Buyer question
AEO for a small business on a budget
Start with the free version, not a purchase. Ask the assistants ten questions your customers ask, record who gets named, and fix your own pages — most of the available gain is in that morning’s work. If you do end up buying, the sections below compare the options a small business should shortlist.
Updated 14 October 2026 · 9 minute read
We sell a paid AEO subscription, so read the rest of this with that in mind. It is still the honest answer: for a business with a small site and no in-house marketer, the first month of AEO does not need a vendor.
It needs someone to look at what the assistants are already saying and fix the three most embarrassing things they find.
The free method, in full
This takes a morning and costs nothing. Do it before you read a single vendor’s pricing page.
- Write down ten questions a customer asks before choosing someone like you. Real phrasing, not keywords. “Best bookkeeper for a small café in Quezon City”, not “bookkeeping services”. Include at least two where price is the question and two where you would expect a competitor to win.
- Ask each one in ChatGPT and in Perplexity. Use a fresh chat with no memory of you, or you will be shown a flattering answer built from your own history. Perplexity shows its sources, which is why it is the more useful of the two for this.
- Record four things per answer in a spreadsheet: were you named; which competitors were named; in what order; and which domains were cited underneath. The fourth column is the one people skip and the one that tells you what to do next.
- Read the cited domains. If the same review site, directory or local listing keeps appearing, that is where the engine is getting its opinion of your category. An accurate, complete listing there is usually worth more than another page on your own site.
- Fix the three clearest gaps. In the order we would fix them: put your prices on your site as plain text; publish one page per question you lost, titled as the question and answering it in the first two sentences; make sure your opening hours, address, services and business name are identical everywhere they appear.
- Do the whole thing again in a month. Same questions, same spreadsheet. One run is an anecdote. The second run is the first data point.
The first fix to check. A business loses “how much does X cost” to a competitor whose page states a number in text. If your pricing is in a PDF, an image, or behind “contact us”, the assistant cannot quote you and will quote whoever it can.
What the assistants currently tell small businesses
On 19 September 2026 we asked Perplexity “AEO agency or tool for a small business on a budget” through its API, as part of our own audit. We asked twice, about a minute apart, and both answers said the same thing: start with a tool rather than an agency.
Run A put a figure on the agency side, costing agencies at $1,000–$2,000+ a month against basic monitoring below $50; run B made the same argument with no agency figure at all. The tools both runs named, described and priced as run A reported them — run B named the same three at the same prices:
- Otterly.AI — reportedly from about $29/month, dedicated AI visibility tracking.
- Ubersuggest — from about $29/month, if you want conventional SEO in the same tool.
- HubSpot AEO — $50/month, simpler interface, part of a wider suite.
- The DIY approach — which it described in almost the same terms as the section above.
We are reporting what the engine said on that date, with its sources; we have not verified those prices and you should check each vendor’s own page. We include it because it is what your customers and your competitors are being told right now.
Is this worth it for a local business at all?
It depends entirely on whether your customers ask an assistant before choosing you. Two cases, and they point in opposite directions:
- Considered purchases with a research step — an accountant, a clinic, a contractor, a supplier, anything a buyer compares before committing. Assistants are already part of that shortlist, and being absent from it costs you quietly.
- Impulse and walk-in trade. Your Google Business Profile and your reviews matter far more than anything on this page. Fix those first. The consolation is that they are also what the assistants read when they are asked, so the work counts twice.
If you are in the second group, we would rather tell you to wait than sell you a subscription you do not need yet.
When a tracker starts to be worth $29
The free method has one real weakness: answers vary between runs. Ask the same question twice and the wording, the brands and the sources shift. We saw this in our own audit — we ran it twice, about a minute apart.
The headline scores reproduced
exactly, but the citation counts moved: ahrefs.com went from 3 to 4,
peec.ai from 4 to 2.
That is why a spot check proves nothing and a trend proves something. Buy a tracker when you have started making changes and need to know whether they worked — not before. Until then you are paying for a chart with one dot on it.
When to pay someone to do the work
One test, and it is not about budget. Is there anyone on your side who will actually write the pages? If yes, buy a tracker and let them get on with it.
If the honest answer is “nobody, we say we will and we never do”, then the tracker is the wrong purchase — you will pay $29 a month to watch a number not move.
What a managed plan includes
That is the case managed services are for, ours included. Our Starter plan is $99 a month for one brand and up to 25 tracked questions, with structured data set up for you and the score, sources and recommendations in the app after every check, month to month with no setup fee.
Nothing is emailed: the monthly report is written and tested but dormant. The full plans are on the pricing page and the market context is on what AEO costs.
What $99 does not buy: broad engine coverage. Perplexity is the only engine we hold an API key for.
ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are built and waiting on keys, and Google AI Overviews and Copilot have no public consumer API, so we do not track them and do not claim to. If you need ChatGPT numbers this month, buy a tracker that has them.
