What does the minimum say, in writing?
Every search visibility engagement we take starts with a ninety-day minimum term. After that it runs month to month, with thirty days written notice to end it. The exclusive market partnership carries the same ninety-day minimum. The client acquisition program, PERMAFROST, carries six months, for reasons covered below.
The statement we put on the pricing page and in every proposal is short:
Ninety days is our minimum because it is the shortest period in which anything we do becomes measurable. If someone promises a turnaround in thirty days, they are selling you the promise, not the turnaround.
This is not a negotiating position. It is a description of how the work behaves.
Why does nothing measurable happen in thirty days?
Search is a system of queues, and none of the queues belongs to us or to you.
Technical changes wait on the crawler, the program search engines use to read pages. When we fix indexing problems, speed, or structured data, the fix only counts once the crawler comes back and reads the page again. That takes days on some pages and weeks on others.
New pages wait on the index, then on the ranking. A page that goes live in week three is rarely in a stable position by week four. It has to be crawled, understood, compared against competing pages, and tested against real searchers.
AI engines run on their own cycles. Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini refresh the sources they draw on at intervals no outside party controls. Generative engine optimization (GEO), the work of being cited inside those AI answers, is measured on this slower clock. A business that becomes a better source in month one may not be cited as one until month two or three.
Put those three queues together and a thirty-day window captures almost none of the effect of thirty days of work.
What happens inside the first ninety days?
Every engagement follows a written, month-by-month plan delivered in week one. The first ninety days cover two phases.
Month one is foundations: technical fixes, tracking, content architecture, and the first builds. What is measurable at the end of it is crawl health, indexation, and a baseline of where the business is and is not cited in AI answers.
Months two and three are activation. Pages go live and entity and schema work lands. An entity is the machine-readable identity of your business, and schema is the structured data that describes it. The first AI citations appear, and long-tail search phrases (longer, more specific queries) start to move. What is measurable is impressions, first page-two and page-one entries, and first AI mentions.
By day ninety you can see direction. You can see which pages are gaining, which phrases are moving, and whether the engines have started to name the business. That is the earliest honest checkpoint. Head terms, lead volume, and cost per qualified lead arrive in the compounding phase, months four to six.
Each month ends with one report and one call: what moved, what did not, and what changes next. The raw numbers are shared with the client, so the direction can be checked directly rather than taken on our word. If something is not moving by the end of the minimum, the report says so, and the plan changes.
Why is the minimum a filter, not a lock-in?
A minimum term reads like a protection for the agency. For us it works the other way. It screens out engagements that would fail no matter how well we did the work.
A business that needs revenue in thirty days needs something other than search: paid media, a sales push, or a cash plan. Taking its money for a program that cannot pay back in that window would be dishonest. The minimum says so before anyone signs.
It also protects the client’s first month. If a client can walk after four weeks, the rational move for any agency is to spend those weeks producing visible activity instead of foundations. We would rather do the unglamorous technical work first, because everything later depends on it.
We are founder-led and small by design. The people you talk to are the people who do the work, with specialists brought in under our direction when a job needs them. That is exactly why we are selective about what we take on. The who we work with page lists the businesses this suits and the ones it does not.
What is a thirty-day promise actually selling?
When someone guarantees rankings, citations, or lead volume inside a month, one of three things is usually true. The results are for phrases nobody searches. The results are borrowed from paid placements and disappear when spending stops. Or the promise is the product, and the refund policy is where it ends.
None of those builds anything the business keeps. Real search visibility accumulates in pages, facts, and corroboration that keep working after the invoice is paid. That accumulation is slow at first and compounds later, which is exactly the shape a thirty-day contract cannot capture.
This is also why we never promise page one or a guaranteed mention in an AI answer. We promise the work, the plan, and honest measurement against it. Our SEO service and GEO service pages explain what each discipline can and cannot deliver. If the terms are new to you, our breakdown of the difference between SEO, AEO, and GEO covers them in plain words.
Why does client acquisition carry six months?
PERMAFROST is our full client acquisition system: search visibility plus intake automation, conversion work, and CRM attribution. It reports one number every month, qualified opportunities and what each one cost. Its minimum is six months because that number depends on the compounding phase.
In months four to six, head terms move, citation share grows, automation is fully wired, and leads are attributed to the page that produced them. Before that, the system is still being assembled. A contract that ended at month three would pay for the build and stop before the measurement it was bought for.
A website build is different. FROST is a single project delivered in six to eight weeks, followed by a ninety-day care window for fixes and small changes. There is no minimum term because there is no retainer.
What happens after day ninety?
After the minimum, the engagement runs month to month. Thirty days written notice ends it. There is no automatic renewal into a new fixed term.
What the client paid for stays with the client. The website, content, automations, accounts, and reports belong to the business, not to us. The single exception is the exclusive market partnership, where we build and own the property and say so plainly.
Months seven to twelve are defend and expand: new markets, new service lines, and more of what worked. By then the monthly report has enough history to show which decisions paid. The plan for the second half of the year is built on evidence rather than forecasts.
How do you know if you are ready?
Three questions settle it. Can the business wait ninety days for the first measurable signals without the engagement becoming a crisis? Is there a working sales process to receive the leads when they come? Is there a decision maker who will be on the monthly call?
If the answers are yes, read how we work, check the published floors and terms on the pricing page, and apply. If any answer is no, the honest advice is to wait until it is yes.