Website design and development for businesses that need to be found by AI search
We design and build marketing sites engineered to be cited by AI answer engines as well as ranked by search. Builds run $8,000 to $15,000, with a care plan of $300 to $1,060 per month. Every page ships with an entity-linked schema graph, answer-first structure and a refresh loop.
What you get
An entity-linked schema graph, not scattered snippets — Organization, WebSite, WebPage, Service, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList nodes that reference each other by stable identifier, so a machine can resolve who you are, what you sell and how the pages relate. Most competitor sites ship either nothing or four disconnected blobs.
Answer-first content architecture — Every page opens with a self-contained answer to the query it targets, because roughly 55% of AI-Overview citations come from the first 30% of a page. Headings are questions and the block beneath each one stands alone when quoted out of context.
A dateModified refresh loop you can actually run — A visible last-updated date and a matching dateModified in schema, plus a documented 90-day review cadence. A 90-day refresh cadence is associated with 4.8 times more AI citations, and a visible last-updated date with 1.8 times more.
AI-referrer analytics — Traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and the AI-Overview referrer patterns split out as their own channel, with conversion tracked separately. AI-referred traffic converts at roughly 4.4 times the rate of organic, which you cannot act on if it is bucketed as direct.
Comparison and alternative pages, built in — Comparison content accounts for 32.5% of all AI citations. We build the comparison surface — you against the alternatives, honestly — as a first-class section rather than a blog afterthought.
Build-time assertions on every page — The build fails if a page ships without a self-referencing canonical, a unique title or a unique h1. This is not a checklist someone runs quarterly; it is a gate that blocks the deploy.
Core Web Vitals and accessibility as acceptance criteria — Real focus states, contrast that passes WCAG AA, keyboard paths that work, and no layout that scrolls the body sideways on a phone. Written into the acceptance criteria so they are not negotiable at the end.
A content model your team can extend — New service pages, locations and comparisons are data entries, not bespoke page builds. The structure that makes page one good makes page seven hundred good.
A migration and redirect plan — Old URLs mapped to new ones before launch, with the mapping reviewed against your top-traffic pages. The most common way a redesign loses traffic is a redirect map written the night before.
Handover documentation and access — Repository, hosting, domain and analytics in your accounts, with a written runbook. You own it whether or not you keep the care plan.
Published pricing
Focused site — $8,000–$10,000 then $300–$500 / month. Roughly 8–15 pages, schema graph, answer-first structure, AI-referrer analytics, one comparison surface. Timeline: 4–6 weeks.
Full marketing site — $10,000–$15,000 then $500–$1,060 / month. 20+ pages, programmatic service and location pages, comparison library, content model your team extends, migration plan. Timeline: 6–10 weeks.
Care plan only — — then $300–$1,060 / month. For a site we did not build: 90-day refresh cadence, schema maintenance, AI-referrer reporting, Core Web Vitals watch. Timeline: Month to month.
AI-visibility retrofit — Quoted after audit then Optional retainer. Schema graph, answer-first restructuring and refresh loop applied to a site that otherwise works. Starts with the $1,000 audit. Timeline: 3–6 weeks.
How the work actually runs
01. Audit and query map (Week 1) — We inventory what you have, what ranks, what gets cited and what does not exist. Then we map the actual questions buyers ask to the pages that will answer them, one page per question, because a page that answers three questions gets cited for none. Output: A page-by-page map: URL, target question, the answer paragraph, the schema type, and the internal links in and out.
02. Structure and design (Weeks 2–3) — Content model, page templates and the design system. We design the answer block, the comparison table, the price table and the FAQ as reusable components, because those four are what actually get quoted. Output: Approved designs for every template plus a written content model your team can add to without us.
03. Build (Weeks 3–6) — Pages built against the map. Schema graph wired with cross-referencing identifiers. Build-time assertions added for canonical, title and h1 uniqueness. Analytics configured with AI referrers split out before launch rather than after. Output: A staging site with every page in place, and a build that fails loudly if a page breaks the rules.
04. Migrate and launch (Week 6–8) — Redirect map reviewed against your highest-traffic URLs, then executed. Sitemap and robots verified. Search Console and analytics confirmed reporting before the old site is retired, not afterwards. Output: A live site, a verified redirect map, and a baseline report of where you stand on day one.
05. Refresh and report (Ongoing, 90-day cycle) — Every 90 days we review the pages that matter, update what has changed, refresh the visible last-updated date and the dateModified, and report on AI referrals as a separate channel from organic. Output: A quarterly written report: what changed, what got cited, what AI-referred traffic did, what to build next.
Who this is for
Businesses whose buyers now start in ChatGPT, Perplexity or an AI Overview and never reach a blue link.
Companies with a site that ranks acceptably but never gets quoted, summarised or cited.
Teams replacing a template site that cannot be extended — no schema, no structured content, no measurement of AI referrals.
Who this is not for
A single landing page for a campaign. That is an afternoon, not an engagement, and we will tell you to build it yourself.
Ecommerce catalogues with thousands of SKUs and complex merchandising — that is a software build with a different price.
Anyone who wants the cheapest possible site. The cheapest possible site is the one AI search cannot see, and that is the entire problem we exist to solve.
The receipts behind those claims
708 pages on this site, up from 123 — TrainYourAgent rebuilt its own site from 123 real pages to 708. Every one carries a self-referencing canonical and a unique title and h1, and the build fails if any page does not.
