Who does AEO for local businesses, and which one fits yours.
Nine providers, sorted by what they are: listings platforms, agencies, tracking software, and us. The kind of company predicts what you get.
Who does answer engine optimization for local businesses?
Answer engine optimization for local businesses is sold by four kinds of company. Listings platforms such as Yext and Uberall keep business facts identical across directories.
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Local SEO tooling such as BrightLocal covers citations and tracking. Agencies including NoGood, WebFX, Siege Media and iPullRank sell AEO as a retainer, and software such as Temso tracks mentions. askotter builds and runs the website, reconciles the facts, publishes schema and reports which prompts named the business, at $99/mo self-managed or $600/mo managed.
- The four kinds
- Listings and presence platforms, local SEO tooling, agency retainers, and AI visibility software.
- Where askotter sits
- A flat monthly price that includes the site, the SEO and the AI search work.
- Not for
- Multi-location brands with hundreds of storefronts or bulk location-data syndication. Yext and Uberall are built for that.
Two numbers, from people with nothing to sell you.
Every company on this page wants you to believe AI search matters, askotter included. So here is primary research from organisations that do not sell AEO.
8% vs 15%
Google users clicked a result on 8% of visits to a page with an AI summary, against 15% without one. A tracked panel of 900 US adults across 68,879 queries. Read the study.
45%
Of US consumers used a generative AI tool for local business recommendations, third behind Google and Facebook. Survey of 1,002 US adults. Read the survey.
For most local businesses, AI answer volume is still small next to the map pack. The work overlaps almost entirely with local SEO you should be doing anyway.
Nine providers, grouped by what they are.
Grouped rather than ranked, because a listings platform and a content agency solve different halves of the problem. Claims are from each provider’s own public material.
| Attribute | What it is | Who it fits | What it does for AI answers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yext | An enterprise listings and knowledge platform. | Multi-location brands with the headcount and procurement process to run one. | Keeps location facts consistent across search engines, maps and directories. Its Scout agent reports how a brand appears across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok. |
| Uberall | A location marketing platform. | Enterprise and multi-location businesses, often international. | The same presence and listings management job as Yext, with store locators, landing pages and reputation management alongside it. |
| BrightLocal | Local SEO tooling, with some hands-on services. | Owners who will do the work, and the agencies that serve them. | Citation cleanup, review monitoring and local rank tracking. The fixing stays with you. |
| Thryv | All-in-one small business software. | Local service businesses that want the scheduling, invoicing, CRM and marketing in one subscription. | Its AI website builder produces AEO-oriented content as a feature of the suite. |
| NoGood | A growth marketing agency. | Funded startups and brands buying growth as a retainer. | Monitors and optimises for ChatGPT, AI Overviews and Perplexity as part of its growth framework. |
| WebFX | A large full-service digital agency. | Businesses that want SEO, paid media, development and analytics bought from one supplier. | AEO delivered inside a revenue-reporting model, alongside everything else the agency runs for the account. |
| Siege Media | A content marketing and design agency. | Brands whose path to citation runs through publishing better material than anyone else in their field. | Wins mentions by publishing the best answer on the web, backed by original research. |
| iPullRank | A technical SEO agency. | Complex sites where the problem is architecture and retrieval rather than copy. | Calls the practice relevance engineering: information architecture, entity clarity and retrieval. |
| Temso | AI visibility software with an execution agent. | Lean marketing teams and agencies who want tracking and drafting in one subscription. | Tracks brand visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, finds citation gaps, and drafts the content and on-page changes to close them. |
| askotter | A managed website and marketing service that takes instructions by text. | Owner-operated local businesses with one location or a few, where the owner has no time to run any of this. | Audits how the models describe the business, reconciles the facts, rewrites pages to be quotable, and reports monthly which prompts named it. Answer engine optimization. |
From each provider’s public material, September 2026. Prices are left out because they move, and the order implies no ranking.
