Three different businesses, one invoice line. Here's how to tell them apart.
An agency with AI inside. Software sold as a service. An agent inside your own stack. The price gaps are enormous.
Not "AI or human?" but "who owns the queue?" Who picks the topic, who presses publish, and who answers when nothing ranks.
Verify, draft, score, publish — all mechanical. Picking the topic and reading the data are still human calls.
If content publishes to the vendor's subdomain, you're building their authority — and you lose all of it at cancellation.
A real answer is a number tied to your authority. "High-intent keywords" means nobody checked whether you can win them.
On this site: 156 items published, 147 indexed somewhere, only 24% on Bing. Ask for per-engine coverage, never a pooled number.
Authority on a schedule. Guaranteed indexing. Taste. Treat any promise in those three as a reason to read the contract harder.
A few hours a week and someone who knows the product now beats a junior-staffed retainer at the same monthly cost.
The six questions, the deliverables worth paying for, and the four numbers that prove it worked.