AEO Services for Local Businesses: What You Should Actually Get

1. The deliverable list

Real AEO services for a local business produce these artifacts. If a proposal cannot be mapped onto this list, ask why.

• —Page inventory and plan. How many pages, which services, which cities, and what each page is supposed to answer.
• —Answer-first rewrites. Every service and city page opens with what it is, what it costs, how long it takes and where you do it.
• —Published facts. Price ranges, response times, service area lists, credentials — in text on the page, not in images or gated behind a form.
• —FAQ inventory. The real questions your customers ask, answered in two or three sentences, placed on the page they belong to, marked up as FAQ schema.
• —Structured data. LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage and Breadcrumb schema implemented and validated.
• —Technical hygiene. Fast pages, crawlable HTML, clean internal links, working sitemap, no content hidden behind scripts.
• —Entity consistency. Name, address, phone, hours, categories and service area reconciled between your site, Google Business Profile and major directories.
• —Citation baseline. Your ten to twenty key questions run through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, with results recorded so there is something to compare against later.

2. What it should not include

Three things show up constantly and add nothing.

• —A proprietary AI visibility score with no disclosed method. It is an estimate presented as a fact, and it exists to justify the next invoice.
• —Recurring calls to review a report. If the report needs a call to be understood, the report is the problem.
• —Twelve thin blog posts a month. Volume without specificity does not get cited. One genuinely useful post beats six generic ones.

3. What it should cost

Most of this list is one-time work that scales with page count, not a permanent monthly service. Pricing should reflect that.

• —The structure and schema: part of building the site, not an add-on. Our builds start at $300 for the five-page core.
• —Additional pages: priced per page. Ours are $50 each, whether you add them at checkout or later.
• —Hosting and upkeep: a flat monthly fee. Ours is $50 a month.
• —Content volume, if you want it: a defined batch. Our blog pack is $500 for 30 SEO-rich drafts written around your services and cities.
• —Ongoing AEO "management": mostly unnecessary once the structure is done. What remains is an hour a month you can do yourself.

If a quote for the same deliverables comes in at $1,500 a month on a twelve-month term, that is $18,000 for work that is largely front-loaded. Run it through the savings calculator and look at the two numbers side by side.

4. Terms worth insisting on

The terms decide your risk more than the acronym does.

• —Written scope with page counts and schema types. Not "ongoing optimization."
• —Cancellation by email with a short notice period. No phone-call-only process.
• —Ownership of your site, content and analytics, exportable, with no ransom attached.
• —No mandatory sales call to get pricing. If the price requires a call, the call is a sales process.
• —A money-back window. Ours is 30 days, no questions.

We wrote our terms around these because they are the complaints we hear most from businesses leaving agencies. Cancel by email, keep your site, 30 days money back, nobody calls you.

5. What the first 30 days should look like

A realistic sequence, whoever is doing the work.

• —Week 1: page plan agreed, question inventory collected, citation baseline recorded.
• —Week 2: core pages built or rewritten answer-first, facts and ranges published.
• —Week 3: service and city pages built out, FAQ blocks added and marked up, schema validated.
• —Week 4: technical pass — speed, sitemap, internal links, business details reconciled everywhere. Launch.

Then results take time. Indexing takes days to weeks, and being cited in AI answers follows indexing plus reputation. Anyone promising AI citations in a fortnight is guessing.

6. Where to start if you are not ready to buy anything

Two free steps that cost you nothing and make any later quote easier to judge.

• —Run the free audit. It checks the technical and structural signals answer engines read, and gives you a written picture of where your site stands.
• —Run the page planner. It crawls your site, identifies your services and buyers, and tells you how many pages your business actually needs — which is the single number every quote depends on.

Walk into any vendor conversation with those two outputs and you will know within five minutes whether they are describing work or describing a subscription.