An agency invoices for effort. Ascent bills for work performed, does it under a governance setting you choose, and records who changed what.
Every act is logged with its actor. To know a change actually worked, a tenth of fixes are withheld as a control group.
What changes when an agent does the work instead of a retainer.
A monthly plan with a credit allowance, and you are never billed for work that fails.
Five categories, capped by plan. Publishing to your own site is its own deliberate setting.
A tenth of fixes are withheld as a control group, so lift is attributed rather than asserted.
The governance is in the product, not in a policy document.
Every applied change writes an entry naming the actor and the page it touched.
Row-level security, per-account budgets and a circuit breaker on runaway spend.
Three of the four presets keep publishing with a person. Autopilot is a decision, not a slider position.
Ascent replaces the recurring execution half of an SEO retainer: the audits, the meta and schema work, the content briefs and the follow-up. It does not replace strategy, brand or commercial judgement, and it says so rather than implying otherwise.
Autonomy is set per task across five categories and capped by the account plan, so a user cannot grant themselves more than the account allows. Every applied change writes an apply-log entry naming the actor, the page and the outcome, and the log is queryable.
Ascent deliberately withholds a tenth of eligible fixes as a control group and compares the two arms, so a reported gain is attributed rather than assumed. Measured rankings and projected lift are kept strictly separate, and where there is not enough data the product reports that instead of a number.
Register and run it on one real property. The audit costs nothing.