A monthly content retainer should include the research that decides what gets written, the writing and publishing itself, a calendar you do not have to manage, and a report you can check. At Hudson South, that means content produced and published every week from day one, about 30 minutes a month of your review time on smaller plans (more on larger ones), a visibility report on a defined question set run across AI platforms, and on most plans market exclusivity for your trade in the market you serve. It runs month to month.
Retainers are easy to sign and hard to evaluate, because the deliverable never stops arriving. Some cover only writing and leave research, publishing and reporting to you. Others promise content without saying how topics are chosen or what you will be able to verify at the end of each month.
This page lists what to look for inside any retainer, for owners and marketing leads in any industry, and then what Hudson South's retainer contains as one of the two ways to buy its AI search content work. Whether a retainer is the right model at all is a separate question, answered in whether to hire a project or a retainer. Nothing here is legal or financial advice about any contract.
The parts of a retainer worth checking
Retainer proposals vary widely, so compare the work inside them, not only the monthly number. The table lists the parts that tend to separate a useful retainer from a writing subscription.
| Part | What to ask | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Research | Who decides what gets written, and from what evidence? | Without research, topics drift toward whatever is easy to write |
| Writing | Is it written from your knowledge, in your voice? | Generic copy reads like every competitor's |
| Fact checking | Are factual claims checked before you see a draft? | Your review time should go to judgment, not error hunting |
| Publishing | Does the provider publish, or hand you drafts? | Drafts that never go live do nothing |
| Calendar | Who owns the schedule? | If you own it, you are managing a writer |
| Reporting | What does the report measure, and could you rerun it? | A report you cannot check is a newsletter |
| Terms | Is there a minimum term or a setup fee? | Both change the risk of trying it |
Not every row has to come from one provider. A business with an in-house editor may want writing only. Know which rows you are buying and which you are keeping, because the gaps become your work. A low monthly fee is not a low total cost if half the job stays with your team.
What a month inside a retainer looks like
Hudson South's retainer produces and publishes content every week from day one. Two of the four steps repeat every week: Market Intelligence researches what buyers in your market ask and what competitors have already answered, and AEO Creation turns that research into published answers. The first two steps, Authority Asset and Hudson Twenty-One, give the weekly work its base: a written record of your expertise and a written specification of how your business sounds.
What gets published can include articles, service pages, city pages, question pages, email and social posts, so every channel says the same thing in the same voice. For social posts and email, the channels, content mix and frequency are agreed around your goals and the team available. Hudson South handles research, writing and the calendar, so there is no writer for you to manage. Every factual claim is checked against a primary source before a piece goes to you for review; you review, and Hudson South publishes.
Your part is about 30 minutes a month reviewing on smaller plans, more on larger ones. A short review like that only works when the writer arrives with your facts already in hand. The writer should not have to invent what your business knows, and you should not have to dictate it from scratch every week. If a provider needs hours of your time each week to explain the basics, the knowledge capture was skipped and you are doing the research yourself.
The visibility report
A retainer should give you something you can check. Hudson South's monthly plans include a visibility report: a defined question set run across AI platforms, with competitor comparison on larger plans. Keeping the question set defined matters because AI answers move. OpenAI's help page on ChatGPT search says ChatGPT may use an approximate location based on your IP address to provide relevant local results, and may use relevant saved memories when rewriting a search query. Google's documentation says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use different models and techniques, so the responses and links they show vary. Running the same questions each month makes those observations easier to compare over time, even though no single run shows exactly what every buyer sees.
Read any visibility report as a set of dated observations, not a score for the whole market. It helps to ask the provider, "If we ran these same questions ourselves today, would we see what the report shows?" A good answer explains the conditions behind each result. What a report like this should contain is covered in what a monthly AI visibility report should show, and keeping mentions, citations and leads apart is the subject of measuring AI search results.
Your voice profile, exclusivity and terms
Three more parts of Hudson South's retainer are worth knowing before you compare proposals. The Twenty-One profile is refined against the first three months of published work, then handed over to you. Market exclusivity comes with most monthly plans, under Hudson South's rule of one business per trade in each geographic market; your proposal confirms it and names the trade and the area, and a project does not include it. The terms are simple: month to month, cancel when you want, plans starting at $1,500 a month and scoped to your market, and no setup fees.
Hold the proposal on your desk against the same points. Some retainers carry minimum terms, onboarding fees, or a style guide the agency keeps when you leave. None of those is wrong on its own, but each changes what you are buying, so ask about them before you sign. Ask how cancellation works in practice as well: what notice is needed, and what happens to pieces already in progress.
A fictional example: one month at a dental practice
Picture a fictional dental practice in Colorado three months into a retainer. During the month, new answers go live each week: a question page on what a first visit looks like for a nervous patient, an article on what the practice does when someone calls about a cracked tooth on a weekend, and a city page for a neighboring town with local detail. The dentist who owns the practice reviews the drafts in one short sitting, flags a sentence about scheduling that changed last week, and approves the rest.
At month end, the visibility report shows the same set of patient questions run across AI platforms, with nearby competitors alongside. The dentist reads it as a record of what those answers said on those dates, not a forecast. The practice's voice profile, now refined against three months of published work, is handed over.
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- Searching the web with ChatGPT. OpenAI Help Center. Read 2026-10-17.
- AI Features and Your Website. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-17.