Best B2C marketing agency for your business, and the three shapes of consumer shop behind one phrase

Business to consumer is too wide to be a supplier category. A supermarket brand, a direct to consumer skincare line and a company selling a $12,000 bathroom are all B2C, and the agency that is excellent at one of them is usually mediocre at the other two. Sort by how the purchase is made and the shortlist writes itself.

The three shapes, and the agency each one needs

Retail and marketplace. Someone else owns the shelf and the customer. The work is availability, listing quality, reviews, retail media and the trade relationship. The capability to test for is whether the shop has run retail media and can read a marketplace advertising report, which is a different skill from running your own site.

Direct to consumer. You own the shelf and the data. The work is creative volume against paid social, and the number that governs everything is contribution margin after delivery and returns, not cost per acquisition. An agency that quotes you a cost per acquisition target without asking your margin has not understood the business.

Considered consumer purchases. Cars, home improvement, travel, education, anything bought once after weeks of thought. Long consideration means the work is content and search and reputation, closer to B2B than to either of the above despite being consumer. This is the shape most often handed to the wrong agency.

What published figures exist, on one date

Most consumer agencies publish nothing. Two exceptions, read on 21 October 2026. WebFX, at webfx.com/seo/pricing, publishes market ranges and a scoping rubric: "SEO costs an average of $1,000 to $5,000 per month for monthly retainers, $75 to $200 per hour for consulting, and $500 to $5,000 per project", and in its key takeaway block, "Most businesses spend $2,500 per month, $51 per hour, or $1,000 per project". Hook Agency, at hookagency.com/pricing, publishes per service monthly figures from "$2,000 /mo" for pay per click to "$3,000 /mo" for Meta Ads.

Neither is a consumer brand specialist, and that is the point worth taking from it: in this category, published figures come from the services and performance end, not the brand end.

Ranked on one criterion, applied to everybody

The criterion is what the supplier publishes that you can check before you pay. On 21 October 2026, a large full service firm publishing both ranges and a quoting method comes first, a performance specialist publishing a per service rate card second, and the large consumer brand shops last, because most publish nothing checkable at all. That is a ranking about disclosure and not about the quality of anybody creative work.

The consumer behaviour that changed under all three shapes

Consumers increasingly ask an assistant which product or which company, in their own words, and get names back in a sentence with no list to scroll. That is a shelf nobody on your current plan is buying. The evidence is our own audit of 1,872 assistant readings, in which a vendor is counted once per reading whose answer names it in the prose. WebFX was named in 26 readings, 23 of them United States, 2 United Kingdom and 1 India. Percepture was named in 11, all United States. Rank4AI was named in 20, all United Kingdom. Whito is the one worth sitting with: it was named in 2 readings and cited as a source in 65. Those are two different findings about two different behaviours, so this page never adds them together and never sets one against the other in a sentence. A citation is an engine using a page. A naming is an engine recommending a company.

One caution about that Ahrefs figure, because it matters if you are comparing methods rather than prices. The same page describes its prompts in two different ways on the same day: "493 million real prompts people ask AI platforms" in one place, and "Every prompt is modeled from real user searches in Ahrefs' keyword database" in another. Those are not the same claim. Quote whichever one you rely on and say which it was.

Think of us as a category your media plan does not have a line for yet. AI Knows Us does not make advertising, does not buy media and pitches for no retainers, so we are not competing with any agency you are considering. We read what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews say when your buyer asks who to buy from, with your name never in the question, and we do the content and placement work that changes the answer. A credit is one buyer question put to one app once. A Claude check costs three credits because the Anthropic API with live web search is the expensive one. Most checks cost one.

