What a consultant adds over a tool, how it is scoped, and when you should not hire one.
An AEO consultant decides which of your visibility problems is costing you most and fixes it. A tool returns a score; a consultant returns an ordered plan and, in this case, implements it directly rather than handing it to your developers.
There is a real distinction between the two things sold under this label. One produces a document. The other changes the site. The second is worth more and is much rarer at this end of the market.
| Automated tool | Consultant | |
|---|---|---|
| Output | A score and a list of flags | An ordered plan with the reasoning attached |
| Prioritisation | Severity labels applied generically | Ranked by what the gap costs you specifically |
| Prompt set | Generic or keyword-derived | Written against your actual buyer’s questions |
| Ambiguity | Reports the flag | Decides whether it matters for your case |
| Implementation | None | Done, or specified precisely enough to hand over |
Tools are good at the parts that are mechanical — crawler permissions, schema validity, status codes per agent. They are poor at the part that decides your outcome, which is knowing which of eleven flagged problems is the one actually costing you citations.
tapFunnel is run by Tymon Podlaszewski. The person who runs the audit is the person who implements the fixes — schema, crawler configuration, page restructuring — rather than passing a document to a developer who was not in the conversation. That is a consequence of being small, and it is the main thing you are buying at this price.
llms.txt, schema, top five pages restructured to be quotable.Searching for an AEO consultant returns three unrelated professions: Authorised Economic Operator customs consultants, structural engineering firms using the initials, and study-abroad agencies. If you are looking for someone to make your company appear inside AI-generated answers, that is this — sometimes called GEO, generative engine optimisation or AI search optimisation. The terminology, and why the distinction barely matters →
robots.txt?The fourth one is the useful question. Anyone who cannot answer it is selling regardless of fit.
Works out why AI assistants are not naming your company, decides which of the problems is costing you most, and fixes it. In practice that means crawler access per named agent, restructuring pages so there is something quotable on them, and entity work so the model can identify you as a source worth naming.
The disciplines overlap on crawlability and structure and diverge after that. SEO optimises for position in a list of links; AEO optimises for inclusion in a generated answer. Many SEO consultants are adding AEO to their offer, and the question worth asking is how many runs per prompt they measure on.
Tools are good at the mechanical checks and poor at prioritisation. They return a score and a list of flags; what changes your outcome is knowing which flagged item is the one actually costing you citations, and then implementing the fix.
Both, in that order. The free check is a report. From the Foundation Sprint onward the fixes are implemented directly rather than specified for someone else to action.
Answer Engine Optimization — making a company citable inside AI-generated answers. It has nothing to do with Authorised Economic Operator customs status, which shares the initials and dominates the same search results.