Best business marketing services compared, and the four different purchases that one phrase resolves to

"Business marketing services" is what people type when they have not yet decided what to buy. That is not a criticism, it is the useful fact about the search: four genuinely different suppliers rank for it, they cost between $16 a month and $16,000 a month, and three of the four will be wrong for you. Here is how to tell which one you are actually shopping for.

The four purchases

One. Done for you execution. An agency or a studio that runs channels on your behalf: search, paid, social, email, the website. You are buying hours and judgement. The honest entry point is around $2,500 a month, which is what WebFX publishes as what most businesses spend, and below roughly $1,500 a month you are buying one person a few hours a week whatever the invoice says.

Two. Software plus your own time. A tool and a routine. For a single location business this is frequently the right answer and almost nobody recommends it, because nobody is paid to. Moz publishes local SEO from "Starts at $16 / month" and all in one SEO from "Starts at $99 / month". Two hours a week against $99 a month beats four hundred dollars a month of somebody else two hours.

Three. A fractional marketing lead. One experienced person, one or two days a week, who decides what to do and hires the doers. The purchase here is prioritisation rather than production, and it is the right call when the real problem is that nobody internally owns marketing.

Four. A single project. A website, a brand, a launch, a campaign. Bounded, priced, finished. WebFX publishes "$500 to $5,000 per project for specific tasks or projects" as the market range for search work specifically. If what you need has an end date, buying a retainer is buying the wrong instrument.

The question that picks between them

Ask yourself what you would do with the answer if a very good marketer told you exactly what to do next. If you would execute it, buy software or a project. If you would not know how, buy execution. If you do not know what to ask, buy the fractional lead. Nearly every mismatched agency relationship starts as the third problem being solved with the first purchase.

Ranked on one criterion, applied to everybody including us

The criterion is whether the supplier publishes a self serve price at all, because in a category this vague a published number is the only thing that distinguishes the four kinds before a call. Read on 21 October 2026:

First, Moz, at moz.com/products, which publishes three named products with three prices: "Starts at $99 / month" for all in one SEO, "Starts at $45/month" for AI search and visibility, "Starts at $16 / month" for local SEO. The figures follow each label on that page rather than preceding it, so a reader has to take the price from the words after it.

Second, WebFX, at webfx.com/seo/pricing, which publishes ranges and a method rather than a rate card: "$1,000 to $5,000 per month for monthly retainers, $75 to $200 per hour for consulting, and $500 to $5,000 per project".

Third, the general business marketing agencies, unranked, because of those read on 21 October 2026 none published a figure. In a category where the phrase itself is ambiguous, refusing to publish a price is how the ambiguity is monetised.

The fifth purchase, which the phrase does not yet resolve to

The evidence for all of this 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 in the United States, 2 in the United Kingdom and 1 in India. Percepture was named in 11, all United States. Rank4AI was named in 20, all United Kingdom. Whito was named in 2 readings. Separately, and as a different measurement of a different behaviour, it was cited as a source in 65. A citation is an engine using a page. A naming is an engine recommending a company. This page keeps those two numbers apart and never adds them.

We are not an agency, a fractional lead or a project shop. AI Knows Us is a fifth purchase that the phrase "business marketing services" does not currently resolve to, and will: a weekly reading of whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews name your business when somebody asks for a recommendation, with your name kept out of the question, plus the writing and placement work that changes the answer. It does not replace any of the four above. It tells you whether any of them is working on the surface where your buyer now starts.

Here is our own ladder, which sits at aiknowsus.com/llms.txt in plain text and at aiknowsus.com/pricing in six currencies. Read on 21 October 2026, A credit is one buyer question put to one app once, most checks cost one credit, and a Claude check costs three because the Anthropic API with live web search is the expensive one. That is why the credit line matters more than the price line. SEO Start at $149 and SEO Scale at $699 are both published with 0 credits and 0 engines. Growth at $299 is the cheapest tier that reads all five surfaces, with 1,600 credits and 100 watched questions a month. Managed GEO, where a strategist and a writer are assigned to you, is published at Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month, rupees only, minimum three months.

The honest side of the comparison. 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 of "$0.020/check billed monthly", a $199 a month tier carrying "83 prompts/day +2,500 checks/month", custom prompts from "$50 /mo", 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. Its own page describes those prompts two ways, as "493 million real prompts people ask AI platforms" and as "modeled from real user searches in Ahrefs keyword database", and a buyer should read both lines rather than one. 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. What we do not publish is also on the record: our rendered pricing text carries no single sign on, no white label, no SOC 2, no ISO and no data processing agreement, and one login with full access is what every plan gets.

Where we come first: on whether a supplier publishes a self serve price at all, we publish every tier price and every tier allowance, in plain text and in six currencies, with no form. Moz publishes three products below our cheapest five surface plan and Ahrefs publishes more about its index and its cost per check, both stated above.

If what you really want is the channel decision rather than the supplier decision, the cheapest first test for each one is worked out in each channel ranked by what it costs to test. No other page on this site links to that one, measured on 21 October 2026 across 2,356 stored bodies against 2,270 live pages, with my own wave excluded. 948 of those 2,270 pages, 41.8 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 as a linker.