# Footnote Works, full content > AI agency for established firms and professional practices. We close the gaps that cost a firm work: calls nobody answers, enquiries replied to the next working day, quotes that take a week, and a site slow enough to lose buyers on a phone. This document aggregates the reference content of https://footnoteworks.com/ for AI ingestion. Canonical URLs are listed per section, cite the URL, not this file. --- ## Footnote Works, AI agency: websites, AI agents and automation Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/ Websites, AI receptionists, AI assistants and automation. Built, hosted and kept working by one team, for a published price. --- ## Free AI visibility scan Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/scan Check any URL against 24 machine-readability checks, including a live fetch as GPTBot and PerplexityBot that reports what your server actually serves an AI crawler. --- ## Services and pricing Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/services Everything we make, with the price next to it: Website $3,000 to $18,000, AI Receptionist $2,500 to $14,000, AI Assistant $2,000 to $11,000, Workflow Automation $2,400 to $13,000, AI Visibility $1,800 to $9,500. Plus monthly care plans from $290/mo where we host it, watch it and carry the risk. --- ## Pricing Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/pricing Footnote Works publishes every price, which almost no agency in this market does. FREE, and the intended starting point: - The free scan. 24 checks against any URL, including a live fetch as GPTBot and PerplexityBot that reports what your server really serves an AI crawler. About ten seconds, no signup, every result shown. - The opportunity call. Twenty minutes. We look at your site and your process, name the three things worth doing, and tell you which ones we would not bother with. No deck, no obligation, and no pitch unless you ask for one. PRODUCTS, fixed scope and fixed price: - Website, $3,000 to $18,000 (two to eight weeks). Custom website build in three contiguous sizes: Small $3,000 to $7,500 (compact, usually two to three weeks), Medium $7,500 to $18,000 (the full system with a content engine and client-facing paths, usually four to eight weeks) and Large from $18,000 (ambitious or complex, quoted after a paid scoping week). Fully server-rendered so every page is real HTML on the first request, with the complete machine-readability layer as foundation (robots.txt welcoming AI crawlers, llms.txt, sitewide JSON-LD, dynamic sitemap, instant indexation), near-zero client JavaScript, and conversion and intake paths. Deployed, hosted and monitored by the agency. The client owns the code outright. Terms: 50% to start, 50% at launch, fixed scope agreed up front. - AI Receptionist, $2,500 to $14,000 plus from $250/mo (two to six weeks). AI voice receptionist, $2,500 to $14,000 to build in three contiguous sizes, plus from $250/mo. Answers calls in about one ring on a new or forwarded number, trained on the client’s services, prices, hours and common questions; books into the real calendar with availability checking and confirmation; takes structured messages; escalates to a human on request, on sensitive topics and on low confidence; transcribes and summarises every call into inbox or CRM within a minute. Out-of-hours and overflow modes supported. Call minutes and model usage billed at cost on top and estimated up front. - AI Assistant, $2,000 to $11,000 plus from $180/mo (two to five weeks). AI assistant, $2,000 to $11,000 in three contiguous sizes plus from $180/mo, covering two roles from one engine. A site assistant answers visitor questions grounded in the client’s own material, states when it does not know, qualifies against the client’s criteria and books into the real calendar. An inbox agent replies to new enquiries within minutes at any hour and follows a finite, polite follow-up sequence that stops on reply or request. Everything logged to the client’s existing email, CRM or spreadsheet, with a weekly digest. Model usage billed at cost on top and estimated up front. - Workflow Automation, $2,400 to $13,000 (per workflow). Fixed-price per-workflow automation, $2,400 to $13,000 in three contiguous sizes, delivered in three to eight weeks depending on size. Covers mapping the existing process, building the automation on hosted and monitored infrastructure, integrating with the tools the client already uses, applying AI only where it outperforms deterministic code (extraction, drafting, classification, summarising), human checkpoints where errors are expensive, explicit failure handling, and handover with a runbook plus 30 days of adjustment. Terms: 50% to start, 50% on handover; third-party running costs are the client’s and are estimated up front. - AI Visibility, $1,800 to $9,500 (one-off, then monthly). AI visibility work, $1,800 to $9,500 in three sizes, covering SEO, AEO and GEO as one job. Fixes AI-crawler access first, installs the machine-readability layer (structured data, llms.txt, server-rendered HTML, dynamic sitemap, instant indexation), restructures key pages answer-first for clean extraction and attribution, builds citation assets, and measures with monthly citation checks across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google plus first-party server-log evidence of AI crawler activity. Included in every website build; sold standalone for existing sites. OPTIONAL DIAGNOSTIC: The Roadmap, $750. Optional paid diagnostic at $750, credited in full against any project booked within 90 days. Covers citation checks across the major assistants, a crawler and technical review of the site fetched as the AI bots, a costed walk-through of the three highest-friction workflows, and a ranked roadmap the client owns outright. Explicitly not the primary entry