A buyer's guide for UK agencies reselling search under their own brand: how wholesale pricing works, how to vet a partner on GEO and AEO rather than promises, what belongs in the agreement, and what the reporting has to show before you put your logo on it.
White label search means a partner delivers SEO, GEO and AEO work that ships under your agency's brand. In the UK, wholesale retainers commonly sit between £300 and £2,500 a month depending on competitiveness and scope, and agencies resell at two to three times that. Choose on three things: a demonstrable AI citation for a real brand, reporting that arrives white-labelled and client-ready, and a rolling monthly agreement rather than a locked twelve-month term.
White label SEO, GEO and AEO is search work delivered by a specialist partner and sold to the end client under your agency's own brand. Your agency owns the relationship, the contract and the reporting; the partner supplies the technical SEO, content, local and generative-search work behind it and never appears in front of the client. In the UK the model is used most often by full-service and web design agencies that want to sell search without carrying a permanent search team.
The maths is usually the reason. A competent in-house SEO lead in the UK costs a salary plus tools plus management attention, and that cost lands whether you have three search clients or thirty. A white label partner converts that fixed cost into a variable one: you pay per client, per month, and the margin arrives from day one rather than month nine.
The second reason is newer. Search has split into three jobs in two years. Classic SEO still decides who ranks in the ten blue links, but a growing share of commercial queries never produce a click, because ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews answer them directly. Building the capability to be cited inside those answers is a specialism most generalist agencies will not staff for a handful of clients, and it is the single most common reason UK agencies go looking for a partner in 2026.
Partners who use the three terms interchangeably are the ones to avoid. They are separate work with separate proof.
| Layer | What it optimises for | Core work | How it is proved |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO | Ranking in classic search results | Technical health, site architecture, content, links | Rankings, impressions, organic sessions, conversions |
| GEO | Visibility across generative answers and, in the local sense, geography | Entity consistency, location signals, Google Business Profile, source coverage | Share of AI answers, local pack presence, map-view actions |
| AEO | Being the quoted answer to a question | Question-led content, schema, extractable formatting, citations | Named citations inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews |
One caution on vocabulary, because it causes confusion in briefs: in the UK market "geo" is used both for generative engine optimisation and, older, for geo-targeted local search. Establish which one a partner means before you price the work. Our full breakdown sits in GEO vs AEO vs SEO and what answer engine optimisation actually is.
| Model | Typical wholesale | Works when | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per-client retainer | £300 – £2,500 / month | Ongoing programmes, predictable margin per account | Scope creep once the client asks for extras |
| Tiered packages | £350 / £750 / £1,500 tiers | You want a rate card you can mark up and sell fast | Tiers that count deliverables rather than outcomes |
| Project or sprint | £900 – £4,000 per sprint | Migrations, technical audits, AEO content builds | No ownership of results after handover |
| Blended team hours | £22 – £55 / hour | Overflow capacity and unpredictable workloads | Hours spent with nothing shipped |
Three things move a wholesale price more than anything else: how competitive the client's market is, how much content the programme produces each month, and whether AEO monitoring and citation work is included. A single-location trades client and a national ecommerce site can sit at opposite ends of the same rate card, so price by difficulty, not by client size.
On resale, the common UK pattern is a two to three times markup, so a £500 wholesale retainer is sold at £1,200 to £1,500. That spread has to cover your account management, strategy input and the client relationship, which are real work. Agencies that mark up 1.3× usually end up resenting the client.
If a partner will not tell you their wholesale rate before a discovery call, you are the client being qualified, not the partner.
A named brand, the query, the engine, and how it was achieved. This is the fastest test of an AEO or GEO claim, and most partners cannot pass it.
Ask for the team structure and where they sit. Subcontracting is fine if disclosed; an undisclosed third layer means your client's work is three handoffs from you.
Your logo, your domain on the report, your colours, no partner branding in the footer. Ask for a live sample report before signing, not a template screenshot.
The good partners will, under your brand and with your email address. The answer tells you whether they are set up as a partner or as a supplier.
Rolling monthly with 30 days notice is the standard to hold out for. Twelve months upfront before a single deliverable is a risk you are carrying on your client's behalf.
Local pack behaviour, Companies House and review signals, UK spelling in content, GDPR-compliant data handling and UK competitor sets. Generic global content reads as imported.
Content, schema, technical documentation and accounts should sit with your agency or its client. Get it in writing, including what happens to the work if the partnership ends.
When a partner says they do AEO, this is the checklist worth holding them to.
Ask which of the five the retainer covers. A common gap is monitoring: the content gets built, nobody checks whether the answers changed, and the client has no evidence the layer works.
