is no lever a vendor can pull on your behalf. Perplexity's help center similarly describes sources being selected per query. Neither leaves room for a supplier to promise placement. More warning signs are in red flags in AI visibility vendors.

Who this is for, and who should not buy it

Buy it if you intend to publish. The subscription pays for itself only when somebody acts on the monthly move, and if nothing gets published it produces a very well-evidenced record of standing still.

Three cases where you should not buy it. If your audit already shows you named ahead of every competitor, you do not need a monthly watch, and we say so in the report rather than waiting for you to ask. If nobody on your side can publish a page within a month, fix that first or the move sits in your inbox. And if you have no baseline at all, take the free check and read it before committing to anything monthly.

There is also a legitimate cheaper answer. If all you want is to know your score, a measurement tool costs less than this, and we would rather you spent $29 than $399 for something you were only going to glance at. The case for the paid version is the read and the named move, not the numbers.

Whether an ongoing subscription is the right shape at all is worth thinking through against what a one-off buys, which is in what a $500 AI visibility audit buys.

How the prices fit together

There are three published prices and one that is not published. Free check at $0, audit at $500, subscription at $399 a month or $300 a month if you add it with the audit. Done-with-you help is quoted on request and carries no list price, because the work is different every time.

The $300 rate is not a discount and we do not present it as one. An audit produces a current baseline, and continuing a board that already exists costs less to run than restarting one that has gone cold, which needs a fresh baseline first. That is why the cheaper rate is only available at the moment the baseline is current.

On value for money generally, the Princeton, Georgia Tech and Allen Institute study of generative engine optimization is worth reading before you buy anything in this category. It measured content changes that raise visibility in generative engine responses and found the biggest gains for sites that were not already at the top. That is an argument for doing the work, and it is also an argument for measuring whether your particular work moved anything, which is the part a subscription is actually for.

The damaging admission: a month is often too short to see a change. A page published in week two may not affect an answer for weeks after that, so a single month can show nothing at all and still be a month well spent. If a supplier tells you otherwise, ask them what they think changed.

If you are weighing this up, start at the free end. The free check asks ChatGPT 25 real buyer questions from your niche at $0 and emails a plain-English readout: your score, who got named in your place, and the one fix to start with. It runs as soon as you ask for it, and the report lands within the hour between 7am and 5pm Central, or by 10am the next morning outside those hours.