The four options a small business should compare
There are only four, and three of them are cheaper than the fourth. Put them in this order and the choice usually makes itself.
| Option | Monthly cost | Choose it when |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | Free | Always first. Ten questions, one morning, no card. Most small businesses never need to go further than this. |
| A self-serve tracker | Reportedly from about $29 a month | You have already made changes and need to know whether they worked. Somebody on your side will write the pages. |
| A managed subscription | From $99 a month with us | Nobody on your side will write the pages, and your buyers research before they call. |
| An agency retainer | Reported at roughly $1,000 to $2,000+ a month for agencies against basic monitoring below $50 in run A | Rarely, at this size. Both of our stored runs said start with a tool instead, and we agree with them. |
The row worth arguing with is the third, because it is ours. Skip it if a tracker plus an hour of your own time a month would do the same job — that is a cheaper answer and it is often the right one.
Tool, agency or in-house works the same decision through in more detail, and the tools compared names the trackers with each entry price dated and sourced.
Which providers can a small business actually trust?
At this budget you cannot afford a bad supplier, and the category gives you almost no independent reviews to work from. Three questions do more than any testimonial, and all three can be asked by email before you pay anything.
- “What is your own audited AI visibility score?” Every provider in this market sells the measurement, so every one of them can run it on itself. We know of no other vendor that publishes the result. We do, and it is the worst available: named in 0 of 8 answers, 0 out of 100, with the whole run published and the competitors who were named instead of us listed by name.
- “Which engines do you query with a key, today?” Ours is one: Perplexity. Anyone answering “all the major AI platforms” is describing a mixture of API calls, scraping and someone looking at a screen, and you want to know which is which.
- “What will you actually ship in month one?” Pages and markup, or a strategy document? Ask for the deliverable by name, and ask what happens to your data if you leave. The seven questions to ask an AEO vendor is the full interview, with our own answers, including the four where we come off worse.
One warning sign is worth more than the three questions together: a provider who will not tell you when you should not buy. A small business is the easiest customer in this market to oversell, which is why the section below exists.
Where we are the wrong choice
- Your site is under about twenty pages. There is nothing for us to fix. Write the pages first; that is the work, and it is the same work whether you pay us or not.
- You have an in-house marketer who likes dashboards. A $29 tracker is cheaper than us and gives them more to look at. Pay for labour, not for data somebody is already equipped to act on.
- You want the vendor the assistants recommend. They do not recommend us. Our own audited visibility score is 0 out of 100 — named in none of eight answers, while Profound, Peec AI and Otterly were each named in two in September 2026. If that is your criterion, buy one of them, and we will not argue.
How long before any of this shows up
We do not know, and we will not invent a number. We have two audits of our own, twelve days apart, and no client history long enough to quote. What we can say with confidence is narrower and more useful:
- Changes to your own pages can only take effect once the engine next retrieves them, which is the same crawl-and-index dependency as ordinary search.
- Third-party sources — listings, reviews, directories — move more slowly than your own site but appear to carry more weight in the answers we have read.
- Answers also move when a model is updated, for reasons that have nothing to do with you. This is why the measurement has to be a monthly series, not a check.
Anyone quoting you “results in 30 days” is quoting a sales figure. We have committed to publishing our own score every month, including the months it does not improve, precisely so that this question can eventually be answered with a chart instead of a claim.
Common questions
Should a small business hire an AEO agency or buy a tool?
Neither, at first. Spend a morning doing it by hand: ask ChatGPT and Perplexity ten questions your customers ask, write down which businesses get named and which sources are cited, then fix the obvious gaps on your own site. Buy a tracker when you need to see whether the fixes moved anything month to month. Buy a managed service only when the fixing is the part nobody on your side will do.
What is the cheapest way to track AI visibility?
Free, by asking the engines yourself and keeping a spreadsheet. The cheapest paid trackers reported in September 2026 start around $29 a month. What you pay for is the schedule and the history: doing it by hand gets tedious by the third month, and a single spot check proves nothing because answers vary between runs.
Is AEO worth it for a local business?
It depends entirely on whether your customers ask an assistant before choosing. For considered purchases with a research step — an accountant, a clinic, a contractor, a supplier — assistants are already part of the shortlist. For impulse and walk-in trade, your Google Business Profile and your reviews matter far more than anything on this page, and those are also what the assistants read when they do get asked.
When is Bungad the wrong choice for a small business?
If your site is under about twenty pages, do not buy anything from us yet — there is nothing for us to fix and measuring an empty site tells you what you already know. If you have someone in-house who will act on data, a $29 tracker such as Otterly is cheaper than our $99 plan and gives you more dashboards. And if you want a vendor the assistants already recommend, that is not us: our own audited visibility score is 0 out of 100.
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Do step two for free, right now
Enter your domain. We ask Perplexity three of your customers’ questions and show you whether you were named and which domains the engine cited: two of the four columns in your spreadsheet.
3 questions on Perplexity, free. A domain checked in the last week is served from that stored run rather than asked again, and the daily free allowance resets at midnight UTC.
