What is actually being sold
Strip the packaging off and any of these services is doing some mix of three jobs. Finding out what is wrong. Deciding what to change. Making the change.
Most of what gets sold to small businesses only covers the first two, and hands you the third as homework. That is the gap to watch for while you read the four options below, because the third job is the one that takes the evening you do not have.
Option 1: do it yourself
Everything that decides whether machines can read you is public and free to check. Your robots.txt, the file listing who may crawl your site, opens in a browser. Your page titles are in your builder's settings. Google Search Console, Google's free dashboard for site owners, will tell you which of your pages it has indexed and which it has not.
The cost is a weekend of reading and a few evenings of clicking, and the ceiling is real: you will fix the obvious things and then hit a wall on the ones nobody explains in plain language, like structured data or why a page is indexed but invisible.
Worth doing if your site is small and you like this kind of thing. The trap is stopping halfway, which is where most people end up. A half-fixed site scores the same as an untouched one.
Option 2: ask a chat AI to do it
This one is better than most people in the industry will admit. Ask ChatGPT or Claude for a robots.txt, a block of structured data or a title and description for your business, and what comes back is usually correct and free.
Two things break, and they are the same two every time. A chat does not open your website. It answers from what you paste and what you remember to mention, so it cannot tell you what you already have, cannot see the page titles you are duplicating, and will happily produce a file pointing at addresses on your site that do not exist. And it does not know where any of it goes: the answer ends at a block of code, and you are the one who has to find where that goes in Wix.
So it is a good writer and a poor auditor. If you already know exactly which piece you are missing, a chat will write it for you in seconds. If you do not know what you are missing, it cannot find out for you.
Option 3: hire an agency or a freelancer
The traditional route, and the most expensive by a distance. Ahrefs polled 439 providers and put the average retainer at $2,917 a month, with 63% of quotes landing between $500 and $5,000 a month and the average hourly rate at $111.
For that you get people who will do the work, keep doing it, and adjust as things change. The catch for a small site is proportion. Much of a monthly retainer covers ongoing work, competitor tracking, reporting and content, while what a five-page site needs is often a handful of one-off fixes that stay fixed. You can end up renting a process when what you needed was an afternoon of work.
If you go this route, the questions further down are the ones that separate a real provider from a templated one.
Option 4: a scan that hands you the files
The newest category, and the one to read the fine print on, because two very different things are sold under it.
Some tools inject the fixes at runtime. You add a snippet of their code, their server writes your tags into the page as it loads, and it works. It also disappears the day you stop paying, and because it is written by JavaScript in the browser, the AI crawlers that do not run JavaScript may never see any of it.
Others generate the actual files and give them to you: a robots.txt, an llms.txt, a block of structured data, corrected titles and descriptions. You paste them into your own site once. They live in your HTML, they belong to you, and cancelling anything does not take them away.
Both are cheap next to a retainer. The difference between renting your fixes and owning them only shows up later, which is exactly why it is worth checking before you buy.
Five questions before you pay anyone
These work on an agency, a freelancer or a tool, and a straight answer to all five is rarer than it should be.
- What do I actually receive? A report is not a fix. Ask whether the deliverable is a list of problems or the corrected files, and who is expected to put them live.
- What happens if I stop paying? If the improvements vanish when the subscription does, you were renting them. Fine, as long as you knew.
- How do you measure AI visibility? If the answer is that they ask ChatGPT whether it knows your brand, be careful. A chatbot's answer changes between two people asking the same thing on the same day, so it cannot be a measurement.
- Can you show me what you found before I pay? Any honest provider can show you the diagnosis for free. Charging to be told what is wrong, and then again to fix it, is two invoices for one job.
- Is any of this a guarantee of ranking first? Nobody can promise a position on Google. An offer that does is either uninformed or hoping you are.
If you only do one thing
Do not buy anything until you know what is broken. The diagnosis is the cheap part and it changes which of the four options makes sense for you. A site blocked at the robots.txt has a ten-minute problem, not a $2,917 a month problem.
Get the list first, in language you understand. Then pick the route that matches the size of what is actually wrong.