FAQ
The questions small-business owners actually ask about AI visibility and private AI — answered the same way I'd answer them on the phone. If yours isn't here, ask it directly; the answer probably ends up on this page.
A measurement of how visible your business is to AI assistants — ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity. It checks whether your site lets AI crawlers in, whether your business name, address and phone are consistent everywhere, and whether your pages answer the questions buyers actually ask. The output is a written scorecard with a prioritized fix list, not a slide deck.
Free for the first 5 small businesses each month, including the external exposure scan. If you want the fixes done for you, it's a flat $400–$600 depending on site size, quoted before any invoice. Comparable audits run $799–$1,500 at GTA agencies. Monthly upkeep, if you want it, is $150–$300.
SEO gets you a link on a search results page. AEO — answer engine optimization — gets you named inside the answer an assistant gives, with no click needed. SEO still matters, but when someone asks ChatGPT for the best IT services near them, there is no results page to rank on. AEO is what makes you the answer.
Yes, when the business is machine-readable. Assistants answer from sources they can crawl and trust: your site's text and structured data, directories, review sites. If your site blocks AI crawlers, your address appears in three different spellings, and nobody has written down what you actually do, assistants answer about your competitors instead — or say nothing about you at all.
It helps, and it's the cheapest fix on most fix lists, but it isn't the whole game. Assistants also read your website directly, and a profile with a wrong address or no description hurts as much as it helps. If you don't have one, setting one up correctly is usually a one-afternoon job I can walk you through.
Quote-based: a free 30-minute call, a written assessment, then a fixed quote. Hardware for a typical small office runs roughly C$3,500 to C$11,500 for one machine, plus one-time installation. Optional monthly care is $150–$300. Existing hardware is often enough, and I say so when it is.
Not in a private local AI setup — the model, your document index, and the chat interface all run on your own hardware. For audit work, scans are external-only and consent-first. I don't send client data to third-party AI services without written consent naming the service, and I don't train models on client files.
Based in Richmond Hill, serving Richmond Hill, Markham (Unionville, Milliken, Cornell), Vaughan, North York and the GTA in person, and remote across North America. Audit, fix, and delivery work happens remotely; private AI installations happen on-site across York Region.
A written report: a visibility scorecard across the assistants that matter, the questions buyers ask in your trade and whether you appear in the answers, an external exposure scan of your public footprint, and a prioritized fix list your web person can act on. The sample report page shows the exact deliverable.
The audit itself takes days, and most Tier 1 fixes — crawler access, structured data, consistent contact details — take effect within weeks as assistants re-crawl. Changing what assistants actually say about you is measured monthly, not overnight. Anyone promising a guaranteed top spot in ChatGPT is selling you something else.
You can win — just not on the terms you'd expect. Broad head terms like "AI consultant Toronto" are locked up by big names with ad budgets, and no small site beats them. Winnable ground is specific, local, long-tail questions: "private ai setup for a small law office in Richmond Hill" currently returns generic cloud-vendor brochures and listicles — nobody local, nobody with a stated price. A page that answers that exact question, locally, with numbers in it, is quotable by assistants and rankable by a one-person site. The audit's fix list targets questions like these for your trade, and the sample report shows the citation panel that measures it.
Both. The report is yours either way. You can have the fixes done (flat fee, quoted before any invoice), hand them to your existing web person, or do nothing. I only take fix work I can actually deliver — if the right move is a specialist electrician or a real lawyer, I say that instead.
Often yes — that's the sweet spot. One desktop-class machine serves a whole small office, and the payback is fastest when you're paying multiple per-seat AI subscriptions or you can't ethically send client data to a cloud provider. If a hosted tool genuinely fits your work, I'll tell you on the call instead of selling you hardware.