# Retainer with earned mentions, $4,000 a month Everything in the $2,500 retainer, plus earned-mention work: third-party source acquisition, comparison-layer placement and outreach. This is the only ongoing work that moves whether an engine names you as a vendor. Source: https://martenfield.com/services/retainer-earned-mentions/ Price: $4,000 a month (per month) Length: 3-month minimum First 90 days: $13,200, diagnosis and build included Method version: v1.1 --- ## Who this is for Companies the engines already place and describe correctly, who are still missing from the vendor shortlist because too little outside their own domain discusses them. ## What this will not do Recommendation moves in quarters, not weeks, and it depends on sources we do not control. Nobody can promise a naming rate. Citation and recommendation are measured and reported separately on both tiers, and never combined into one visibility number. ## What you get - Everything in the $2,500 retainer, the build included - Third-party source acquisition, targeted from the source map - Comparison-layer placement: presence on the pages that compare vendors in your category - Outreach, pitched with original data from your own assets - The same measurement as the $2,500 tier: the same 50 queries, the same 5 engines, the same competitors - Monthly report naming the sources where mentions landed ## How it runs ### 01. Source map review Which domains the engines cite and which ones name vendors for your category, from the diagnosis and refreshed by the weekly tracking. ### 02. Target list Only the sources that appear in the citation data. A publication that never shows up behind an answer is not on the list, however well known it is. ### 03. Placement and outreach Profiles claimed and corrected, data contributed to industry reports, comparison pages approached, and pitches carrying original data from your own assets. ### 04. Monthly report The movement in recommendation share, the sources where mentions landed, and where we cannot attribute a change to our work, we say so. ## Not included - Paid placement, advertorial or newswire distribution. - A media desk or standing journalist relationships. - A promised naming rate. - Work outside the contracted query set without re-scoping. ## What we do not promise - Pipeline numbers from AI answers - Demo counts attributed to a model - Attributed revenue from generated answers Attribution from generated answers is unreliable in 2026. We contract on a leading indicator, not the invoice: citation share on the first retainer tier and recommendation share on the second. Recommendation share is the proportion of answers, across a defined query set, in which a company is named as a vendor to consider. Citation share is the proportion of answers in which a URL on a domain the company owns appears as a cited source. They are reported separately and never merged. ## Measurement is the same at both retainer prices **Same depth on both tiers.** Both retainer tiers track the same 50 queries across the same 5 engines at 3 runs each, against the same competitor set, on the same reporting cadence. We do not charge more to run more prompts. **Why depth is not what the price buys.** Collection is the cheapest part of this work, and the guide to what GEO costs works through why. Pricing on it would put the premium on the part that costs least and invite comparison with dashboards that sell tracking by the prompt. Nobody gets a shallower read for paying less. **What the higher tier adds.** Work. The $4,000 tier adds earned-mention work on top of everything in the $2,500 tier. The view of that work, the queries, the engines, the competitors and the report, is identical. ## Why this work never finishes **The sources that name vendors keep changing.** Comparison pages get rewritten, lists get refreshed, and publications move on to the next vendor in the category. Those pages change whether or not you do, so a mention earned this quarter is not a position held next quarter. We have not measured how fast they turn over and we are not going to put a rate on it. ## Digital PR, and why what most firms sell you will not work **The kind of coverage matters more than the amount.** Earned editorial, advertorial and newswire distribution are not the same asset here, whatever the invoice says. An engine is grounding a claim, and it weights a source by whether the claim can be trusted to it. Advertorial and wire copy are built to be placed rather than to be checked, and they arrive on hundreds of low-authority domains at once, which is the pattern a retrieval system discounts. We have not measured the split between the three, ours or anyone else's, and we are not going to repeat a percentage we cannot source, so this is the reasoning behind where we point the work rather than a number. It is still the reason the version of PR most companies buy is the version least likely to earn a citation. **An unlinked mention can beat a followed link.** A link is an instruction to a crawler. A mention is a fact about your entity, in text, next to the claim it supports, and that is the form a model can actually use when it decides who is a credible source for a category. So a trade publication naming you in a paragraph with no link can be worth more here than the same publication linking you from a directory page. We have not measured how much more, we have not seen a figure for it we would repeat, and anyone quoting you one should be asked where it came from. **What we actually do, and why nobody without measurement can.** Generic digital PR pitches a media list. We measure which domains the engines cite for your category, which is what the source map is, then target only those. That makes the work measurable in a way the rest of the field is not: pitch the domains that appear in the citation data, then measure whether recommendation share moves on the queries those domains influence. A firm that has not measured the source map is guessing at the list. **What we do not do.** We do not run a media desk and we have no standing journalist relationships. We do the outreach on this tier, and what decides whether it lands is whether the pitch carries original data and whether it is on the journalist's beat. Both of those are settled before anyone sends an email. Where your PR firm already holds a relationship, they can take the pitch and we hand them the assets and the target. ## Questions ### Why not start here? A mention does little for a company the engines cannot yet place or describe correctly. The $2,500 tier fixes that, and its published ceiling is the point where this tier starts to matter. ### Where is the build fee? Inside the retainer, as on the $2,500 tier. The first 90 days on this tier total $13,200 with the diagnosis included. ### How soon will we be named? Nobody can tell you honestly. Recommendation moves in quarters rather than weeks and depends on pages we do not control. We report the movement on the same query set every month, including the months it does not move. ### Can this run alongside our PR firm? Yes. We bring the data assets and the target list from the source map. Where your PR firm already holds a relationship, they can take the pitch. --- Each retainer contracts on the metric its work moves, across a named query set over 90 days, measured identically both times, under method v1.1: citation share on the first tier, recommendation share on the second. Both are reported on both.