The team obsessed with turning Google and AI search into revenue.

No, but the job got bigger. Google still sends the majority of buying traffic, and AI Overviews sit on top of the same index, so the pages that earn rankings are usually the pages AI systems quote. What changed is that ranking alone is no longer enough. You also have to be retrievable and citable in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, which is a second discipline stacked on classic SEO.

In theory: research demand, fix the site, build pages, earn authority, measure. In practice most of the retainer goes on account management, reporting and meetings, and the shipped work is whatever is left. The question worth asking is not what they do, it is how many things they shipped last month and what each one moved.

Most Australian agencies charge between $1,500 and $10,000 a month, and that range says more about scope than quality. The Growth System runs at $6,500 a month and Agentic Search Engineering at $11,000 a month, on a monthly, 6-month or 12-month term. You enter through the Agentic Website Full Build at $12,000, or the Agentic Migration at $3,000 if your current design is worth keeping. A cheap retainer usually buys a report and a blog post. Ours buys 30 to 50 shipped production units a month, which is the number actually worth comparing.

It depends entirely on whether work ships and gets measured. An agency that sends a monthly report and optimizes the same five pages is a cost. One that builds pages, fixes the foundation and shows the revenue effect is an investment you can audit. Ask for the last three things they shipped for a client and the number that moved.

Yes, and plenty of owners do the early work well. Claiming your Google Business Profile, fixing titles and descriptions, writing honest service pages and collecting reviews all work without an agency. It stops scaling at diagnosis and volume: knowing which of 400 flagged issues actually matters, building hundreds of pages that stay useful, and earning references from sites you do not control.

Expect movement in weeks and commercial results across a quarter. A local service business we launched hit number one organic for a highest-intent service-and-location search within 47 days. An Australian professional services firm grew organic clicks 719% across matched 90-day Search Console windows. Competitive markets take longer, and anyone quoting a fixed date for a specific ranking is guessing.

Increasingly yes, and the order matters. AEO depends on the same crawlable, trustworthy site that SEO builds, so a weak foundation cannot shortcut to being cited. We build the foundation once, then run both on top of it, which is why they sit inside one program rather than on two invoices.

The people you meet on the call. No account manager relaying messages to a junior, and no offshore content mill. You talk directly to the operators building and shipping your pages.