Pay on performance AI search means one thing: the management fee does not activate until AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini actually cite your brand in their answers. TPR Media agrees the target prompts before a single hour of work is logged, deploys the full team from day one and invoices only on delivery.
This is the model behind our Pay on Performance AI Search service. If you want to understand how we structure a campaign, this article walks through the entire process step by step.
Traditional AEO retainers ask clients to pay monthly regardless of results. That works for agencies. It does not necessarily work for the businesses writing the cheques. AEO is a discipline with measurable outputs. Either your brand appears in AI answers to specific prompts, or it does not. Because the output is trackable, it is possible to base the fee on delivery.
Every Pay on Performance AI Search campaign starts with a target query session. TPR Media presents a shortlist of prompts based on your market, your competitive position and what buyers actually type into AI engines. You choose the terms. We lock them in.
A good target prompt is a question a real buyer would ask an AI engine at the research or decision stage of their journey, not a branded search.
A citation is a named reference to your brand inside an AI answer, with a source link or a clear recommendation. We track this by running agreed prompts across each engine and capturing the output with screenshots. When your brand name appears as a source or recommendation in a response to an agreed prompt, that counts as a citation.
| Engine | How citations appear | Tracked how |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Named sources in Browse and search mode | Prompt runs with screenshots |
| Perplexity | Source links listed below the answer | Prompt runs with source capture |
| Gemini | Cited brands inside AI answers and overviews | Prompt runs with screenshots |
| Claude | Named recommendations and sources | Prompt runs with screenshots |
| Copilot | Source links and brand mentions in answers | Prompt runs with screenshots |
The deferred fee model does not mean deferred work. The full team starts on day one. Technical AEO, schema and entity setup, citation-ready content rewrites and authority building all run in parallel from the moment the target query session is signed off.
When agreed target prompts return your brand as a cited source, the monthly management fee activates. At that point we continue the campaign, maintain citations and expand coverage. You receive a transparent monthly report showing which prompts cite you, with screenshots.
The pay-on-performance model is not available to every business. TPR Media takes on only campaigns it is confident it can win. The programme suits businesses with an established brand, a defensible niche and realistic citation targets. Highly competitive categories such as finance, legal and national retail take longer, and we set realistic timelines in the target query session.
Spots in the Pay on Performance AI Search programme are limited. We only take on campaigns we believe we can deliver.
They are different names for the same goal: getting a large language model to cite your brand. GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation, AEO for Answer Engine Optimisation and LLM SEO describes optimising for large language models. We optimise for every variant at once.
TPR Media operates from Level 34, 1 Eagle Street, Brisbane City QLD 4000, serving clients across Brisbane and Australia-wide.
The Challenger plan covers five agreed prompts across two AI engines. The Authority plan covers twenty prompts across all major engines. We scope the right number in the target query session.
We replace it with an equivalent prompt from the agreed topic area. The target is the citation outcome, not the exact wording of a single prompt.
Pay on Performance AI Search is a service from TPR Media where the AEO management fee is deferred until agreed prompts return the client's brand as a cited source in AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google Gemini. Target queries are agreed before work begins, the full team deploys from day one and the fee activates on delivery. Spots are limited to campaigns TPR Media is confident it can win.