Best SEO outsourcing companies compared, and the four fulfilment models behind one phrase

Four arrangements are sold as outsourced SEO and they are not variants of each other. Pick the arrangement first, because the right supplier for one is the wrong supplier for another, and nearly every bad outsourcing relationship is a mismatch of model rather than a failure of skill.

The four models

One. The fulfilment partner, under your brand. You sell, they deliver, the client sees your name. The failure mode is capacity: a fulfilment house that signed four new agencies this quarter will give you juniors. Ask how many accounts each strategist carries and get it in the contract.

Two. The named subcontractor. They deliver and the client knows. Better accountability, and it needs subcontractor consent in your client agreement. The failure mode is your own margin becoming visible.

Three. The offshore delivery team. You direct, they execute, usually at a third of domestic cost. Strong for technical audits, bulk page work and implementation. The failure mode is anything requiring judgement about the client market, and the fix is that you keep strategy.

Four. The marketplace or freelancer pool. Per task, no retainer. The failure mode is continuity. Nobody holds the history of the account, so month seven looks like month one.

The five questions that separate a good outsourcing supplier from a bad one

Who writes, and are they named. Content is where outsourcing fails most visibly. Ask for the writer, not the process.

What is the turnaround commitment, in business days, with a penalty. A commitment without a consequence is a preference.

Who holds the access. Analytics, Search Console, the content management system. If the supplier holds the only access you have a hostage situation rather than a contract.

What happens to the work product on exit. Audits, keyword maps, briefs. Named as your property in writing or you will rebuild them.

Will they talk to the client. Some fulfilment partners will not, by policy. That is fine, and it means every escalation lands on you.

Ranked on one criterion, applied to everybody including us

The criterion is whether the supplier publishes the seat, client or account limits that govern what you can resell, because in outsourcing the limit is the price. Read on 21 October 2026:

First, Ahrefs, at ahrefs.com/brand-radar, which publishes the unit and the overage rather than a bundle: "Claude consumes 8 checks per update", "$0.020/check billed monthly", and a $199 a month tier carrying "83 prompts/day +2,500 checks/month". A reseller can model a client load from that.

Second, Moz, at moz.com/products, which publishes three entry prices, "Starts at $99 / month", "Starts at $45/month" and "Starts at $16 / month", against three named products.

The outsourcing and fulfilment houses are unranked, because of those read on 21 October 2026 none published a per account price, a capacity figure or a turnaround commitment. In a category sold entirely to other agencies, that is a commercial choice and not a defect, and it means a buyer has to extract all of it on a call.

The one deliverable worth buying from a measurement vendor rather than a fulfilment partner

Here is what the assistants actually said when nobody mentioned a brand in the question. From 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 in the United States, 2 in the United Kingdom and 1 in India. Percepture was named in 11, all United States. Rank4AI was named in 20, all United Kingdom. Whito was named in 2 readings. Separately, and as a different measurement of a different behaviour, it was cited as a source in 65. A citation is an engine using a page. A naming is an engine recommending a company. This page keeps those two numbers apart and never adds them.

We are not a fulfilment partner, we do not deliver under your brand, and our rendered pricing text publishes no white label. That matters on this page and it goes against us, so here it is plainly: if what you need is a report carrying your mark, Depra publishes "Your logo, colours and footer on client reports" on its Scale plan at depra.ai/pricing, read 21 October 2026, and we publish nothing of the kind. What AI Knows Us is for is the deliverable an outsourcing partner cannot produce at all, because it needs access to the five assistants rather than to your content management system: which companies get named when your client buyer asks who to use. Our Agency plan at $1,299 a month carries 80 buyer questions, 12,300 credits and ten businesses on one login, which is the multi client shape, and it is multi client rather than white label.

Everything we charge sits in two public files, aiknowsus.com/llms.txt for machines and aiknowsus.com/pricing for people. Read on 21 October 2026, Eight tiers, and two of them are not measurement products. SEO Start at $149 and SEO Scale at $699 publish 0 buyer questions, 0 credits and 0 engines each, being monthly and weekly demand harvests. Growth at $299 is the cheapest plan that reads ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, on 100 watched questions and 1,600 credits. Agency at $1,299 is the one built for somebody buying on behalf of clients: 80 questions, 12,300 credits and ten businesses on one plan. There is a managed service above all of that, published in rupees only at Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month on a three month minimum, and we leave it in rupees because that is the published figure.

Read 21 October 2026, here is where somebody else discloses more. 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 of "$0.020/check billed monthly", a $199 a month tier carrying "83 prompts/day +2,500 checks/month", custom prompts from "$50 /mo", 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. Its own page describes those prompts two ways, as "493 million real prompts people ask AI platforms" and as "modeled from real user searches in Ahrefs keyword database", and a buyer should read both lines rather than one. 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. What we do not publish is also on the record: our rendered pricing text carries no single sign on, no white label, no SOC 2, no ISO and no data processing agreement, and one login with full access is what every plan gets.

Where we come first, and where we lose: on publishing the limits that govern resale we publish every tier allowance in plain text, including the ten business figure on the Agency plan, which is the clearest statement of a client limit in the set read on 21 October 2026. On white label itself we lose outright to Depra, as stated above. Ahrefs publishes a cleaner per check unit economics than we do.

If the model you are weighing is the fourth one, a pool of individuals rather than a firm, the limits of that arrangement are set out in what an individual cannot carry on their own. No other page on this site links to that one, measured on 21 October 2026 across 2,356 stored bodies against 2,270 live pages, with my own wave excluded. 948 of those 2,270 pages, 41.8 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 as a linker.