Question 1

What is Living Pillar Maintenance?

Accepted Answer

Living Pillar Maintenance is a monthly retainer service that keeps your most important pages alive in AI search and Google. We measure each pillar page weekly across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, and Google Search Console. When a page slips a grade, we ship a refresh patch — usually FAQ updates, copy tweaks, schema fixes, or internal link improvements. The service exists because AI engines refresh their understanding of your business constantly, and pages that get cited today can get dropped within weeks if competitors move faster.

Question 2

What is a pillar page?

Accepted Answer

A pillar page is a single high-value page on your site built to rank for a small cluster of buyer-intent queries and get cited by AI engines. For a service business, that might be your main 'what we do' page, your top service area page, or a 'what is X' explainer page that defines your category. Pillars are the pages worth maintaining because they drive the most calls, the most revenue, and the most AI citations. Most clients have somewhere between 5 and 25 pillar pages worth tracking.

Question 3

How is this different from regular SEO maintenance?

Accepted Answer

Regular SEO maintenance focuses on Google rankings and traffic. Living Pillar Maintenance measures four AI engines plus Google plus Bing on every pillar, every week. We catch when ChatGPT stops citing you before your traffic drops in Google. The patches we ship target both surfaces. The diagnostic surface is also more granular — each pillar gets a 0-100 health score across five components, so you can see exactly which lever is broken.

Question 4

What does LPM include and not include?

Accepted Answer

LPM includes weekly measurement, monthly diagnosis, and ongoing refresh patches on the pillar pages we agreed to maintain at signing. Patches mean FAQ adds, copy rewrites, schema fixes, internal link adds, and similar refresh work on existing pages. LPM does NOT include net-new page builds, blog posts, topic clusters, programmatic SEO, site redesigns, or migrations. Those are billable add-ons. The line is clear: monitoring and refreshing is the retainer; building new surface area is project work.

Question 5

How much does Living Pillar Maintenance cost?

Accepted Answer

There are two pieces. Setup is a one-time fee that builds your initial pillar set and wires up the measurement infrastructure. Setup ranges from $1,500 to $3,500 depending on platform and pillar count. The recurring retainer ranges from $300 to $800 per month based on how many pillars you want maintained: $300 for up to 10 pillars, $500 for up to 20, $800 for up to 40. Add-ons like new pillar builds ($300 to $500 each), single blog posts ($250 to $400), or topic clusters ($2,500 to $4,000) are billed separately when scope grows.

Question 6

What's the difference between Setup S, M, and L?

Accepted Answer

Setup tier is mostly platform-driven. Setup S ($1,500) is for clients on Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace, or similar CMSes — we work within whatever schema and templates the host provides, optimize 5 to 10 pillars, set up the AI visibility tracker on 10 prompts, build your Notion delivery workspace, and run your first audit. Setup M ($2,500) extends that to 10-15 pillars with GSC pipeline and 30 prompts. Setup L ($3,500) is for static sites (Next.js, Astro, custom) where we control schema directly — same as M plus full schema audit, llms.txt manifest, AI Citation Readiness pass, and 60 prompts.

Question 7

How do you measure pillar health?

Accepted Answer

Each pillar gets a 0-100 health score across five components, scored 0-20 each. AI Visibility — how often the four major LLMs cite the URL on your tracked prompts. PAA Match — whether your H2 and H3 headings match the People Also Ask questions Google shows for your target keywords. Schema Validity — whether your structured data is parseable and complete. Internal Links — whether other pages on your site link to this pillar with relevant anchor text. Index Status — whether Google and Bing have actually crawled and indexed the page. Pages graded D or F automatically generate a refresh patch.

Question 8

Will I see what you're doing each month?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Every client gets their own free Notion workspace with five live databases: a Changelog showing every action taken, a Tasks view showing what's queued and what's been shipped, a People view, a Projects view, and a Weekly Plans view. The audit cron writes to it directly each Sunday night. You always know exactly what we're doing, what we found, and what's next.

Question 9

Do you offer LPM without the Setup phase?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes. If you already have well-built pillar pages and just need ongoing monitoring and refresh work, we can run a discounted intake (typically $750 to $1,500) to import your existing pages into our measurement infra and then move to monthly retainer. If your pillars need rebuilding before maintenance makes sense, we'll quote a full Setup tier. The audit will tell us which path is right.

Question 10

How is this priced if I have more than 40 pillars?

Accepted Answer

We quote custom retainers above 40 pillars. The economics scale roughly $200 per additional 10 pillars per month, with diminishing returns past 60 because most clients get the same business value from focusing on the top 40 pillars rather than tracking everything. We'll usually recommend tightening the pillar list rather than expanding it.

Add-on	Price	Notes
New pillar build	$300-500 each	Single page, includes FAQ, schema, internal links
Blog post	$250-400 each	1,500-2,500 words, AEO-optimized with FAQ + schema
Topic cluster	$2,500-4,000	1 hub + 4-6 spokes, internally linked
Programmatic page batch	$1,500-3,500	10-50 templated pages (cities, niches, SSE)
Prompt expansion	$150 once	Add 15 prompts to your AI visibility tracker
Schema overhaul	$500 once	Custom JSON-LD when CMS markup falls short
Quarterly business review	$300 once	Slide deck + 60-min strategy call

Keep Your Best Pages Alive in AI Search

Most "completed" pillar pages are already decaying.

What happens to pillars without maintenance

A system that watches every pillar, every week

Every pillar gets a 0-100 score, every Sunday

AI Visibility

PAA Match

Schema Validity

Internal Links

Index Status

Auto-Generated Patches

Build the pillar set and wire the measurement

Living Pillar Maintenance

What LPM does not include

When you need to add new surface area

Discovery to Action, every Sunday

Discovery

Measurement

Diagnosis

Recommendation

Action

How LPM fits with the rest of the stack

Frequently Asked Questions

Find out where you're losing calls