point: the free scan and the free opportunity call are. The $750 comes off your first invoice if you book any project within 90 days, so it costs nothing to start here. CARE PLANS, monthly, under which the agency owns hosting, uptime, security patching and backups: - Essential, $290/mo (monthly · cancel anytime). Entry monthly website care plan at $290/mo. Managed website hosting with SSL and CDN, uptime monitoring, security patching and dependency updates, daily tested backups with a documented recovery path, up to one hour a month of content changes, and a quarterly report. Response: next business day for faults, same day for outages. - Growth, $1,400/mo (monthly · cancel anytime). Mid monthly care plan at $1,400/mo. Everything in Essential plus monitoring and tuning of the client’s AI receptionist and assistants as models change, a monthly block of build or automation work, monthly AI-visibility monitoring (rankings, citation checks, crawler activity), a monthly planning call, and queue priority over project work. Response: same business day for faults, within the hour for outages. - Partner, $3,800/mo (monthly · three-month minimum). Top monthly care plan at $3,800/mo, positioned as an alternative to hiring a technical lead. Everything in Growth with a substantially larger monthly work block, plus roadmap ownership and accountability, management of the client’s other vendors and systems, direct access with no ticket queue, and quarterly planning against business goals. Response: within the hour during the client’s working hours. Care plans are monthly retainers under which the agency owns hosting, uptime, security, backups and the maintenance of the systems and AI products it built, billed as one line. The published policy states plainly that this is not a 24-hour helpdesk, that the response windows reflect what a single experienced engineer can hold, and that firms needing genuine round-the-clock cover are referred elsewhere. --- ## AI visibility glossary Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/glossary Plain definitions of the terms that come up in AI search: GEO, AEO, llms.txt, Content-Signals, the individual AI crawlers and what each one is for. --- ## Field notes Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/blog Evidence-first writing for established firms buying technology: what a website should cost, what an AI receptionist or assistant is actually worth, which processes are worth automating, and what gets a business cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Every claim sourced. --- ## AI Agency: we build it, automate it, and get it cited Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/ai-agency An AI agency designs and builds the systems a business runs on and makes them legible to AI, rather than advising on it from the outside. Footnote Works does three things: builds the site, automates the manual work behind it, and engineers both so answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity can read and cite them. The work is delivered by the same senior engineer who scopes it, prices are published before you speak to anyone, and reporting comes from first-party server logs and Search Console rather than an agency dashboard. --- ## LLM Optimization: how to get your site read and quoted by AI Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/llm-optimization LLM optimization is the practice of making a website readable, quotable and trustworthy to large language models, so that assistants like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can use it as a source. It is mostly an engineering problem rather than a writing one: the model has to be able to fetch the page, parse meaning from the HTML without running JavaScript, and find a passage that answers a question on its own. Access, structure and extractable answers are the three things that decide it. --- ## Generative Engine Optimization Agency: engineering, not guesswork Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/generative-engine-optimization-agency Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the practice of getting a business named and cited inside AI-generated answers rather than only inside a list of blue links. A GEO agency works on the three things that decide it: whether AI crawlers can reach the page at all, whether the content is structured so a model can extract a self-contained answer, and whether the business has enough corroborating evidence elsewhere to be trusted as a source. It is closer to technical engineering than to content marketing. --- ## AI SEO Agency: rank on Google and get cited by ChatGPT Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/ai-seo-agency An AI SEO agency optimises a site for two different systems at once: the ranked list Google has always produced, and the generated answer that assistants now produce on top of it. The foundations overlap, since both need a page a machine can fetch and parse, but the selection differs. Ranking rewards authority and relevance across a whole page, while citation rewards a short passage that answers one question completely on its own. --- ## AI Automation: stop paying people to retype things Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/ai-automation AI automation uses language models and integrations to complete work that previously needed a person to read something and type it somewhere else. The highest-value targets are the boring ones: client intake, invoice processing, onboarding checklists, quote generation and recurring reports. The test of a good automation is not how clever it is, it is whether anyone notices the work is gone. --- ## AI Automation Agency: one workflow live in three weeks Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/ai-automation-agency An AI automation agency builds the software that removes repetitive