Build-time assertions, not a checklist — Canonical, title and h1 uniqueness are enforced by the build. A rule a human is supposed to remember is a rule that gets broken on page forty.
1,378 static pages in one client engine — A single client codebase we operate prerenders 1,378 static pages. Programmatic page generation at that scale is a normal working day here, not a stretch goal.
58.5% of US searches are zero-click — The market fact this service line exists to answer. If most searches end without a click, being the source the answer is built from matters more than being the tenth blue link.
Against the market
Corporate marketing site build — market: $36,500 median; here: $8,000–$15,000
Three-year total cost of ownership — market: 2×–3.4× the original build cost; here: Published care-plan range so you can compute it yourself
Ongoing maintenance — market: Usually quoted as hosting; here: $300–$1,060/mo, itemised as refresh, schema and reporting
Why does AI search change how a website should be built?
For twenty years a website was designed to win a click. The page had to look attractive in a list of ten results and persuade someone to choose it. That model assumes a list, and a list assumes a click. With 58.5% of US searches in the United States now ending without a click, a growing share of buyers never see the list at all — they read a synthesised answer and act on it. This changes the unit of optimisation. The unit is no longer the page as a whole; it is the extractable block. An answer engine reads your page, finds a passage that answers the question cleanly, and either quotes it or cites it. A page written as a flowing brochure has no such passage. A page written as question, answer, evidence, table has one on every screen. It also changes what wins. Brand mentions correlate with AI Overview appearance at roughly 0.664, while backlinks correlate at roughly 0.218. Being talked about is now a stronger signal than being linked to, and 82% of AI citations are earned media rather than a brand's own domain. The site's job is to be the clean, quotable, unambiguous source that those mentions resolve back to.
What does a typical agency website miss?
Four things, and they are the same four almost every time. No entity-linked schema graph — either no structured data at all, or a handful of disconnected snippets that never reference each other, so a machine cannot resolve the organisation, the service and the page into one entity. No answer-first content structure, so the first 30% of every page is a hero image and a slogan rather than the answer to the query the page is supposed to own. No dateModified refresh loop, so every page silently ages and the site's freshness signal decays to nothing. And no AI-referrer analytics, so traffic arriving from ChatGPT or Perplexity lands in the direct bucket and nobody can tell that it converts at several times the rate of ordinary organic traffic. None of this is exotic engineering. It is a set of decisions taken at the start of a build, and it costs almost nothing to do at the start and a great deal to retrofit later.
What does a business website really cost over three years?
The build price is the smaller number. Across the industry, three-year total cost of ownership for a business website runs roughly two to three and a half times the original build cost once hosting, maintenance, content, plugins, security work and the inevitable partial redesign are counted. A $10,000 build is realistically a $20,000 to $34,000 three-year commitment. We publish both halves so you can do that arithmetic before you sign rather than after. A build of $8,000 to $15,000 and a care plan of $300 to $1,060 per month gives you a three-year range you can compute on the back of an envelope. For comparison, corporate marketing site builds benchmark at a median of $36,500, which is the number your agency proposals are being drawn from even when they do not say so. The reason to know this in advance is that the maintenance line is where sites die. A site with no maintenance budget stops being refreshed, its freshness signal decays, and within two years it is a brochure nobody cites.
We can get a site built for $2,000.
You can, and for some businesses that is the correct purchase. What $2,000 buys is a template with your logo on it: no entity-linked schema, no answer-first structure, no refresh loop, no build-time guarantees and no AI-referrer measurement. That is fine if the site is a business card. It is not fine if the site is supposed to be the source that answer engines cite, because the four things it omits are precisely the four things that determine whether it gets cited.
Isn't AI search optimisation just SEO with a new name?
It overlaps heavily and we do not pretend otherwise. Crawlability, speed, internal linking and good content matter for both. The genuine differences are structural: extractable answer blocks rather than flowing prose, an entity graph rather than page-level keywords, freshness as a first-class signal, and brand mentions outweighing backlinks by roughly 0.664 to 0.218 in correlation with AI Overview appearance. If your current SEO vendor is doing all of that, keep them.
How much does a website cost to build?
TrainYourAgent builds run $8,000 to $15,000 depending on page count and how much programmatic structure is involved, with a care plan of $300 to $1,060 per month. For context, corporate marketing site builds benchmark at a median of $36,500, and three-year total cost of ownership across the industry typically runs two to three and a half times the build price.
How long does it take to build a website?
Four to six weeks for a focused site of roughly 8 to 15 pages, and six to ten weeks for a full marketing site with programmatic service and location pages. The variable is almost never the build — it is how quickly content decisions get made and approved on your side.
What is a website care plan and do you need one?
A care plan is the ongoing work that keeps a site visible: a 90-day content refresh cycle, schema maintenance as your services change, Core Web Vitals monitoring and quarterly reporting on AI-referred traffic. It runs $300 to $1,060 per month. You need one if you want the site to still be cited in two years; a site nobody refreshes decays into a brochure.
Will a new website rank higher on Google?
A rebuild alone does not guarantee higher rankings, and anyone promising otherwise is guessing. What a well-built site does is remove the technical reasons you cannot rank — slow pages, missing canonicals, duplicate titles, no structured data — and give you a content structure that both search engines and answer engines can extract from. Ranking then depends on content and authority, which take time.