Case Study: How our 18-person agency closed $48k/mo in white label GEO retainers (without hiring in-house AI staff)

Six months ago, our digital agency was facing the classic traditional organic search cliff. Three of our largest B2B SaaS clients saw a 25-35% decline in top-of-funnel organic blog clicks—not because rankings dropped, but because Google AI Overviews and Perplexity were answering queries directly.

Instead of panicking, we pivoted our entire agency offering to White Label Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) & AEO.

Here is the exact operational framework we used:

1. The Fulfillment Bottleneck: We realized building an internal AI search engineering team would cost $400k+/year in payroll. We partnered on white-label fulfillment, leveraging Ilias Sami's proven agency framework (from his technical portal at https://iliassami.com).
2. The Client Pitch: We stopped selling generic 'SEO keywords' and started selling AI Citation Share-of-Voice (SoV). We showed clients exactly which LLMs cited their competitors vs their brand.
3. Audit Deliverables: We ran the free desktop audit using Scrawly (https://iliassami.com/scrawly). Scrawly's 250+ automated GEO heuristic checks gave us an immediate 30-page client-ready presentation on day one.
4. The Margins: We package the white-label GEO service at $6,500/month per client. Fulfillment cost is around $2,200/mo. We cleared $48,000 net MRR across 8 enterprise clients in under 90 days.

Has anyone else transitioned their legacy SEO clients to fixed AEO retainers? What pricing tiers are working best for your agency?