Executive Summary

Local SMBs and the agencies that serve them lack reliable, auditable metrics to prove visibility and ROI inside LLM-based discovery (AEO), which creates billing friction, weak attribution and missed investment decisions for roughly 1.6M local businesses. Decision-makers currently rely on anecdote or agency-provided dashboards with no independent verification, so SMBs and brands can’t confidently invest in AEO services. You could build a SaaS platform that continuously probes major conversational models with localized, intent-driven queries, maps responses to business listings, and produces a standardized AEO visibility score and conversion-attribution models tied to bookings or calls via integrations. The product would include reproducible audit reports for agencies, APIs for verification, and a client dashboard that translates visibility changes into estimated dollar impact. The market is timely and sizable — a $4.8B addressable market assuming $3K ACV across 1.6M SMBs — driven by rapid LLM adoption for local discovery and a wave of agencies packaging AEO without consistent metrics. Advertisers’ demand for tighter attribution and independent auditing increases willingness to pay for transparent measurement tools. Competitive differentiation will come from independent, reproducible probing methodology, standardized AEO KPIs, and agency-facing audit workflows that incumbents aren’t offering; the main challenges are keeping pace with LLM updates, potential platform limits on probing, and accurately tying LLM exposure to downstream revenue. If you can solve those technical and data-integration challenges, this idea has clear commercial legs given the unmet need and buyer willingness to pay.

Market Opportunity

Measure local business visibility inside LLMs and prove AEO ROI targets a $4.8B = 1.6M local SMBs × $3K ACV (annual spend on local search, listings, SEO and verification services averaged across market) total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 25% YoY (source: industry estimates combining local SEO growth and rising AI search adoption from reports by Forrester and Google Trends).

Key trends driving demand: LLM-first discovery — Consumers increasingly use conversational agents (ChatGPT, Gemini) for discovery, creating demand for visibility inside those models.; Agency shifts — Marketing agencies are packaging AEO services without standard metrics, creating an immediate need for independent verification tools.; Attribution tightness — Advertisers and SMBs demand direct ties between channel activity and revenue, and AI discovery introduces new attribution challenges that analytics can solve.; Knowledge graph and structured data importance — As LLMs lean on knowledge graphs and structured sources, businesses that manage canonical data have measurable advantages..

Key competitors include Yext, BrightLocal, Semrush.

Sign in to access

Measure local business visibility inside LLMs and prove AEO ROI

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

More in Marketing Tech

SEO, reviews & online-presence system for small service shops without a team

Cut agency workload with AI-led marketing automation and white‑labeling

Slow, low‑ranking content → RAG‑powered AI team that automates SEO briefs & drafts

Automate ad targeting & conversion tracking with LLM-driven workflows

Automate release-day media aggregation & reporting across 21 sources (seconds)

Turn low-performing sites into revenue engines — AI-driven monetization & personalization