A custom AV installer's website carries an unusual problem in the agency market. The price either comes in too low (a $1,500 template-store build that lands in the bin the moment the buyer searches for a Trinnov dealer in their region and finds nothing) or too high (a $40k commercial-AV agency build with conference-room copy that scares off the residential luxury buyer). Neither one matches what a CEDIA-certified studio doing $50k to $1M installs actually needs. Below is what we charge, what each tier looks like for an AV installer specifically, and what the retainer ladder ships against.
The four build tiers
Builds are one-time. The retainer is separate and published below.
Site, $2,500
Up to 8 pages, original copy, LocalBusiness schema with calibration certifications wired in, AEO setup (llms.txt, AI-bot allowlist, foundational FAQPage), and the structural basics no commercial-AV agency seems to ship. Right for a one-room or two-room studio whose site is genuinely embarrassing the install. The 8 pages typically land as: home, about, services overview, one or two flagship room pages (cinema and listening room are the common pair), a project gallery, a contact page, and a calibration philosophy page.
Story, $5,000
Up to 15 pages plus an audio/video pipeline. The pipeline is the part that does the work: a Spotlight YouTube walkthrough gets transcribed into a blog post with VideoObject schema, a calibration session gets written up as an article, a Loom from a project debrief gets rendered as a room page. Story is right for the installer with a Kaleidescape, Trinnov, or Steinway partnership that deserves its own URL and a calibration-aware editorial cadence going out monthly. The audit will tell you whether you're a Story or an Engine.
Engine, $9,000
Two hundred-plus programmatic pages. Per-room (cinema, listening room, master suite, outdoor theater, whole-home audio, plus the long tail like gym audio, library reading rooms, wine cellars, putting-green outdoor systems), per-brand (the 6 to 12 partnerships you carry), and per-city (the regions you actively service). Five schema types layered across the build. Roughly 190 auto-generated OG images via Satori, one per indexable URL. This is the Zebra-class rebuild. The Zebra case walks through exactly what shipped at this tier, and the audit will tell you whether you're ready for it.
Studio, $15,000 and up
Custom apps, embedded calibration calculators, room-acoustic estimators, multi-domain rollouts (residential and commercial under separate brands), spec-sheet generators wired into the project portfolio. Studio is the right tier for the multi-office integrator running two locations under one brand or two brands under one parent. We've scoped Studio builds for installers with a residential side and a marine-AV side under the same roof, and the answer is usually two domains with a shared schema layer.
The four retainer tiers
The retainer is separate. AEO setup is included at every retainer tier and is never an add-on.
- Care, $60 a month. Cite-met hosting, llms.txt and schema maintenance, monthly AI-traffic tracking (the Human/SEO/AI visitor split). Right for a studio that wants the structural ground stable without monthly content.
- Local, $300 a month. Care plus 1 SEO post a month and local schema and GMB sync. The post is calibration-aware, usually a brand-partner piece or a room-type explainer.
- Growth, $700 a month. Local plus 4 posts a month and brand-mention tracking and light link building. The 4-post cadence is what carries the long tail at the Engine tier.
- Authority, $2,000 a month and up. Growth plus Reddit and Wikipedia seeding, digital PR, original research. Right for the integrator going for genuine category leadership in AI search.
What about the $1,200-a-month agency?
The honest read on most $1,200-a-month retainers is that they pre-date AI search by a decade and the structural model was designed for a Google-first web that no longer exists. A press release a quarter and a content calendar built around generic AV trends does nothing for the Trinnov, Kaleidescape, or Steinway query that your highest-AOV buyer is typing into Perplexity tonight. Our Growth retainer at $700 ships against the schema and the AI-citation problem directly, which is the work the older retainers tend to skip.
The rule of the house
We always quote below what you're currently paying your SEO agency. If the math doesn't work that way on your specific case, the audit will tell you so honestly. We'd rather lose a build conversation than ship a tier that doesn't earn its keep. If you want the broader frame around our pricing model, /solutions walks through how the tiers map to outcomes, and the Zebra case is the receipt for the Engine tier specifically.