An AI SEO agency with one job: getting your business named inside the AI answer.

Traditional SEO is a competition for position on a results page. The prize is a link, and the visitor decides between ten of them. AI SEO is a competition to be quoted. The prize is your name inside a written answer, and the assistant has already done the deciding for the reader.

The two jobs overlap but they are not the same job, and being good at one does not carry you into the other. Semrush found the pages ChatGPT cites rank at position 21 or worse in Google almost 90 percent of the time (Semrush, Jul 2025). A business can hold page one for years and never appear in a single AI answer, because assistants pull from sources page-one ranking does not measure.

So the work changes shape. Instead of chasing a keyword, we chase a question. Instead of one long page that mentions everything you do, we build one page per service that answers one question completely, in plain sentences a machine can lift. Instead of link building, we fix the record: the same name, address, phone, hours and services in every place an assistant goes to check.

• SEO measures rank. AI SEO measures whether you were named, in which questions, on which tools.
• SEO rewards a page that covers a topic. AI SEO rewards a page that answers a question and states a number.
• SEO treats listings as housekeeping. AI SEO treats them as the fact check that decides whether you exist.
• SEO reports traffic. AI SEO reports screenshots of the answer itself, which you can repeat yourself any day.

The vocabulary is a mess, and the mess costs owners money, because three vendors can quote three different prices for the same job under three different labels. It is worth being clear about what each word actually means.

• AI SEO is the plain-language umbrella: the work of getting found and named by AI tools.
• Answer engine optimization, or AEO, names the target: the answer itself, not the list.
• Generative engine optimization, or GEO, names the machine: the model that generates the answer.
• AI search optimization, sometimes written as LLM SEO, names the surface: search inside an assistant.

In practice the deliverables are identical. Anyone who tells you GEO is a different service from AEO, with a different price and a different retainer, is selling vocabulary. We do one thing, at one price, and we call it whatever you are used to calling it. The guide AEO vs SEO vs GEO sets the terms out side by side if you want the longer version.

There is no single algorithm to please, but the main AI tools behave in ways you can plan around, and they read many of the same sources.

• ChatGPT: when it looks something up on the web it searches with Bing, so Bing Places and a Bing-visible site matter here as much as Google does. A business with a perfect Google Business Profile and no Bing presence can be invisible to it.
• Google AI Mode: built on Google's own index and Business Profile data, so proximity, categories, hours, review volume and structured data all feed it, and a stale or half-filled profile shows up as an absence.
• Perplexity: writes short answers with visible citations, which means being citable is the whole game. It favours pages that state a fact plainly, in text, on a page about that one thing.

Underneath all three is the same test: can the machine read what you do, verify it somewhere independent, and trust it enough to put your name in front of a stranger. That is why the work is boring on purpose. Readable pages, verified listings, trusted signals, repeated every month.

A local AI SEO agency is not a smaller version of a national one, it is a different unit of work. The question an assistant answers is never "who is good", it is "who is good in this city", so the whole job is built around one city and one service at a time rather than one national keyword.

Our own AI Local Visibility Report reads city by city answers across eleven industries and finds the same shape everywhere: an assistant names a short list of businesses per city, never every business in town. That is why local AI SEO services are sold and measured per city: the screenshots that prove the work are the buyer questions people in that city actually ask, run in that city's own market.

• One business per industry per city. An AI-powered local SEO agency that also serves your direct competitor two blocks away cannot make an honest guarantee to either of you, which is why we do not do it.
• The listings and profiles that decide a local answer (Google Business Profile, Bing Places, the two or three directories your trade actually gets cited from) are city-specific, not brand-wide.
• The research reports behind this page are read the same way: city by city, one dated AI answer at a time, which is the only way "local" AI visibility is actually checkable.

Our AI SEO services are one package at $499 a month, with a 3-month minimum and then month to month. There is no setup fee and nothing is sold separately. The price is on this page, so you do not need a sales call to see it.

Local marketing retainers in these industries typically run $3,000 to $10,000 a month, usually with no guarantee attached. Whatever you are quoted, by us or anyone else, check that the package names these things in writing:

• The buyer questions it will be measured on, agreed before you pay, and how many of them count as a win.
• Which AI tools are checked (for us, ChatGPT and Google AI Mode) and how often you get the dated screenshots.
• What gets built each month: pages, structured data, listings, reviews. A report alone is not a package.
• What happens if nothing changes by a set date, and who owns the site, profiles and content if you leave.

The guide what AI visibility costs goes through typical quotes line by line.

This is for local businesses where one new customer is worth hundreds or thousands of dollars, and where buyers ask a question before they pick a name: med spas, law firms, dentists, chiropractors, cosmetic surgeons, therapists, accountants, HVAC companies, roofers, plumbers, electricians and real estate agents.

It is not for national ecommerce, and it is not for businesses in markets the answer already owns. Before we take money we check whether the answer in your city is still open. In big metros a hospital system or a national chain often owns it, and we say so and decline.

• Med spas and aesthetics clinics: our deepest market, with first-party data for the cities we publish.
• Every industry we work in: the buyer question we target and what one customer is worth in each.
• Anything else local: send the site and we will tell you honestly whether the market is winnable.