The veterinary clinic owners we talk to are usually one of two shapes. Either they're a single-doctor companion clinic on a Squarespace template that the previous office manager set up four years ago, paying a local agency $1,200 a month for a blog post and a social tile. Or they're a multi-site practice with eight veterinarians (DVMs) paying an agency $2,500 a month for what amounts to a quarterly check-in and a slide deck. Both ends of the market are getting overcharged for what's actually being delivered, and both are missing the structured data and answer engine optimization (AEO) work that matters for AI search in 2026.
Here are the four build tiers, with what each one looks like for a veterinary practice specifically. The full structure also lives on the solutions page.
The four build tiers (one-time)
Site at $2,500
Up to 8 pages, 100% original copy, foundational AEO setup. For a veterinary practice this usually means a homepage with VeterinaryCare schema, three species pages (dogs, cats, exotics), a fees and policies page, an about-the-team page, a contact and hours page with proper OpeningHoursSpecification, and an emergency or after-hours referral page. The starter tier for a single-doctor companion clinic that needs the marketing site working before next quarter without overcommitting.
Story at $5,000
Up to 15 pages plus audio/video content pipelines. The Loom-to-blog pipeline means you can record a two-minute walkthrough of a dental scaling procedure or a dermatology consult and the studio turns it into a structured article with FAQPage schema, without the office manager doing the writing. The right fit for a two or three doctor practice that wants per-condition pages (dental, ortho, dermatology, ophthalmology) and a real about-the-team section with proper photography.
Engine at $9,000
Up to 200+ programmatic pages with structured data automation. This is where per-species times per-condition times per-location pages start working as a system. A multi-site practice with three locations and twelve specialty conditions can generate 36 location-condition pages plus species variants. They are built with the same schema discipline that ranked Starlit Homes' twelve building-science pages for a custom home builder. The Engine tier also covers emergency-symptom surfacing for the after-hours search behaviour, which is where 24/7 hospitals win the visit.
Studio at $15,000 and up
Custom apps, multi-domain rollouts, embedded conversational layers, and clinical-system integration. The tier for a 24/7 hospital or specialty group that needs eVet, IDEXX, or Provet Cloud booking embedded, multi-domain rollouts across sister clinics, and a triage-style conversational layer on the emergency page that reads pet symptoms and surfaces the right next step. Studio scopes are quoted individually because the integration shape varies.
The four retainers (monthly)
The retainer side is where most veterinary practices are getting taken right now. The Canadian veterinary SEO market sits between $1,200 and $1,800 a month for what amounts to one blog post and a Google Business Profile sync. Our structure runs differently.
- Care at $60/mo. Cite-met hosting, llms.txt and schema maintenance, monthly AI-traffic tracking. The floor for keeping the structured data fresh and watching which AI crawlers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the rest) are visiting the site.
- Local at $300/mo. Care plus one SEO post a month with FAQPage markup, Google Business Profile, local citations, and on-page work. This is the tier that replaces most $1,200/mo veterinary agency retainers at a quarter of the cost.
- Growth at $700/mo. Local plus four posts a month, off-page link building, competitor share-of-voice tracking, and a monthly strategist. The fit for clinics that want to compete for symptom-based search across a metro area.
- Authority at $2,000+/mo. Growth plus AEO citation-building, Reddit and Wikipedia seeding, digital PR, and original research. For multi-site practices or specialty groups that want to be the cited authority in their region.
What about the $1,400/mo agency you're already paying?
The objection we hear most often is that the current agency has been running the site for three years and the clinic owner doesn't want to rock the boat. The math we usually run on the audit is that the current retainer pays for roughly $14,400 to $21,600 a year in deliverables that don't include schema work, llms.txt maintenance, or AI-traffic tracking. Our Growth tier at $700/mo covers all three plus four monthly posts and competitor share-of-voice monitoring, and that's $8,400 a year. The savings usually fund the one-time build inside the first 12 months.
The rule of the house
We always quote below what you're currently paying your SEO agency. The audit is free and takes us about two hours. We send the deck back with the schema gaps, the AI citation flow on your current site, and the quoted pricing in writing. If the math doesn't work, we say so and you walk. The same posture applies whether you're a single-doctor companion clinic or a multi-site specialty hospital, and the same posture applies to human dental practices and community fitness studios in the studio's wider book.
Start with the free audit and we'll show you the gaps before you commit to anything.