Three names that came back from ChatGPT and did not check out.
ChatGPT gave us twelve names. RankNext and Rhemic AI could not be resolved to identifiable AEO providers in September 2026, and “AEO Agency” appears to be a category label. If an assistant hands you a shortlist, open every name on it.
Four questions that separate these.
Does it fix, or does it report?
Most of what is sold as AEO is measurement. Ask what happens after the alert, and who does it.
Who reconciles your facts?
Identical hours, address and prices everywhere is the highest-yield piece. Does your provider do it or hand you a list?
What does the report count?
A useful report names the prompts you were returned for, the ones you were not, and who took the mention.
What happens if you leave?
Ask who owns the site, the content and the listings. Some listings revert when the subscription ends.
A short honest answer about us.
askotter is built for a business where the owner is also the product, such as a dentist or a mechanic, with no marketing person. The AEO work is included in the monthly price, and the owner steers it by text.
A team that will do its own fixing is better off with Temso or BrightLocal at a fraction of the cost. askotter fits when there is nobody to do the work.
You drive the builder and ship the changes Whiskers suggests. The platform does the analysis.
| What is included | Self-managed$99/moWebsite, SEO and the platform. Compute-based after that. |
|---|---|
| Website and SEO | |
| AI web builder, unlimited edits | Included |
| Your site hosted on your own domain | Included |
| SEO: keywords, on-page, schema, rank tracking | Included |
| AI content recommendations, ready to publish | Included |
| Answer engine optimization | Included |
| askotter dashboard and change log | Included |
| Paid channels | |
| Google Ads + Meta Ads, connected and tracked | Add per channel |
| AI bidding and budget recommendations | With each channel |
| True ROAS against your real revenue | With each channel |
| How it runs | |
| Who ships each change | You |
| A person reviews every change before it ships | Not included |
| Ad accounts | Yours, you keep them |
| What moves the price | The compute you use |
| Cancel anytime | Included |
| Start free | |
The $99/mo covers your website and SEO on the platform. After that the price is compute-based. Ask Whiskers to run more analysis, or to watch more ad channels for you, and the bill scales with how much you use.
No setup fee. Ad spend is billed to you by Google and Meta.
Want a person to run it for you?
Our team builds and runs it. A person reviews every AI recommendation before it ships.
| What is included | PopularManaged SEO$600/moWe build it and run the SEO. | Managed + Ads$1,000/moEverything in Managed SEO, plus Google Ads and Meta Ads run by our team. |
|---|---|---|
| Website and SEO | ||
| We build and host your website | Included | Included |
| Monthly SEO, done for you | Included | Included |
| Content written, reviewed and published | Included | Included |
| Answer engine optimization, run for you | Included | Included |
| One site refresh per year | Included | Included |
| askotter dashboard and change log | Included | Included |
| Paid channels | ||
| Google Ads + Meta Ads management | Not included | Included |
| Monthly performance reviews | Not included | Included |
| Ad budget | Not needed | Under $10K/mo |
| How it runs | ||
| Who ships each change | Our team | Our team |
| A person reviews every change before it ships | Included | Included |
| Email marketing waterfall | Setup | Fully managed |
| Strategy calls | Not included | Monthly |
| Website is yours after six months | Included | Included |
| Get a free audit | Get a free audit | |
No setup fee. Cancel anytime. Ad spend is billed to you by Google and Meta.
Want to talk it through first? Book a 20-minute demo
Prefer to run it yourself?
Questions about AEO services for local businesses
What are answer engine optimization services?
How much do AEO services cost for a local business?
Is AEO different from local SEO?
Can a local business do AEO itself?
Do AI assistants recommend businesses based on how close they are?
Find out what the models say about you.
The baseline audit runs the prompts your customers would type and reports who gets named. Free for 14 days, no card required.
Self-managed is $99/mo and scales with the compute you use. Our team runs it from $600/mo.