work from a business: it maps a process, connects the systems that process touches, and replaces the manual steps with code and language models. A good one starts with a single workflow, prices it as a fixed piece of work, and proves the hours it gives back before proposing anything larger. A bad one sells a platform, a discovery phase or a monthly seat license before anything runs. --- ## AI for Accountants: where it pays, and where it does not Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/ai-for-accountants AI helps an accounting practice most in the work around the work: reading and filing client documents, chasing information, drafting routine correspondence, assembling recurring reports and answering the same client questions. It is a poor fit for anything where a wrong answer is a filing risk, so the reliable pattern is that the machine does the reading and the drafting and a qualified person still signs. Practices that start with one high-volume process usually see the hours back within a quarter. --- ## AI Receptionist: what it does, what it costs, where it fails Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/ai-receptionist An AI receptionist is a voice agent that answers your phone, knows your services, hours and prices, books into your real calendar and hands over to a person when it should. A good one answers in about one ring, checks live availability rather than promising a callback, escalates anything sensitive, and puts a transcript of every call in your inbox within a minute. The reason to buy one is arithmetic: a missed call is a client who rang the next firm on the list, so work out what one new client is worth to you and how many rang last month. The market runs from about $5,000 to $15,000 for a scoped custom build; ours is $2,500 to $14,000 across three contiguous sizes, plus from $250/mo, with call minutes and model usage on top at cost. --- ## AI Chatbot for Business: what to build, and what to avoid Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/ai-chatbot-for-business A business AI chatbot answers visitor questions using your own pages and documents rather than the open internet, states plainly when the answer is not in its material, qualifies the visitor against criteria you set, and books into your real calendar or hands over with everything already captured. The two things that separate a useful one from a liability are grounding, meaning it can only answer from material you supplied and links to the source, and a hard rule that it never gives advice or quotes outside an agreed range. It earns its price on response time, which is the cheapest advantage in a service business and the one almost nobody uses: an enquiry answered in minutes beats one answered tomorrow, and a great many firms never answer at all. Ours is $2,000 to $11,000 in three contiguous sizes plus from $180/mo. --- ## AI Visibility Audit: what it measures, and what it should cost Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/ai-visibility-audit An AI visibility audit measures whether AI assistants can find, read and recommend a business, and explains mechanically why not where they cannot. It runs your real customer questions through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google, records who gets named instead, then fetches your site the way a crawler does to find the cause of each absence. The technical half of ours is free and instant, and it needs no access to your servers. Be wary of anyone charging four figures for the diagnosis before you have seen them do any work. --- ## AI for Law Firms and Lawyers: intake, calls and getting cited Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/ai-for-law-firms For a law firm, AI matters in two separate places. Outside the firm, prospective clients now ask assistants who to call, and the assistant names two or three firms from sources it can read and trust. Inside the firm, intake, conflict checks, document handling and client updates still consume paid hours that follow rules. The first is a visibility problem and the second is an automation problem, and most firms have both. --- ## SEO for Accountants: be the firm the AI names Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/seo-for-accountants SEO for an accounting firm used to mean ranking for local service terms. It now has a second half: being one of the handful of sources an AI assistant uses when a business owner asks who should do their books, handle a tax question or advise on a structure. Ranking and citation are decided differently, so a firm can sit at the top of Google and never be named in the answer above it. --- ## SEO for Lawyers: the enquiries you never hear about Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/seo-for-lawyers SEO for a law firm now decides two separate things. The first is where you sit in the ranked list, which still sends most of the clicks. The second is whether an AI assistant names your firm when somebody describes their problem and asks who to call, and that is decided differently: a firm can hold the top Google result and go unmentioned in the answer printed above it. The cost of losing the second one is invisible, because a prospect who is handed two firm names never becomes an enquiry you can count. --- ## Answering Service for Law Firms: the calls that became a competitor’s case Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/answering-service-for-law-firms A law firm answering service exists because a person with a legal problem rarely calls twice. They work down the list until somebody picks up, so an unanswered ring at six in the evening is not a delayed enquiry, it is a case that went to another firm. There are three ways to cover it: a human answering service that takes a message, a voicemail that most callers will not leave, and an AI receptionist that