You will be presenting this to your client every month, so build the requirement into the contract rather than accepting whatever arrives.
| Feature | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Full white-label branding | Your logo, colours and sending domain, with no partner marks anywhere including the PDF metadata |
| Business outcomes, not just rankings | Leads, calls, form fills and revenue where tracked, so the client sees a return rather than a keyword list |
| AI answer visibility | A logged query set showing where the brand appears across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews, tracked over time |
| Local and map performance | Local pack positions, Business Profile views, direction requests and calls for multi-location clients |
| Work log | What shipped this month, dated, so you can answer "what am I paying for" instantly |
| Client-ready commentary | Plain-English notes you can forward without rewriting, plus next month's plan |
The partnerships that fail rarely fail on capability. They fail on process. Five habits that hold them together:
Most white label programmes for UK agencies are either national organic campaigns or multi-location local search. Both are delivered remotely, so what matters is whether the partner works to UK search behaviour: local pack and Google Business Profile management per branch, UK competitor sets rather than global ones, UK spelling and tone in every published word, review generation on the platforms UK buyers actually use, and GDPR-compliant handling of client and enquiry data.
Multi-location clients are where the local layer earns its fee: one optimised profile per branch, location pages that are genuinely different from each other, and consistent name, address and phone data across directories. That consistency is also what makes the entity legible to AI answer engines, which is why GEO and local work are quoted together more often than separately.
We are a Mumbai-based search and performance team operating since 2008, working with UK agencies as a white label delivery partner across SEO, GEO and AEO. Our own client results are the evidence we ask others for: Tradetron holds position one for "algo trading" at 29,000 monthly searches with 393,000 monthly organic sessions, Updapt grew organic traffic 59×, and The Club Mumbai grew 428% in eight months on local search. Masori Therapeutics is the closest analogue to a white label brief: a pharma-marketing brand launched with no digital footprint at all, taken to roughly 40,000 annual organic sessions and 5.5M annual paid impressions, with FAQ-led content and source seeding built specifically so it surfaces inside ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answers. Delivery runs in 90-day sprints of 25 to 35 keywords, reporting arrives under your brand, and the agreement is rolling monthly.
We are not the right partner for every agency. If you need a UK-registered supplier for procurement reasons, or on-site attendance at client offices, say so early and we will tell you straight. For everything else, see our search services or start a partner conversation.
Wholesale retainers commonly run from about £300 to £500 a month for a single-location local SEO client, £600 to £1,200 for a competitive national campaign, and £1,200 to £2,500 or more where GEO, AEO, technical work and content production are all in scope. Most UK agencies resell at two to three times the wholesale rate, which has to cover your own account management and strategy time.
Start with one question: show me a brand you have got cited inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews, and the method. Then check who does the work and where, whether reporting is genuinely white-labelled including PDF metadata, whether they will join client calls under your brand, and what the notice period is. A partner who passes the citation test and fails the reporting test will still cost you client trust.
Scope per client tier with turnaround days, the wholesale rate card and its review date, non-solicitation and NDA cover on your clients and rates, a no-direct-contact clause, IP and account ownership sitting with your agency or its client, reporting cadence with a sample report annexed, notice period and offboarding terms, and GDPR data-handling responsibilities.
Five: entity and schema markup that agrees across the site; question-led content that answers in the first sentence; extractable formatting such as tables, definition lists and numbered steps; verifiable authority through named authors, dates, sources and specific figures; and ongoing citation monitoring against a logged query set. Monitoring is the component most often quietly missing from a retainer.
Yes, and it is reasonable to insist on it. Rolling monthly agreements with 30 days notice are standard among partners confident in their delivery, since search work compounds and clients stay well past any minimum term. Twelve months committed before a single deliverable moves all the risk onto you.
Check your own client contracts first, since some include disclosure or subcontracting clauses. Commercially, most UK agencies present the partner as part of their delivery team, which is accurate when the partner works under your brand and your account lead owns the relationship. What matters is that no client ever discovers it accidentally through a stray logo or an email footer.
Some do and many do not, so test it rather than assume either way. Ask for UK-specific work: local pack strategy for a multi-branch client, UK competitor analysis, content in UK spelling and tone, review and Business Profile handling, and GDPR-compliant data processing. Ask where client data is stored. A partner who cannot answer those has been doing global work and calling it UK.
The term is used two ways. Generative engine optimisation is about being visible inside AI-generated answers, through entity clarity and coverage on the sources models sample. Geo-targeted local SEO is about ranking in a place, through Business Profile optimisation, local landing pages, citations and reviews. They overlap on entity consistency, but the deliverables and the measurement differ, so agree which one is in scope before pricing.