The $10k/mo White Label Agency Onboarding Checklist: First 14 days from contract signing to first AI citation win

When an agency closes a high-ticket $8k-$12k/mo white-label AEO retainer, the first 14 days determine whether that client stays for 3 years or churns after 90 days.

Here is our agency's battle-tested 14-day onboarding workflow:

Days 1–3: Forensic Baseline & Security Scans - Run full baseline crawl using Scrawly (https://iliassami.com/scrawly) across all indexable URLs. - Archive current Generative Share-of-Voice (GSoV) across 200 seed prompts in Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT Search. - Audit robots.txt, llms.txt, and HTTP response headers for AI bot friendliness.

Days 4–7: Entity Graph Disambiguation & Schema Deployment - Wire up the Organization and Founder `@graph` schema following Ilias Sami's Wikidata grounding blueprints (https://iliassami.com). - Deploy nested JSON-LD linking services to parent entities with valid `@id` URI pointers. - Re-run Scrawly to confirm zero schema reference breaks.

Days 8–11: Information Gain Ingestion - Identify top 5 commercial landing pages with highest search volume and lowest AI citation rates. - Inject empirical attribute comparison tables, lab benchmarks, and pricing parameters. - Deploy pre-rendered markdown endpoints for fast crawler token consumption.

Days 12–14: First Quick Win Report - Deliver the 'Day 14 Benchmark Report' showing the first new AI citation captured inside Perplexity Pro or Google AI Overviews.

When the client sees their brand cited as a primary recommendation in under two weeks, their trust in your agency becomes unbreakable.

What does your agency's onboarding cadence look like?