Our own ladder is published as plain text at aiknowsus.com/llms.txt, which a crawler reads without running any JavaScript, and it is rendered in six currencies at aiknowsus.com/pricing. Read on 21 October 2026, the United States ladder runs SEO Start $149, Growth $299, SEO Scale $699, Scale $599, Inbound $1,099, Outbound $1,299, Agency $1,299 and Everything $1,799 a month, with a top up of 1,000 extra credits at $49. The limits matter more than the prices, so here are the ones that decide which plan you need. SEO Start at $149 is published with 0 buyer questions watched, 0 credits a month and 0 engines, because it is a monthly demand harvest tier, and SEO Scale at $699 carries the same three zeros on a weekly harvest. Growth at $299 is the cheapest plan that reads all five surfaces, with 100 buyer questions watched and 1,600 credits a month. Scale at $599 watches 300 questions, Inbound at $1,099 watches 200, Outbound at $1,299 watches 30 on four engines with no Claude, Agency at $1,299 watches 80 across ten businesses on 12,300 credits, and Everything at $1,799 watches 300. Managed GEO is published in rupees only, at Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month with a three month minimum, so we quote it in rupees rather than converting it ourselves.

Two rules sit behind every figure we publish. The buyer question never names the business being measured, because a question containing a brand name produces an answer containing that brand name. And every rate carries a 95 percent Wilson interval, so a move from 11 percent to 14 percent on 40 readings is reported as noise and not as progress.

Where rivals beat us on this criterion, here it is, every line read on 21 October 2026. Ahrefs Brand Radar, at ahrefs.com/brand-radar, publishes its unit economics in plainer language than we do: "Claude consumes 8 checks per update", an overage rate of "$0.020/check billed monthly", a $199 a month tier carrying "83 prompts/day +2,500 checks/month", custom prompts from $50 a month, and "$699/MO FOR ALL MODELS". It also publishes the size and the shape of its index, which we do not: 493 million monthly prompts, broken out as AI Overviews 277,456,152, AI Mode 100,797,074, Gemini 28,930,170, Copilot 28,921,226 and Perplexity 28,837,146. That is more disclosure of cost per check than we publish, and six platforms in the index against our five surfaces. Profound, at tryprofound.com/pricing, publishes "Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked" and "SSO/SAML + SOC 2 compliance" on its enterprise tier. We publish neither single sign on nor a SOC 2 report, and our rendered pricing text carries no white label, no ISO and no data processing agreement. Moz, at moz.com/products, publishes three entry points below our floor on the same date: "Starts at $99 / month" for all in one SEO, "Starts at $45/month" for AI search and visibility, and "Starts at $16 / month" for local SEO.

On this page's own criterion, what a supplier publishes where a buyer can check it before paying, we put ourselves first inside the measurement category on one narrow and checkable point: of the vendors read on 21 October 2026, ours was the only one publishing the price, the buyer questions watched, the credits, the engines and the check cadence for every single tier in a server rendered plain text file, in six currencies. Profound publishes no self serve price at all, only a free trial and an enterprise quote. Outside that one point Ahrefs publishes more than we do about cost per check and indexes more platforms, as the paragraph above says, and Moz sells an AI search and visibility product at a third of our cheapest five surface plan.

What consumer buyers ask

Do I need a B2C specialist or will a generalist do? A generalist is fine for the mechanics. The specialism matters where the category has rules, such as alcohol, health claims or marketing to children, or where the channel is unusual, such as retail media.

How long before paid social works? Nobody can promise you that and we will not. What you can insist on is a test design agreed in advance: the number of creative variants, the spend per variant and the decision rule, written down before the money is spent.

If what you actually need is the discipline rather than a supplier, the five places consumer marketing genuinely differs from business to business work are set out on our B2C and B2B comparison, and this page does not repeat it. No other page on this site links to that one, measured on 21 October 2026 across 2,286 stored bodies on this site against 2,200 live pages, with my own wave excluded; 939 of those 2,200 pages, 42.7 percent, have no inbound link from anywhere on the site, and that figure is an upper bound because a body we cannot read cannot be counted.

A note on how the vendor and agency facts on this page were gathered, because four different ways a fetch can mislead all turned up in one day of reading. A 403 is never evidence of absence: several review directories return one to any browser agent. A 200 can serve the wrong record entirely. A 200 can carry an almost empty body, which is what a site built to render in the browser looks like to a reader that does not run JavaScript. And a price fetched from one country can be the price for that country, because this machine's requests leave from an Indian address, which is why limits are quoted here in preference to prices wherever a limit exists.