Best off page SEO services compared, and the four things a package has to name before you pay for it

Off page SEO is everything about you that exists somewhere else: links, listings, reviews, mentions and profiles on platforms you do not own. That is precisely why it is the easiest part of search to sell badly, because the buyer cannot inspect the work the way they can inspect a page on their own site.

So the whole purchase comes down to one thing: what the supplier will name in advance and show afterwards. This page lists the four, with published figures where they exist.

The four things an off page package has to name

One. The deliverable, as a count and a kind. Not improved authority. How many placements, on what kind of site, and what the anchor and target page policy is. A proposal that will not put a number on it is asking you to fund an unspecified activity.

Two. How placements are obtained. There are only a few honest answers: earned outreach to a real editor, a paid placement, a directory or listing submission, or a digital public relations story. Each has a different cost, a different risk and a different durability. A supplier that will not say which it uses is making the choice for you and hiding it.

Three. The report, as an artefact you can check. A list of live URLs with dates, which you can open. Anything short of that is unverifiable, and this is the single most common failure in the category.

Four. What happens to the placements if you leave. Earned coverage stays. Rented links disappear. Those are two different products at similar prices and you should know which one you bought.

The claim no supplier can honestly make

That a link will produce a ranking. Nobody can promise that and we will not either, on this or any other page. What a supplier can promise is the deliverable: the placements, on the kinds of site named, reported with live URLs. Buy the deliverable and judge the outcome yourself over two quarters.

Be careful with authority scores in a pitch too. They are third party estimates, not search engine numbers, and a proposal built on moving one of them is a proposal built on moving a vendor metric.

Ranked on one criterion, applied to everybody including us

The criterion is what the supplier publishes that you can check before paying. Read 21 October 2026.

First, a firm publishing ranges and a method. WebFX, at webfx.com/seo/pricing, publishes "SEO costs an average of $1,000 to $5,000 per month for monthly retainers, $75 to $200 per hour for consulting, and $500 to $5,000 per project", with "Most businesses spend $2,500 per month", and lists link building explicitly inside its retainer scope alongside technical and on page work.

Second, a specialist publishing a per service monthly rate. Hook Agency, at hookagency.com/pricing, publishes local SEO from "$2,800 /mo" as a "Starting price for SEO only", and states on its own page that buyers value "clear documentation of deliverables every month (content written, links acquired, technical changes made)". That sentence is the standard this whole page is asking for, and it comes from a supplier rather than from us.

Third, tooling plus your own outreach. Moz publishes "Starts at $99 / month" for all in one SEO, which includes link research, at moz.com/products, and states an index "of over 44 trillion links" for its API. Ahrefs publishes its own index figures at ahrefs.com/brand-radar. Cheapest route and the one that costs the most of your own time.

Fourth, a supplier that publishes nothing and sells a monthly link quota. Last on this criterion, for the obvious reason.

The off page work that is not links at all, and nobody is selling it

Off page means what exists about you elsewhere. The newest and least worked version of elsewhere is an assistant answer, assembled from pages on other people sites and delivered to your buyer as a sentence with company names in it. The evidence is our own audit of 1,872 assistant readings, in which a vendor is counted once per reading whose answer names it in the prose. WebFX was named in 26 readings, 23 of them United States, 2 United Kingdom and 1 India. Percepture was named in 11, all United States. Rank4AI was named in 20, all United Kingdom. Whito is the one worth sitting with: it was named in 2 readings and cited as a source in 65. Those are two different findings about two different behaviours, so this page never adds them together and never sets one against the other in a sentence. A citation is an engine using a page. A naming is an engine recommending a company.

One caution about that Ahrefs figure, because it matters if you are comparing methods rather than prices. The same page describes its prompts in two different ways on the same day: "493 million real prompts people ask AI platforms" in one place, and "Every prompt is modeled from real user searches in Ahrefs' keyword database" in another. Those are not the same claim. Quote whichever one you rely on and say which it was.

This is the one place where what we sell genuinely overlaps with off page SEO, so here is the boundary drawn honestly. AI Knows Us sells no link packages and no monthly quotas, and pitches for no retainers. We measure which companies the five surfaces name for your buyers questions, with your name kept out of the question, and we do placement work on the third party pages those answers draw from. That is an off page job with a different target and a different report, and it is the newest row on the scorecard. A credit is one buyer question put to one app once. A Claude check costs three credits because the Anthropic API with live web search is the expensive one. Most checks cost one.

