AEO agency for small businesses: what should it do, and what should it cost?

AEO agency for small businesses: what should it do, and what should it cost?

An AEO agency gets your business named when customers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini who to hire. For a small business that means three jobs done every week: get you onto the sites those tools read before they answer, make your own pages answer your customers' exact questions, and measure the same frozen set of questions so you can see whether it is working. Expect to see the agency's own result before you sign. Ours, Get Users, starts at $500/mo, month to month, with the work done for you once you approve it.

What does an AEO agency actually do?

When a customer asks ChatGPT “who should I call to fix my AC” or “best bookkeeper near me”, the tool reads a handful of websites and writes an answer with a few business names in it. The job is to make your business one of those names. There are three levers, and an agency worth paying works all three.

• The sites the answers read. Directories, review sites, best-of lists and forum threads. If the tool reads a list you are not on, it cannot name you from it. Getting listed, pitched onto lists and followed up is most of the work.
• Your own pages. One page per real customer question, with the question as the title and a straight answer in the first few lines, so the tool can quote you.
• Measurement. The same frozen set of your customers' questions, asked on each tool every week, several times each. Without it you are paying for activity, not results.

Which sites matter depends on what you sell. In our October 2026 research, directories and review sites were 30.7% of the citations for 12 local trades, while best-of lists were 10.8%. For AI chatbot tools it flipped: best-of lists and comparisons were 54.3% and directories 2.6%. An agency that runs the same playbook for a plumber and a software company is guessing.

What should a small business get every week?

Four things, in writing:

• A short list of the work for that week: which listings, which pitches, which page changes, and why each one, tied to a site the AI tools actually cited for your questions.
• Your approval before anything goes out under your name. You run the business; nothing should be submitted, sent or published that you have not seen.
• The work done, with links you can check: the listing live, the pitch sent, the page published.
• A scoreboard: for each of your questions, on each tool, were you named, who was named instead, and is that changing.

The tools disagree with each other more than people expect, which is why one tool is not enough. Across the 12 local trades in our research, 691 businesses were named by Perplexity or Gemini on at least one question check. Only 170 of those 691 were named by both. Measure one tool and you know about one tool.

What should an AEO agency cost a small business?

One vendor's published benchmark, The Answer Engine (June 21, 2026, linked below), puts a one-time AEO audit at $800 to $2,500, a starter retainer at $2,500 a month, and calls $500 to $1,000 a month a “below-market danger zone”. That is their view. Here is ours, from our pricing page.

Why ours sits under that benchmark: the measuring is automated. The same system asks your questions on all three tools every week and logs every site they cite, so the cost of the scoreboard is small. The part that is not automated, deciding what to do about it and doing it, is done by one person, me, Matt Turley. No ad spend on top, and no guaranteed result: nobody can promise what an AI tool will say, and an agency that does is selling you a promise it cannot keep.

What should you ask before you hire one?

Six questions. A real agency answers all of them without a sales call.

• “Show me your own result.” If they will not run their method on their own business and show you the number, ask why.
• “Which questions will you measure?” They should be your customers' words, written down before the first run and never edited afterwards, so next month is comparable with this one.
• “How many runs per question, on which tools?” Answers change between runs. One screenshot proves nothing either way.
• “Do you count named, or linked?” A link to your site in the sources is not the same as your name in the answer. Both are worth knowing; only one gets you the call.
• “What exactly happens each week, and who approves it?” You want a list of specific sites and pages, not “content” and “authority building”.
• “Can I leave any month?” If the work is good you will stay. A long minimum term protects the agency, not you.

What is our own result?

Not good yet, and published anyway. On September 24, 2026 we asked 15 questions our own buyers ask, 3 times each, on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini: 135 answers.

Named on 0 of 15. That is our starting line, and the weekly work for our own business runs through the same system a client gets. This page is part of it: AI answers to this exact question kept citing agency pages, and we had no page that answered it. The full report is on the product page.

The rest of the business is older. I have shipped production software for 20+ years. Porch Enclosure Systems has been a client since 2017, and BizJetJobs was a fifteen-year engagement through 2024. Those are software relationships, not AEO results; they are here because an agency you hire for this should still be around next year.

Can you do it yourself?

Yes, if you have a few hours a week. Write ten questions in your customers' words, without your business name in them. Ask each one three times in ChatGPT with web search on, then in Perplexity, then in Gemini. Write down whether you were named, who was, and every site cited. Then get onto the three or four sites cited most, and write one page per question on your own site. Re-run the same questions every week.

The step most people skip is the last one, and it is the one that tells you whether the rest worked. Our free AI visibility check runs a few of your questions live as a first look, the AI Visibility Watch re-runs them every week if you want the measuring without the work, and what an AI visibility audit covers walks through the full version.

Want the work done for you?

Straight answers