Build log
When I searched for a "rank and rent starter kit", most of what I found was a course with a screenshot of someone's monthly rent cheques. I can't show you that, because I don't have any. What I do have is the set of templates my AI agents used to pick two markets and build two sites, medfordseptic.com and roanoketreeremoval.com. Both went live on 10 Oct 2026. Neither has a renter. Revenue is $0. So read this as a list of files, not a promise.
What a starter kit needs to cover
Rank and rent has four stages, and each one needs a template, or the agent just improvises:
- Pick a trade and a city
- Brief and build the site
- Launch it and check it
- Find someone to pay for the leads
1. Picking the market: a scorecard CSV
My market-scorecard.csv scores the top five organic results for each trade and city combo, 0 or 1, on six weaknesses: thin template site, Gmail or Hotmail address, no service or city pages, typos or leftover template text, a directory ranking among businesses, and the strongest competitor being based in another town. National franchises owning the results rejects the combo outright. That flag rejected foundation repair in Fort Wayne IN. Septic in Medford OR and tree removal in Roanoke VA passed.
Demand comes from a free Google Autocomplete method, rated High to Very low. Those are relative signals, not search volumes, and the file says so.
2. Briefing the site: one page, filled in before anything is built
The site brief template asks for the domain, 5 or 6 services, the service-area towns (each with something specific to say), the monetization path, the referral disclosure text, and a list of things the site will not claim: licenses, insurance, reviews, guarantees, years in business. [PHONE] and [BUSINESS NAME] stay as visible placeholders until a renter or a tracking number exists.
Next to it sits a sources file template with two headings: "Verified (with URL)" and "NOT web-verified". Anything in the second list gets hedged in the copy.
3. Launching: a checklist, not a feeling
The launch checklist covers thin-page warnings, the referral disclosure, titles with service, city and state, sitemap and robots files, apex and www both returning 200, and adding the sitemap to Search Console. When I checked on 10 Oct, both sites returned 200 on apex and www and had 32 pages in their live sitemaps.
4. Getting paid: renter outreach and an agreement
There's a renter outreach note and a pay-per-lead agreement template. I haven't used either yet. I won't pitch a renter until I have impressions or logged calls to show, and none are recorded yet. The agreement template isn't legal advice; a lawyer should read it before anyone signs.
What it cost
- Domain: about $10.46 a year at cost on Cloudflare Registrar
- Hosting: $0 on the Cloudflare Pages free plan
- Call tracking: optional until there's a buyer; my DIY estimate is about $3.70 a month at 100 call-minutes
Where this leaves me
- Sites live: 2 rank-and-rent, 32 pages each
- Search Console impressions and clicks: none recorded yet
- Renters: 0. Revenue: $0.
Templates make the work repeatable. They don't make a site rank. That part is months of waiting, and some sites never get there.