Questions
40 questions, answered properly.
These are the ones that actually get asked, including the awkward ones.
Money
Money
What does a website cost?
Brand, Website and Automation starts at $4,500 USD over three to eight weeks. That floor is the story and the facts alone, which touches no code and is often enough on its own. What moves it up is how much of the site and how many channels have to be rebuilt to carry the story. It is scoped and fixed in writing before anything starts, so you never find out the number afterwards. Every price and every term is published on the pricing page.
What does the free check cover?
What ChatGPT and Claude tell patients about you today, asked 25 real patient questions with live web search, and what a crawler actually gets from your site. It runs automatically. Then thirty minutes on a call with Mariya: who we are, what the check found, what it means, and where we could help. Nothing is invoiced, so there is nothing to credit back later.
What is in the $2,500 rung?
AI Visibility, two to four weeks, from $2,500 USD. Every claim on the site checked against its source, the site brought in line with WCAG 2.1 AA, privacy and tracking put right, structured data matched to what the page visibly says, and Core Web Vitals measured on a phone. It also carries the parts that need a person rather than a script: someone rings your front desk as a new patient, and a compliance pass runs over your live copy.
Can I pay in instalments?
Yes. Brand, Website and Automation is scoped to a fixed price in writing, then half to start and half on delivery. The Monthly Partnership is billed monthly.
Can I just pay monthly instead of a project fee?
For the ongoing work, yes: that is what the Monthly Partnership is. For a build, no. A build is a fixed piece of work with a start and an end, and spreading it across a retainer hides both what you are buying and how long you are tied in. What can happen instead is a smaller first step, then the monthly work, then a build later if the numbers justify one.
Do I have to buy the whole sequence?
No. Each step is bought on its own and most practices stop partway. The order matters because each step assumes the one before it is true, not because there is a package to sell.
Are there ongoing costs after launch?
The Monthly Partnership starts at $2,500 USD a month. The first 30 days after a Rebuild goes live are included, then it is billed monthly. Domain and any third-party tools you choose are billed to you directly, never marked up.
Is there a refund policy?
The check and the call cost nothing, so there is nothing to refund at the front of the ladder. Paid work already delivered is not refundable, because it has been delivered. Everything else is governed by the agreement you sign, and the terms are shown to you before any money moves.
Process and timing
Process and timing
How long does a website take?
Three to eight weeks for Brand, Website and Automation, depending on how much of the site and how many channels are in scope. Most of the variation comes from how quickly content and claim approvals come back, not from the building.
Can you do it faster?
No. Compressing the schedule means skipping either the claim review or the launch checks, and those are the two things being paid for.
What do you need from me?
A completed intake form, two working sessions, your credentials and licence details, testimonial permissions in writing, content approvals in batches, and one named person who can approve public claims.
How much of my time will this take?
Roughly six to ten hours spread across the project, concentrated in the first three weeks. After launch, about an hour a month.
What happens if I go quiet mid-project?
The project pauses and the schedule moves. Nothing is published without your approval, so a delay is a delay rather than a risk.
Do you work with practices outside New York?
Yes. The work is remote and clients are across the United States. New York only matters for local search on the studio’s own listing.
Compliance and claims
Compliance and claims
Will you write claims my current marketing makes?
Only the ones the evidence supports. Anything else gets rewritten in weaker, honest language. You will be told exactly which claims were changed and why.
Is this legal advice?
No. It is editorial discipline plus a documented trail of what was claimed and what supports it. Aggressive or disease-adjacent claims need a lawyer, and you will be told when you have reached that line.
Can I use testimonials?
Yes, with written permission, honest representation, disclosure of any material connection, and context when a result is not typical. Testimonials cannot be used to say something the practice is not allowed to say directly.
What about before-and-after photos?
Only where they are permitted for your modality, consented in writing, unretouched, and accompanied by honest typicality context. In many cases the answer is no, and that is the correct answer.
Who signs off on health claims?
You do, or a named clinician you designate. That approval is recorded. Nothing that touches a health claim goes live on a signature that does not exist.
AI visibility
AI visibility
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend me?
No, and anyone who guarantees it is selling something. Answers vary by phrasing, by user, by day and by model version. What can be done is to make the facts about your practice correct, structured, consistent across every profile, and easy to retrieve, then measure what changes over three to six months.
What is the difference between GEO and AEO?
AEO, answer engine optimization, makes a page the clearest direct answer to one patient question, such as "what does a functional medicine doctor do?" GEO, generative engine optimization, works on whether your practice is named and cited when an assistant combines several sources into one answer, such as "compare functional medicine clinics near me." The boundary is not agreed, and most of the work serves both: plain answers backed by real evidence.