answers in about one ring and books the consultation into your real calendar. They differ mainly in what happens after the phone is picked up. --- ## Website, $3,000 to $18,000 Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/services/site Custom website build in three contiguous sizes: Small $3,000 to $7,500 (compact, usually two to three weeks), Medium $7,500 to $18,000 (the full system with a content engine and client-facing paths, usually four to eight weeks) and Large from $18,000 (ambitious or complex, quoted after a paid scoping week). Fully server-rendered so every page is real HTML on the first request, with the complete machine-readability layer as foundation (robots.txt welcoming AI crawlers, llms.txt, sitewide JSON-LD, dynamic sitemap, instant indexation), near-zero client JavaScript, and conversion and intake paths. Deployed, hosted and monitored by the agency. The client owns the code outright. Terms: 50% to start, 50% at launch, fixed scope agreed up front. --- ## AI Receptionist, $2,500 to $14,000 Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/services/voice AI voice receptionist, $2,500 to $14,000 to build in three contiguous sizes, plus from $250/mo. Answers calls in about one ring on a new or forwarded number, trained on the client’s services, prices, hours and common questions; books into the real calendar with availability checking and confirmation; takes structured messages; escalates to a human on request, on sensitive topics and on low confidence; transcribes and summarises every call into inbox or CRM within a minute. Out-of-hours and overflow modes supported. Call minutes and model usage billed at cost on top and estimated up front. --- ## AI Assistant, $2,000 to $11,000 Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/services/assistant AI assistant, $2,000 to $11,000 in three contiguous sizes plus from $180/mo, covering two roles from one engine. A site assistant answers visitor questions grounded in the client’s own material, states when it does not know, qualifies against the client’s criteria and books into the real calendar. An inbox agent replies to new enquiries within minutes at any hour and follows a finite, polite follow-up sequence that stops on reply or request. Everything logged to the client’s existing email, CRM or spreadsheet, with a weekly digest. Model usage billed at cost on top and estimated up front. --- ## Workflow Automation, $2,400 to $13,000 Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/services/automate Fixed-price per-workflow automation, $2,400 to $13,000 in three contiguous sizes, delivered in three to eight weeks depending on size. Covers mapping the existing process, building the automation on hosted and monitored infrastructure, integrating with the tools the client already uses, applying AI only where it outperforms deterministic code (extraction, drafting, classification, summarising), human checkpoints where errors are expensive, explicit failure handling, and handover with a runbook plus 30 days of adjustment. Terms: 50% to start, 50% on handover; third-party running costs are the client’s and are estimated up front. --- ## AI Visibility, $1,800 to $9,500 Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/services/visibility AI visibility work, $1,800 to $9,500 in three sizes, covering SEO, AEO and GEO as one job. Fixes AI-crawler access first, installs the machine-readability layer (structured data, llms.txt, server-rendered HTML, dynamic sitemap, instant indexation), restructures key pages answer-first for clean extraction and attribution, builds citation assets, and measures with monthly citation checks across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google plus first-party server-log evidence of AI crawler activity. Included in every website build; sold standalone for existing sites. --- ## What Should a Small Business Website Cost in 2026? Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/blog/what-should-a-small-business-website-cost A small business website in 2026 falls into four price bands: under $500 for a DIY template, $500 to $5,000 from a freelancer or small shop, $5,000 to $25,000 from a boutique agency, and $25,000 upward for fully custom design and development. Most established small firms land between $2,000 and $8,000. The number is driven far more by how many systems the site has to talk to, whether anyone logs in, and whether the content already exists, than by how many pages it has. Judge a quote by what the site is meant to earn, not by what it costs. --- ## Is Your Website Blocking ChatGPT? How to Check in 2 Minutes Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/blog/is-my-website-blocking-chatgpt To check whether your site blocks ChatGPT, open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for lines that disallow GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot, and separately confirm your CDN or firewall (Cloudflare especially) is not blocking those bots at the network level. If either layer blocks them, the assistants cannot read your pages and will never cite you. The fix is to explicitly allow the AI user-agents in robots.txt and in your CDN’s bot rules. --- ## Why Isn’t My Business Showing Up in ChatGPT? 