# Retainer, From $4,500

Weekly tracking, continuous publishing, and source acquisition. For companies treating citation share as a standing metric.

Source: https://martenfield.com/services/retainer/
Price: From $4,500 (per month)
Length: 6-month minimum
Method version: v1.0

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## Who this is for

Companies treating citation share as a standing metric rather than a project. Usually this follows a Build, once the pipeline exists and the question becomes keeping the position rather than taking it.

## What you get

- Weekly tracking across the contracted query set
- 3 to 4 source-grade assets per month
- Source acquisition: profiles, data contributions, trade press
- Monthly report with the movement and what caused it
- Quarterly benchmark against named competitors

## How it runs

### 01. Weekly tracking

The contracted query set runs weekly. Citation sets shift when engines update, so monthly tracking finds out too late to react.

### 02. Continuous publishing

Three to four source-grade assets a month, chosen from where the source map moved rather than from a content calendar agreed in advance.

### 03. Source acquisition

Legitimate presence in the ecosystems the models trust. Profiles corrected, data contributed, methodology cited by trade press, answers given where practitioners actually ask.

### 04. Monthly report

The movement, and what caused it. Where we cannot attribute a change to our work, we say so.

## Not included

- A dashboard login. The report is a document, because that is what gets read and forwarded.
- Guaranteed monthly citation growth.
- 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. Citation share is
what we measure, and it is the leading indicator, not the invoice.

## Questions

### Why a six-month minimum?

Source presence is the part that moves the number most, and it is slow. Profiles, data contributions, and trade press placements take weeks to be crawled and longer to be trusted. A three-month retainer would bill you for the setup and end before the payoff.

### Can we start with the retainer instead of the audit?

We would rather you did not. Without a baseline we cannot show you what changed, which means you are paying monthly for work you have to take on faith.

### What happens if the numbers do not move?

We show you that they did not, and why we think so. Model behaviour changes and some categories are harder than others. The tracking is honest in both directions or it is not worth running.

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Every engagement contracts on citation share across a named query set over
90 days, measured identically both times, under method v1.0.