These engagements contain two very different jobs
Almost every proposal in this category bundles a technical job with an editorial one. They have different shapes: the technical half is a small, one-time change with an immediate and measurable effect, and the editorial half is an ongoing programme whose effect is real but slow and hard to attribute.
| The technical half | The editorial half | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Serving, bot rules, response size, fact position | Content that answers real questions |
| How long | An afternoon, once | Continuous |
| Effect | Immediate and measurable | Gradual and hard to attribute |
| Can you do it in-house | Usually yes, it is middleware | Only if you have the writers |
| What it should cost | Close to nothing | Whatever good writing costs |
The reason to separate them before a call is that they are often priced as one thing. If a retainer is largely the technical half, you are paying monthly for a change that happened once.
The half you can ship this afternoon
Content negotiation is the single highest-impact change for most sites, and it is middleware rather than strategy. A request that asks for markdown gets markdown built from values you already store; browsers and search crawlers are untouched.
import { gateway } from '@rebilder/gateway'
export default gateway({
source: { kind: 'document', resolve: myPages },
})- Scan a page of each template and write the numbers down. This is your baseline and your negotiating position.
- Read your bot rules as a decision. Most blocks on assistants were inherited from an old anti-scraping policy, not chosen.
- Answer
Accept: text/markdown. The free tier covers 1,000 agent visits a month and the SDK is unmetered and self-hostable. - Then decide what is left. Whatever remains is genuinely editorial, and that is a real thing to hire for.
Six questions to ask before you sign
- What exactly are you promising? If the answer includes guaranteed mentions or citations in assistants, that is not deliverable by anyone at any price.
- What is the baseline, and who takes it? An engagement with no before-measurement cannot demonstrate an after.
- Which of the two halves is most of this retainer? Ask for the split in hours, not in deliverable names.
- What happens to the technical work if we leave? Middleware you own keeps working. A hosted rewrite layer does not.
- How will we see agent traffic? Analytics cannot record agent fetches, so if that half of the reporting comes from a page-view tool it is measuring the wrong thing.
- Will any of this change what Google receives? The correct answer is no, and it should be demonstrable rather than asserted.