Straight answers.

You choose how much it does alone. In approve mode every change waits for your one-click approval. On autopilot it publishes by itself, within the rules you set.

Either way, each change is logged with the before and after, checked to confirm it is live, and can be rolled back in one click. Ship/Scale only edits the parts of a page it is fixing: titles, headings, new sections, FAQs, meta descriptions and internal links.

Honestly: it can. Google's spam policies treat links bought to manipulate rankings as link spam, so paid links carry real risk, from being ignored to, in serious cases, a manual action against the site.

We reduce that risk rather than pretend it isn't there: only relevant, verified domains; never domains flagged as suspect; never the same domain twice for a page; a pace that matches your site's natural link growth; an anchor mix led by your brand and plain URLs, with exact-match anchors kept under 5%; and no link spending on a page until its content is fixed.

You decide whether to buy links at all. Ship/Scale works content-only if you set your link budget to zero.

They might not, and we won't promise otherwise. Rank movement is modelled from your own data, not guaranteed. That is why every figure is labelled measured, modelled or assumed, and why payback is calculated on the most realistic step up, not a jump to #1.

What we do promise is visibility and control: you see spend next to observed results at 30, 60 and 90 days, the plan stops buying for pages that don't pay back, and you can pause everything instantly.

Only if you turn autopilot on. New sites start in approve mode, where nothing is published until you click approve. You can switch per site at any time, and every change can be rolled back.

Three pieces, all shown on screen. First, how many people search for what the page ranks for (Search Console, plus search volume when available). Second, how many of them click at each position, using a click-through curve fitted to your own site's data. Third, what a click is worth, from your analytics (GA4, PostHog or Plausible) or a conversion value you enter.

Multiply the extra clicks from moving up by the value per click and you get extra revenue per month. Link costs come from real, held prices, so payback is cost divided by that monthly gain.

WordPress, Webflow and Shopify. If your site runs on something else you can still use Ship/Scale in approve mode and copy the changes across yourself.

Google Analytics 4, PostHog and Plausible, all optional. Analytics tell us what a visit to each page is actually worth. Without them, you enter a conversion rate and conversion value and we use those.

Links come from PlacementAPI's marketplace: named, verified domains with prices held while you decide. Ship/Scale and PlacementAPI are run by the same team.

You pay PlacementAPI's marketplace price with no markup on your own purchases, from your own budget and within your caps. Orders run on your own PlacementAPI account, so its credit, refund and verification terms apply.

Start with what you are comfortable spending in a month. Ship/Scale ranks pages by revenue per dollar and spends only where the modelled payback is within twelve months, so a small budget goes to the best opportunities first. Many sites begin content-only with a budget of zero.

On the Free plan you paste in your own API keys: Anthropic for AI rewriting, PlacementAPI for link inventory and gap pricing, and optionally DataForSEO or Ahrefs for sharper competitor and search data. Their usage is billed to you by those providers directly. The product itself is the same as Pro, and Free includes 10 competitor analyses a month on our keys so you see real results before adding any.

Without a DataForSEO or Ahrefs key, Ship/Scale falls back to Search Console and PlacementAPI data.

Only whose keys power the metered parts. Free uses your keys and costs nothing. Pro ($99/month) uses ours, so there are no API keys to manage: AI rewriting, competitor analysis and market data are included, with 5 sites and fair-use limits of 300 rewrites and 100 link-gap analyses a month. Extra sites are $19/month each.

Yes, any time. Ship/Scale is month to month: no contract, no notice period, no exit fee. Pausing a site stops all its future actions immediately. If you cancel Pro, you keep it until the end of the month you have paid for. Links already placed stay placed, and content changes stay on your site unless you roll them back.

We read Search Console and Google Analytics with read-only access, and use that data only to run Ship/Scale for you. API keys, Google tokens and CMS credentials are encrypted at rest. We never sell your data, and you can delete your account and data at any time. Details are in our privacy policy.

Yes. Agency features are included on both plans: per-client budgets and autopilot switches, connect links so clients can grant access without an account, one approval inbox across clients, white-label monthly reports, and your own markup when you re-bill link spend.

No. Every recommendation is written in plain language with a dollar figure and a reason. If you do know SEO, you'll find the underlying numbers (queries, positions, competitors, referring domains, anchors) one click away.