Every question buyers actually ask before they sign.

The full six-layer audit is worth $999 against 2026 industry benchmarks for the deliverable — verify against WebFX, FirstPageSage, or any reputable agency.

We're charging $497 for our first 25 Founding Clients because we believe being early should be its own reward. After audit #25, the price moves to $999. We're not running a sale. We're running a Founding Client program.

$497 audit instead of $999. Locked-in Stage 1 retainer pricing for as long as you stay a client — we grow, prices move, you don't. Direct access to both co-founders on every call. Named in our public case study library with your permission. First look at new services. Voice in the methodology — your audit findings shape the next version of Emaration's six-layer methodology.

Yes. Our methodology requires Andrew on every audit through Stage 1. The math: roughly three hours per audit, evenings and weekends, max 20 audits per month. The cap is real because the founder hours are real.

After audit #25, the price moves to $999. Founding Clients who sign a retainer within twelve months keep their Stage 1 retainer pricing.

Same audit. Same six layers. Same founder walkthrough. Same 30 days of monitoring. The only thing that changes after Founding Client #25 is the number on the invoice.

You probably hired the senior person, got handed off to a junior account manager, and watched the work get worse. Here, Andrew is on every call and signs every deliverable. The audit shows you the work and the prices before you commit to a retainer — and the retainer is month-to-month, so if the work doesn't produce, you leave without a fight.

The audit fee is also refundable against your first month, which means the entry cost of finding out whether we're the right shop is effectively zero.

The audit ends with a dollar number on every finding — the estimated monthly revenue you're losing to each leak. You see the math before you spend a retainer dollar.

Plans start at $1,500/month and are scoped from those findings, so you only pay for line items mapped to real losses. Most SMBs we audit are leaking five to ten times the retainer in untracked conversions, schema gaps, and AI-search invisibility — the audit's job is to prove that or disprove it in writing.

Most agency pain comes from generalists pretending to be specialists. We're honest about which verticals we have deep experience in — multi-location healthcare, professional services, accessibility-focused e-commerce — and which ones we'd be learning on your time. If your industry is outside what we've worked in, we'll tell you on the first call.

The audit methodology itself is industry-agnostic: it surfaces leaks, AI-search gaps, and measurement breaks the same way whether you sell veterinary visits or violins. What changes is the benchmark set we hold your numbers against — and we name that benchmark in the audit.

No. Retainers are month-to-month. Cancel any time with 30 days' notice — that's it.

We don't offer annual discounts because annual contracts at this band read as lock-in dressed up as savings. The only reason for a client to stay with us is that the work is producing. If it isn't, the contract shouldn't be the thing keeping you.

No. Percentage-of-ad-spend pricing creates an incentive to recommend bigger budgets, not better outcomes.

We charge flat monthly retainers scoped from your audit findings, with line-item prices you can see before you sign. If your audit says paid search is leaking money, we'll show you the fix — and the fix might be to spend less, not more. Our retainer doesn't move when your ad budget does.

Share the audit page and the pricing page. The audit is a fixed $497 with a defined deliverable in seven days. It's refundable against month one if you continue, and if you don't, you keep the audit and 30 days of monitoring. Nothing about that decision is reversible-only-by-litigation.

We've also written a one-page summary you can forward — request it through the audit form and we'll send it within a business day.

You can, but the audit isn't something you're committing a quarter to — it's seven days. Most of what we find is already costing you money every week it's not fixed: untracked conversions, AI engines pointing customers elsewhere, ad campaigns optimizing against wrong signals.

If the timing is genuinely wrong, book the audit now, take the findings, and start the retainer next quarter with a plan already scoped. The audit's findings don't expire.

Six layers in seven days. We look at:

(1) the technical and indexing problems pulling your Google rank down, (2) the keyword and content gaps where competitors are outranking you, (3) how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are answering questions about your business and whether they're citing you, (4) the leads and sales your measurement stack isn't capturing, (5) a scoped plan with real line-item prices for every fix, and (6) an accessibility read on your site against WCAG AA.

You get a PDF, a dashboard view, an audio variant, and a 30-minute founder walkthrough.

Get the audit anyway. It's the cleanest way to find out whether your current agency is leaving money on the table — and it gives you a second opinion with real prices attached, not vibes.

About 40% of SMBs leave their agency within a year, and most do it because they couldn't tell what they were paying for. The audit makes that visible. What you do with it — renegotiate, replace, or stay — is your call. We're happy to share the findings directly with your existing agency if you'd rather have them implement the fixes.

A new site is the highest-leverage moment to run an audit, because the cost of fixing structural problems is lowest before they're baked into a year of content.

We'll cover the same six layers, weighted differently: measurement stack, schema, AI-search visibility, and accessibility get more attention; competitive keyword gap analysis gets less, because you don't have a track record to compare yet. The scoped plan focuses on what to build first, not what to tear out.

Yes. Emaration is US-wide. We're based in Portland and our charitable arm starts with Oregon partners, but the audit and retainer work is remote-first. We've designed the engagement to run cleanly over video and async updates.

If you're outside the US, write us — we'll tell you honestly whether we can serve you well in your time zone.

Stripe is the default for the audit fee and for monthly retainers — it handles card and ACH. For larger retainers or clients with procurement requirements, we accept ACH/wire by invoice and can issue net-30 terms after the first month.

We don't take crypto. We don't take checks (it slows everyone down). If your accounting team needs a W-9, COI, or a specific vendor onboarding form, send it with your audit intake and we'll have it back the same week.

Membership is "we watch, advise, and arm you" — month-to-month at $197 to $997/mo, with metered AI jobs you can run when you need them. A retainer is "we do it for you" — hands-on execution, starting at $1,500/mo and scoped from your audit.

Most clients start with membership to act on the audit themselves with our guidance, then move up to a retainer when they want us running the work. Either way it's month-to-month, with no term lock-in.

Those tools hand you a 200-item checklist and leave you to guess which five items actually move money. Our audit ranks every finding by the dollar cost of the leak, tests how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are answering questions about your business, and ends with a scoped plan that has real line-item prices on it.

We also use those tools — and a measurement-stack review, and a hands-on accessibility check, and a manual AI-search citation audit you can't get from any platform. The tool gives you data. The audit gives you a decision.

Yes. We're publishing a redacted sample audit — a real audit run on a real Portland business, with their identifying details removed and their permission to share.

Request it through the audit form and we'll send a link within one business day. The format, the depth, and the scoped-plan section are exactly what you'd receive.

Because we'd rather earn the retainer with the audit than sell you on a pitch deck. If you hire us after, the $497 comes off your first month — so the audit costs you nothing. If you don't, you keep the audit and the 30 days of monitoring and we're square.

The fee exists to make sure the people who sign up are serious, not to make money on intake.

Nothing automatic. No card on file, no auto-renewal, no surprise bill.

If you've decided to hire us, we start the scoped plan from your audit and the $497 comes off month one. If you haven't, monitoring stops on day 30, you keep every deliverable, and we don't chase you.

You can come back later — your audit findings don't expire and the same $497 credit applies if you sign on within twelve months.

Yes — and that's a feature for you, not a bug.

Emaration is currently a founder-led operation: Andrew runs the technical and client work, Jordan leads accessibility and the charitable arm. Behind us is a vetted vendor stack we orchestrate for specialized work — paid search specialists, content production, design, development — at agency-quality without the agency overhead.

What you get: the senior person on every call, no account-manager layer, and prices that aren't paying for a sales team. What you don't get: a 24/7 support desk or a roster of named specialists on your account. We name the trade-off out loud because it matters to some buyers more than others.