Our own ladder is published as plain text at aiknowsus.com/llms.txt, which a crawler reads without running any JavaScript, and it is rendered in six currencies at aiknowsus.com/pricing. Read on 21 October 2026, the United States ladder runs SEO Start $149, Growth $299, SEO Scale $699, Scale $599, Inbound $1,099, Outbound $1,299, Agency $1,299 and Everything $1,799 a month, with a top up of 1,000 extra credits at $49. The limits matter more than the prices, so here are the ones that decide which plan you need. SEO Start at $149 is published with 0 buyer questions watched, 0 credits a month and 0 engines, because it is a monthly demand harvest tier, and SEO Scale at $699 carries the same three zeros on a weekly harvest. Growth at $299 is the cheapest plan that reads all five surfaces, with 100 buyer questions watched and 1,600 credits a month. Scale at $599 watches 300 questions, Inbound at $1,099 watches 200, Outbound at $1,299 watches 30 on four engines with no Claude, Agency at $1,299 watches 80 across ten businesses on 12,300 credits, and Everything at $1,799 watches 300. Managed GEO is published in rupees only, at Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month with a three month minimum, so we quote it in rupees rather than converting it ourselves.

Two rules sit behind every figure we publish. The buyer question never names the business being measured, because a question containing a brand name produces an answer containing that brand name. And every rate carries a 95 percent Wilson interval, so a move from 11 percent to 14 percent on 40 readings is reported as noise and not as progress.

Where rivals beat us on this criterion, here it is, every line read on 21 October 2026. Ahrefs Brand Radar, at ahrefs.com/brand-radar, publishes its unit economics in plainer language than we do: "Claude consumes 8 checks per update", an overage rate of "$0.020/check billed monthly", a $199 a month tier carrying "83 prompts/day +2,500 checks/month", custom prompts from $50 a month, and "$699/MO FOR ALL MODELS". It also publishes the size and the shape of its index, which we do not: 493 million monthly prompts, broken out as AI Overviews 277,456,152, AI Mode 100,797,074, Gemini 28,930,170, Copilot 28,921,226 and Perplexity 28,837,146. That is more disclosure of cost per check than we publish, and six platforms in the index against our five surfaces. Profound, at tryprofound.com/pricing, publishes "Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked" and "SSO/SAML + SOC 2 compliance" on its enterprise tier. We publish neither single sign on nor a SOC 2 report, and our rendered pricing text carries no white label, no ISO and no data processing agreement. Moz, at moz.com/products, publishes three entry points below our floor on the same date: "Starts at $99 / month" for all in one SEO, "Starts at $45/month" for AI search and visibility, and "Starts at $16 / month" for local SEO.

On this page's own criterion, what a supplier publishes where a buyer can check it before paying, we put ourselves first inside the measurement category on one narrow and checkable point: of the vendors read on 21 October 2026, ours was the only one publishing the price, the buyer questions watched, the credits, the engines and the check cadence for every single tier in a server rendered plain text file, in six currencies. Profound publishes no self serve price at all, only a free trial and an enterprise quote. Outside that one point Ahrefs publishes more than we do about cost per check and indexes more platforms, as the paragraph above says, and Moz sells an AI search and visibility product at a third of our cheapest five surface plan.

Two boundaries so this page does not swallow two others. The precise on page and off page split, and how to divide ninety days between them, is a separate page, as is the list of off page techniques. The buying question that sits closest to this one, how to tell an outreach supplier from a placement broker, is on outreach link building services compared with placement brokers. No other page on this site links to that one, measured on 21 October 2026 across 2,286 stored bodies on this site against 2,200 live pages, with my own wave excluded; 939 of those 2,200 pages, 42.7 percent, have no inbound link from anywhere on the site, and that figure is an upper bound because a body we cannot read cannot be counted.

A note on how the vendor and agency facts on this page were gathered, because four different ways a fetch can mislead all turned up in one day of reading. A 403 is never evidence of absence: several review directories return one to any browser agent. A 200 can serve the wrong record entirely. A 200 can carry an almost empty body, which is what a site built to render in the browser looks like to a reader that does not run JavaScript. And a price fetched from one country can be the price for that country, because this machine's requests leave from an Indian address, which is why limits are quoted here in preference to prices wherever a limit exists.