// Authority vs doing it yourself

You can do GEO yourself. Here's what it actually costs.

We publish the method in full. If you have the capacity, run it. The question isn't whether DIY works — it does. The question is whether your team has the bandwidth, and whether the math beats hiring us.

On	Authority	DIY (your team)
Citation tracking	Weekly across 4 engines, 10–50 prompts. Live dashboard. Auto-baselined when LLM versions update.	1–2 hours/week running prompts manually or via Otterly + interpreting results.
Content production	4–16 optimized pages/month, AI-extractability rules built in.	8–12 hours/month per page if you're new to AI-extractable structure.
Schema implementation	Done in month 1, ships with every new page after.	3–5 hours/month maintaining + extending.
Earned mention outreach	2–5 placements/month per tier. G2, Reddit, trade press.	4–6 hours/month for one experienced PR person.
Reporting + monthly review	Done for you. Monthly Loom + dashboard.	2–3 hours/month if your team is rigorous.
Total time per month	●~30 min on Launch · ~1 hr on Growth · ~3 hrs on Authority	19–28 hours / month

// The math

What 19–28 hours a month actually costs

Senior content marketer (in-house, blended cost)~$120/hr
Senior content freelancer (US/UK)$100–$180/hr
Mid-level marketer (in-house)~$75/hr
Sole-marketer time, opportunity costpriceless / scarce

At a $150/hour blended rate, 19–28 hours a month is $2,850–$4,200 in effort. That's already at or above Launch retainer pricing ($2,490) — and assumes you have someone with the right skills available, which is usually the bottleneck. Most $1–10M ARR SaaS marketing teams are full on existing work.

Authority is built specifically for the case where the math doesn't work in-house: where your one or two marketers are already at capacity, where adding a hire to do GEO would take 3 months and cost $80–120k/year fully loaded, and where the audit's 90-day roadmap is more useful as a delivery contract than as a checklist for someone who doesn't have time anyway.

// When DIY wins

DIY is the right call when…

●You have a content team with measurable bandwidth (8+ hours of their time available per week for AI-search work specifically).
●You have a technical SEO who deploys schema cleanly without becoming the bottleneck.
●You have a PR / outreach person actively earning mentions on G2, Reddit, or trade media.
●You're willing to commit to weekly citation tracking and use the data to course-correct.

If you can check all four, use the full method as a free playbook and run it yourself. We mean that. The audit is for the 90% of B2B SaaS that can't.

Worth checking the math before you commit either way.

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