Before a DIY AEO Plan, Name Who Does the Work

It is the first Monday of the month and the audit lands in your inbox. It says your most important service pages carry no FAQPage markup, that the Organization schema on your homepage still lists a phone number you retired, and that when the AI assistants were asked who does your kind of work in your city, a competitor was named and you were not. The strategist's note at the bottom says which page to fix first and why. It is clear, specific and correct. Then the question nobody asked at checkout arrives: who is going to open the website and make the changes?

That question decides whether a do-it-yourself AI search plan is worth the money, and I say this as the person selling one. AEO Starter costs $249 a month, and its page is blunt about what you get: a monthly audit across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, a live citation dashboard, a schema audit of your top 25 pages, the NetWebMedia CRM for three users and 5,000 contacts, and a one-page strategy note each month from a human strategist. What it does not include is anyone from our side editing your site. The plan hands you a playbook. The planting is yours.

What the audit will actually ask you to change

It helps to know the shape of the work before you sign up for it. The schema audit on AEO Starter checks four things on your most important pages, and every one of them ends in an edit.

• JSON-LD validation. Structured data that is broken, out of date or contradicts what the page says. Fixing it means editing a block of code in the page head, or the SEO settings in your CMS.
• Missing entities. The services, places and people a page talks about without naming them in a way a machine can read. Fixing it means rewriting some copy and adding markup.
• FAQPage coverage. Pages that answer real customer questions without marking them up as questions and answers. Fixing it means writing the questions properly, then adding the markup.
• Organization graph completeness. Your business name, address, phone, logo and profiles, described consistently in one place. Fixing it means one careful edit, then keeping it true.

None of this is exotic. A developer who has done it before can work through most findings quickly, and plenty of owners learn to do it themselves. What matters is that each finding touches your website. A finding that sits untouched for a month becomes a monthly reminder of work you are paying to be told about.

Four kinds of team, and which of them should buy it

Whether a plan like this pays off comes down to who holds the keys to the site. Most small businesses are in one of four situations.

You have a developer, in-house or on call

This is the buyer the plan was built for. The audit becomes a ticket list, the strategist's note says which ticket matters most, and the dashboard shows the following month whether AI assistants started naming you. If your developer bills by the hour, ask them to quote one month of audit fixes before you start, so the real monthly cost is on paper.

The owner is comfortable inside the CMS

Also a good fit, with one condition. The page describes this exact person under who the plan is for: a tech-savvy owner who can implement schema and content changes. The owners who get value from it put a recurring block on the calendar for the week the note arrives, the same way they would for payroll. The ones who plan to get to it when things calm down usually find that things do not calm down.

A web agency built the site and still maintains it

Read your maintenance contract before you buy anything. Many cover hosting and security updates but not content or markup changes, and small edits billed one at a time add up fast. If the agency will make the changes at a fixed monthly cost, you are in the first group. If every change needs its own quote, you are closer to the fourth.

Nobody

Then do not buy a do-it-yourself plan, from me or from anyone else. The AEO Starter page lists this under wrong fit in plain words: no internal capacity to implement recommendations. An audit you cannot act on is information without leverage. The honest options are to find the hands first, or to buy the version where someone else does the work, which on our ladder is CMO Growth at $999 a month plus a $499 setup fee.

A test to run before the free trial starts

You can find out which group you are in this afternoon without buying anything. Open your homepage in a browser, view the page source and search for application/ld+json. Then try to change one thing inside that block, the phone number or the opening hours, and publish the change.

1. If you found the block and changed it within the hour, you are the buyer. Start the trial.
2. If you found it but could not work out where it lives in your CMS, find that out now, while nothing is at stake.
3. If you could not find it at all, write down who you would call. That person is the real subscriber, and their hourly rate belongs in your budget.
4. If there was nobody to call, go back to the fourth group above.

If the markup itself is unfamiliar, the line-by-line JSON-LD walkthrough for small sites covers the basics, and schema markup in plain English explains why it matters to AI assistants in the first place.

What you are paying for when you do the work yourself

Assume you have the hands. What the monthly fee buys is the diagnosis and the order of operations, which is the part most teams get wrong on their own. Without an audit, people fix whatever they read about last. With one, the note says which pages to touch this month and why, and the dashboard says next month whether anything moved.

Two details on the plan page matter here. There are no live calls; the strategy arrives as a written note, which suits people who act on writing and frustrates people who like to think out loud. And there is a 90-day minimum on the monthly subscription once the free trial ends, after which it runs month to month. The real commitment is one quarter of doing the work, so make sure the person doing it has a quarter to give.

The one thing I would not do

I would not buy the plan hoping the audit will shame someone into action. It will not. The dashboard does not change until the site does, and the site does not change until a named person owns the edits. If that person exists, AEO Starter is an inexpensive way to hand them a map. If they do not, the first thing to buy is their time.

There is one safety valve if you start on your own and later want help. The AEO Starter page states that if you upgrade to CMO Growth or CMO Premium within your first 90 days, every dollar you paid on Starter applies as credit to the new plan's setup fee. So the cheapest way to find out which group you are in is to run the view-source test today, then write the name of the person who will make the edits at the top of your first audit.

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