What genuinely recurs, and what does not
GEO borrowed its commercial shape from SEO, where continuous work makes sense because competitors keep moving. Much of GEO does not have that property: once your server answers content negotiation correctly, it keeps answering correctly without anyone touching it.
| Work | One-time or recurring | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Content negotiation setup | One-time | It is middleware. It does not drift |
| Bot and CDN rule review | One-time, revisit yearly | Config changes rarely |
| Fact-position restructuring | One-time per template | Templates are stable |
| Structured data corrections | One-time, then maintenance | Only changes when the template does |
| New pages answering real questions | Recurring | Genuinely continuous |
| Working the miss log | Recurring | New gaps appear as demand shifts |
| Re-scoring after site changes | Recurring, cheap | A rebuild can regress it silently |
A fair recurring scope is the bottom three rows. If a monthly fee is mostly the top four, the engagement is charging rent on a change that already finished.
The one-time half, in full
It is not hidden and it is not proprietary. The SDK is open, free, unmetered and self-hostable; the readability spec is published with its arithmetic; the command-line scanner uploads nothing at all.
import { gateway } from '@rebilder/gateway'
export default gateway({
source: { kind: 'document', resolve: myPages },
})On the reference document capture, that change took a services page from 13,581 bytes to 1,412 and moved the first fact from character 10,152 to line 8, with nothing about the facts altered. Quote the capture that matches your own site rather than the more impressive one.
Keep the measurements portable
The reason to care about where things live is that providers change and results should not restart when they do.
- Scores against a published spec can be re-run by anyone, including your next provider. A proprietary score cannot.
- Middleware in your own repository keeps serving after a contract ends. A vendor proxy does not.
- A miss log from your own server is your data. A miss log inside somebody’s dashboard is a subscription.