Pricing
How much does a small-business website cost?
In 2026, a professionally built small-business website typically costs $1,500–$8,000 from an
independent studio, with most strategy-led builds landing between $4,000 and $6,000. DIY site builders run
$200–$600 a year; larger agencies charge $6,000–$35,000 and up.
Why the huge range? Three things move the number. Strategy: a template shop skips
discovery and structure — you're paying for pixels. A strategy-led build starts with your customers and how
they decide, which is what makes a site produce enquiries instead of just existing. Scope:
page count, e-commerce, booking, and multiple languages all add real work. Build quality: a
static, structurally clean site is lighter, faster, and easier for a search engine or an AI tool to parse —
deliberate engineering that cheap builds skip.
Ongoing costs matter too: hosting (free on modern static builds), a domain (~$15/year), and — the piece
most owners discover late — ongoing upkeep, which runs anywhere from $150 to $1,500/month
across the industry depending on what is actually included. My own pricing is public: see the
pricing page — builds from $1,500, with our recommended Growth package at
$4,000–$6,000, and care plans at $400–500/month.
Updated September 2026
AI visibility
How do I show up in ChatGPT and AI search?
AI tools cite pages that answer questions directly: clear question-based headings, a complete
answer in the first paragraph, specific facts and quotes, and a site that AI crawlers can technically read.
Ranking on Google helps — but it's no longer enough on its own.
Here's the shift: when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity "best hospice in Anaheim" or "affordable web
designer near me," the AI writes one answer and names a handful of sources. Being on Google's first page and
being named in that answer are related, but they are not the same thing — they're different games
with different rules.
What appears to earn citations: answer-first writing (the first 200 words answer the
question — AI lifts clean, complete passages); question-based headings that match how people
really ask; specifics over slogans — a quotable, checkable statement is something an engine
can lift, and a slogan isn't; technical readability — many sites accidentally block AI
crawlers or hide content behind scripts; and consistency, because an engine describing your
business is assembling it from whatever it finds. When I ran this check on my own site, two of three engines
quoted a description of this studio I had retired weeks earlier, and could not find a phone number published
twelve times on the same site.
One honest caveat, and it's the important one. Everything above is technique on your own
pages, and in healthcare that is not what decides it —
see the next answer.
Updated September 2026
Healthcare
Why do the same few websites always get cited?
Because in healthcare the door is far narrower than the general advice suggests — and knowing
that should change what you spend money on.
A study of 1,200 prompts across four AI engines (Attrifast, 2026 — third-party research, not
mine) found healthcare the most concentrated category it measured. The top ten domains took
71.2% of healthcare citation slots, against 28.4% in software. Six domains take most of
them: nih.gov, mayoclinic.org, cdc.gov, webmd.com,
healthline.com and Cleveland Clinic. The study calls it a "citation oligopoly" and
attributes it to deliberate health-content guardrails on medical topics.
What that means for a single agency: you are not competing for the whole answer. You are
competing for what is left after the CDC and the Mayo Clinic — and no amount of on-page technique changes
that ratio. Anyone selling you "AI visibility" for a hospice is selling into that wall.
What I have tested myself is smaller, and more useful. Across eighteen runs — six questions, three engines
— Gemini described what it looks for as a "known entity consistently referenced across the web." And
in an earlier check, a hospice was cited second by both engines while holding twelve Google reviews, and
sixty-five on a different review platform. What appeared to earn the citation was presence across
several independent sources, not the count on any one of them.
The limit of that, stated plainly: five businesses, on one day. I am not going to tell
you a number of reviews to reach, because I don't know one — and neither does anyone selling you one. What it
does suggest is that the work that matters is corroboration — being consistently
present across independent sources — rather than anything you can edit on your own homepage.
Which is why I don't sell a ranking plan.
Updated September 2026
Plain English
SEO vs AEO vs GEO — what's the difference?
SEO gets you ranked in Google's list of links. AEO gets you picked as the direct answer — the
box at the top, the voice-assistant reply. GEO gets your business cited when an AI tool like ChatGPT or
Gemini writes an answer. Three acronyms, one goal: being the answer your customer finds first.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the established game: earning a spot in the top ten
blue links through relevant content, good structure, speed, and credibility. It still matters — a page that
ranks well is more likely to be cited everywhere else — but it's the foundation now, not the finish line.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) targets the direct answer: featured snippets, "people
also ask," voice replies. You win it by answering real questions completely and concisely, right at the top
of the page. In practice AEO has largely merged into GEO — the techniques overlap.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the new game: when AI writes an answer, it names
two to seven sources. GEO is the craft of being one of them — through answer-first content, verifiable
specifics, consistent business information across the web, and a site AI can actually read. The door is
narrower than ten blue links — and in healthcare it is narrower again, for reasons that have nothing to do
with your website. See the healthcare answer above.
A useful way to hold it: SEO gets you listed, AEO gets you featured, GEO gets you quoted.
A modern small-business site should be built well for all three at once — that's how I build every site.
I don't sell any of the three as a service, and this page is here to explain the words, not
to price them.
Updated September 2026
