The Chicago Authority Site.
“Built for the way people actually search now.”
We build 200 pages of topical authority for Chicagoland businesses whose competitors are already showing up in ChatGPT — and they're not. Custom-designed. Live in 14 days. $4,997 flat.
Six deliverables. One flat price.
Every Chicago Authority Site ships with the same six inclusions. No upsells. No "Premium" tier. No "ongoing optimization" retainer required to make it work. Same product whether you're a med spa or a roofing contractor.
200 custom pages
Designed and structured per your business — no templates, no clones, no shared themes. Every page earns its place in the topical map.
AKA SEO Wireframe™
Authority–Knowledge–Answer pyramid architecture. The exact topical structure AI Overviews and ChatGPT reward — engineered to rank, not retrofitted.
Custom WordPress
You own the site. Edit anything, anytime. Real WordPress, no proprietary builder, no platform lock-in, no monthly hostage situation.
Live in 14 days
Brand discovery → custom theme → 200 pages drafted → deployed → indexed → live. All inside two weeks. No 90-day agency drag.
GSC indexation push
Every page submitted to Google Search Console. Internal link weighting validated. Sitemap submitted. Indexation tracked weekly through Day 30.
AI-citation prompt engineering
Schema markup, structured data, and prompt-optimized copy designed to surface in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
How 200 pages become authority.
The AKA SEO Wireframe™ is the topical architecture every Chicago Authority Site is built on. Three layers, one pyramid, ranking together.
The pillar pages — homepage, core service category pages, the "about" / "method." Six pages that establish you as a real entity in your category. Compete for the hardest keywords. Earn the deepest trust.
Every service detail page, location page, comparison page. The depth layer. Internal-linked to the Authority layer to pass weight up. Each one targeting a specific intent — "service in city," "service X vs Y," "service near me."
Every question your customers actually ask. "How much does X cost in [city]?" "What's the difference between Y and Z?" "When should I do A vs B?" This is what AI Overviews actually cite. The long-tail layer most competitors never build.
Why the pyramid works: AI search models look for sites that cover a topic completely — not just the headline. The Answer layer (154 pages) is the part competitors don't build. It's also the part that gets cited by ChatGPT, the part that ranks long-tail in Google, and the part that compounds month after month.
What you can't lose.
Four explicit guarantees. We post them publicly because we don't ship work we'd have to refund.
Full refund · Days 1–3
Brand discovery wraps Day 3. If anything in the brief feels wrong, you get your $2,500 deposit back. No paperwork, no friction.
No bill until live
The final $2,497 doesn't get charged until the site is published, indexed, and your first GSC verification is in. We don't bill for promises.
Missed deadline? Free hosting
If we miss Day 14 for reasons on our side, the first year of WordPress hosting is on us. We've shipped 60+ on time — but the guarantee is on the page anyway.
Hate a page? We redo it
Within 30 days post-launch, point at any page that doesn't feel right — we rewrite, redesign, or restructure it. Once. Free.
From kickoff to live
in two weeks.
Every Chicago Authority Site runs the same flight plan. Same five stages we used to build this site. No surprises, no scope creep, no "we'll get back to you on Thursday."
Brand discovery
Five-round discovery session — target customer, positioning, voice, pillars, the feeling. Output: a Brand Brief that drives every downstream decision. No taste-by-committee.
Visual identity + custom theme
Color, typography, image style, motion. Then a custom WordPress theme built around those tokens. No Divi. No Elementor. No "starter template you can edit later."
Topical map + 200 pages drafted
Authority–Knowledge–Answer wireframe across services × locations × questions. 200 pages of real copy in your voice. AI-search aware from the first sentence.
Build + deploy
Programmatic page assembly, hand-curated where it matters, deployed in batches of 10. Schema markup, internal linking, sitemap — all in by launch day.
Indexation + AI citation push
Google Search Console submission, internal-link weighting, AI-citation prompts and structured data. We don't ship and disappear — we get the site cited.
Same custom site.
$10,000 $0 of bloat.
- Hand-built page-by-page
- Billed by the hour
- Quarterly planning, weekly standups
- Account manager + 4 layers of translator
- Strategy decks, kickoff docs, retainers
- 90-day timeline (best case)
- Custom quote required
- Pipeline-built for the AI era
- Flat one-time fee
- Day-by-day timeline shown above
- One operator per build · direct line
- Live site by Day 14, no decks
- 14 days, end-to-end
- Price posted publicly · this page
Same custom design. Same hand-tuned WordPress. Same topical authority. Just without the $10,000 of bloat — strategy decks, account managers, 90-day timelines — that exists because the rest of the industry hasn't rebuilt their production pipeline yet.
We take 4 clients at a time.
Team of three. Four concurrent builds. When all four slots are full, booking closes until the current builds ship. This isn't a marketing tactic — it's how we keep the quality bar.
What 200 pages looks like.
Eight authority sites we've shipped across niches and geographies. Same pipeline. Same 14-day cadence. Same AKA Wireframe™ underneath. Each one tailored to its own brand.
The pipeline is built for 200 pages — that's the depth threshold where AI search starts citing you and topical authority compounds. Going smaller breaks the engine. Below 200 pages, you're paying for a fancier brochure.
That said: in some industries with narrow vertical scope (e.g. specialty B2B SaaS), we can ship at 150 pages with proportional pricing. Ask on the call.
No. Content farms generate thin, duplicate, scraped junk. We generate topically distinct, structurally varied, voice-aligned pages — each one earning the right to exist in the AKA topical map.
Every page is checked for uniqueness, search intent match, and internal-link contribution. We don't ship slop. Google penalizes slop. So do AI Overviews.
Authority–Knowledge–Answer pyramid. Authority pages (~6) are your pillars — homepage, core services, about. Knowledge pages (~40) are the cluster — service detail, location, comparison. Answer pages (~154) are the long-tail — every question your customers ask.
Internal-linked so weight flows up the pyramid. The Answer layer is what AI Overviews cite. The Knowledge layer is what Google ranks. The Authority layer is what humans land on. All three earn their keep.
We map every existing ranking URL, redirect 1:1 to the new equivalent, and preserve every backlink. Rankings hold during the transition — and the new depth picks up rankings the old site couldn't.
For sites with significant existing rankings (50+ keywords on page 1), we run a parallel-launch protocol — new site goes live alongside the old, redirects flip at indexation confirmation. Zero downtime, zero ranking loss.
You own the site. The $4,997 covers the build, indexation push, and citation prompts through Day 30.
After that: you can run it yourself (real WordPress, real editor), or add an optional ongoing retainer at $1,500–$3,500/mo for content cadence (4–12 new Answer pages/mo), GBP management, and AI-citation tracking. Not required for the site to work. Some clients want it, some don't.
Yes — eight live builds in the demo carousel above. Each is a real 150–250 page Chicago Authority Site built using this exact pipeline.
You can also generate your own mockup in 90 seconds via the Try the Methodology tool — Sonic runs the actual Stage 1 (Brand Philosophy) + Stage 2 (Visual Identity) on your business and produces a custom mockup. No card, no call.
Full refund of the $2,500 deposit before Day 3 (brand discovery wraps). After Day 3 we've started custom theme + topical map — no refunds, but we won't ship without your sign-off. And the final $2,497 doesn't get billed until the site is live and indexed.
Ready to ship 200 pages?
15 minutes. No deck. No "discovery call." We'll look at your site, your top 3 competitors in your category + city, and tell you exactly where your authority gap is. If it's a fit, you claim the slot. If not, you leave with a clearer picture than you came in with.