7 Reasons (and Fixes) Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/blog/why-isnt-my-business-showing-up-in-chatgpt AI assistants skip your business for one of seven reasons: they are blocked from crawling your site; your pages render as blank without JavaScript; your content is not structured as clear answers; you have no third-party mentions the model trusts; your information is stale; your competitors are simply more citable; or you are invisible on the sources (Reddit, directories, reviews) that AI cross-checks. Ranking on Google fixes none of these automatically: AI citation is a separate game. --- ## What Is llms.txt? An Honest Answer for Business Owners Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/blog/what-is-llms-txt llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file (at yourdomain.com/llms.txt) that lists your most important pages in a clean, LLM-friendly form, like a curated sitemap for AI. It is cheap, harmless hygiene, but as of 2026 no major AI platform has committed to reading it, and an Ahrefs study of 137,000 domains in May 2026 found 97% of llms.txt files received zero AI requests. Add it if it is easy; do not let anyone sell it to you as the thing that “gets you into ChatGPT.” --- ## GEO vs AEO vs SEO: A No-Jargon Guide for Business Owners Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/blog/geo-vs-aeo-vs-seo SEO gets you ranked in Google’s list of links. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) gets you into the direct answer, featured snippets, voice, Google’s AI Overviews. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) gets you cited inside AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude. They are three views of the same discipline: publish clear, structured, trustworthy answers that both search engines and AI can read and quote. You do not pick one. You do the shared foundation, then weight toward where your customers actually search. --- ## AI Visibility for Law Firms: Getting Cited by ChatGPT in 2026 Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/blog/ai-visibility-for-law-firms Law firms get cited by AI assistants the same way they earn referrals: by being the clearest, most authoritative answer to a specific legal question. In practice that means unblocking AI crawlers, publishing answer-first pages on the exact questions clients ask (structured with FAQ and jurisdiction detail), earning third-party trust signals, and keeping it all compliant with ABA advertising rules. Legal is the highest-stakes category for this because AI answers appear on legal queries more than any other. --- ## AI Visibility for Dental Practices: Getting Found by ChatGPT Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/blog/ai-visibility-for-dentists Dental practices get recommended by AI assistants when three things line up: the assistant can crawl the practice website, the site answers the exact questions patients ask (procedures, costs, insurance, “near me”), and the practice has a strong, consistent off-site footprint, Google Business Profile, reviews and accurate listings, that the AI cross-checks. Because AI assembles “dentist near me” answers largely from that off-site entity layer, a great website alone is not enough. And it all has to stay HIPAA-safe, which rules out most generalist tactics. --- ## Why ChatGPT Recommends Your Competitor Instead of You Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/blog/why-chatgpt-recommends-your-competitor ChatGPT recommends your competitor because, by the signals it can read, they are the safer answer: they are crawlable when you might be blocked, their pages answer the exact question in extractable form, and, most decisively. They have more third-party mentions, reviews and citations that the model treats as consensus. It is not favoritism; it is that they look more trustworthy to a machine assembling an answer. You change its mind by out-structuring them on-page and out-earning them off-page. --- ## The Complete List of AI Crawlers (2026): Who’s Reading Your Site Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/blog/the-complete-list-of-ai-crawlers The AI crawlers that matter fall into three jobs: training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Google-Extended) that ingest content to train models; retrieval crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot) that fetch pages live to answer a user and cite with a link; and classic search bots (Googlebot, Bingbot) whose AI features sit on top of search. If you want to be recommended by AI, allow the retrieval crawlers above all. They are the ones that put you in an answer. --- ## Does Schema Markup Help You Get Cited by AI? An Honest Look Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/blog/does-schema-markup-help-ai-citations Schema markup helps AI understand your content, but it is a supporting factor, not a magic switch. Rich, accurate schema that matches what is visible on the page (FAQPage, Article with real author, Organization with entity links) can improve how machines parse and attribute you. But thin or generic schema can actually underperform having none, and some studies find no citation lift at all. Do it well and honestly; do not expect it to carry a page that is otherwise unreadable or untrusted. --- ## AI Visibility for Accounting & Tax Firms: Getting Found by AI Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/blog/ai-visibility-for-accountants Accounting and tax firms get found by AI assistants by answering the specific, high-intent questions prospects ask, “do I need to file a return for an LLC with no income,” “CPA for expat taxes,” “bookkeeper near me”, on a crawlable, well-structured site, backed by a consistent local entity and real reviews. Because these are trust-heavy financial questions, clear authorship and cited, accurate answers matter more than in most categories. Firms that publish genuinely useful, current answers become the cited source; the rest stay invisible. --- ## Privacy Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/privacy What Footnote Works collects, why, and how to have it deleted. Two forms and privacy-respecting analytics, no ad tracking, no data sold, no third-party chat widget. --- ## Terms Canonical: https://footnoteworks.com/terms The terms covering this website and the free AI visibility scan: what the scan is, what it is not, and the limits of what a free automated check can tell you.