Is this just SEO with a new name?
No. Ahrefs, testing 15,000 long-tail queries, found only about 12 percent of the URLs AI assistants cite also rank in Google’s top ten. The work overlaps, but ranking well and being quoted accurately are different outcomes and they need to be measured separately.
What actually moves AI visibility?
The peer-reviewed work (KDD 2024) found that adding real statistics, direct quotations and cited authoritative sources raised citation likelihood most, and that keyword stuffing did nothing. Vendor correlation studies add a fourth factor, how established the domain already is. Off-site consistency does more work here than on-page tricks, which is why directory and profile clean-up is part of the job.
How do you measure it?
A fixed list of 25 questions a patient would really ask, re-run every quarter in ChatGPT and Claude, each asked seven times, with the answers recorded verbatim and diffed. Quarterly rather than monthly because the sources these assistants cite turn over about two and a half times faster than Google results, so a month-to-month comparison is mostly noise. The baseline is captured before launch, because it cannot be reconstructed afterwards.
AI already names us. Is there anything left to do?
Being named is the first half. The second is whether what it says is right: your hours, the insurance you take, the services you offer, whether you are accepting new patients. Of the 465 people in the rater8 survey who had used AI to research a provider, two thirds said they met incorrect information about that provider, and 60 percent said they trust the summary without checking it. Being named incorrectly is worse than not being named at all, because nobody tells you it happened.
What changes when AI assistants start booking appointments?
Being named is no longer the whole picture. In August 2025 Google began testing AI Mode finding restaurant reservations for US subscribers to its top AI plan, drawing on live web browsing, Google Maps and booking partners such as OpenTable and Booksy, and named local service appointments as the next step. Google has not said what a practice needs to be included. Keeping your services, hours and booking details accurate on your site, your Google Business Profile and your booking tool is the sensible starting point.
Should I block AI crawlers?
Usually not the ones used for live retrieval, because blocking them removes you from the answers. Training crawlers are a separate decision and yours to make. The distinction is explained and configured for you either way.
Technical and ownership
Technical and ownership
Do I own the site?
Yes. The code, the content, the domain and the accounts are yours, in your accounts, and you keep them if you stop working with the studio.
Can my team edit it?
Yes. How editing works depends on the platform chosen for your project, and that choice is made in the Prescribe phase based on who will actually be writing. A practice that publishes weekly needs a different setup from one that updates twice a year.
What platform do you build on?
Whichever one fits the practice. This site runs on Next.js. Plenty of client sites run on WordPress, because a practice that writes its own articles is better served by an editor its staff already knows. The platform is a decision, not an identity.
Do you host it?
Hosting is included in the Monthly Partnership. You can also host it yourself, and you will be given everything needed to do that.
Which AI tools touch my practice's work, and where does the data go?
The automations we install run inside your own CRM, so the data stays in an account you own. The drafting tools research, draft and format. They cannot publish, and a person approves every line before it goes live. Before any AI tool goes into your setup, you are told which model it runs on and what its data policy says, so you can decide with whoever handles your compliance.
What if I want to leave?
You take everything and go, with 30 days notice on the Monthly Partnership. There is no lock-in, no proprietary page builder, and no license that expires.
Do you do logos only?
No. The identity is designed against the positioning, so there is nothing meaningful to design before the positioning exists.
Do you run ads?
No. Paid acquisition is not part of the offer. The work is the asset the ads would point at.
Fit
Fit
Who is this not for?
Pre-launch or pre-revenue practices, anyone shopping on price, anyone who needs claims the evidence does not support, and anyone who wants it live in two weeks.
We only want social media. Will you do that?
On the monthly partnership, and after the check. Posting into an unclear story is the thing most practices have already paid for once, which is why the check comes first. If it finds the story is clear and the channels are the real gap, that is where the work starts and no rebuild is needed. If it finds otherwise, you will be told before you spend anything on posting.
I am a solo practitioner. Is this too much?
Probably, and we would rather say so than sell it to you. This is priced for a clinic with several providers. A solo practice whose whole marketing budget is a few hundred dollars a month should put that money into its Google Business Profile and its reviews first, which is free to do and is what practice owners themselves credit for growth. Book the free call and we will tell you which one you are.
I already have a developer. Can you just do the strategy?
Yes. The Prescribe phase is written so another developer can carry out the work, and that happens regularly.
What if I disagree with what the check finds?
Every measured finding comes with the measurement attached, so disagreement is usually about priority rather than fact, and priority is a conversation worth having.