FAQ
Questions, answered directly
If something you need isn't here, ask on the strategy call — and if it's a question other owners would want answered, it ends up on this page.
What does Booked do?
Booked is a strategy-led marketing company for small businesses. We run SEO, Answer Engine Optimization and paid social lead generation on behalf of clients, and we separately own local lead-generation websites and rent the exclusive lead flow to one business per trade and territory.
What is the difference between a Growth Program and a Lead Network?
A Growth Program builds visibility on your own domain and you own everything produced. A Lead Network is a site Booked already owns and ranks; you rent exclusive leads from it and start almost immediately, but you don't own the asset. Many clients start on a network and build their own underneath it.
Why does every engagement start with a diagnostic?
Because packages are priced for the agency's convenience, not your situation. Two weeks of diagnosis establishes whether your constraint is demand, conversion or follow-up — three problems that look identical from outside and need completely different spending.
What is Answer Engine Optimization?
AEO is the practice of structuring your information so AI assistants can understand, trust and quote it when answering questions. Where SEO competes for a ranked link, AEO competes to be the source inside the answer itself.
Is AEO different from GEO?
In practice, barely. Generative Engine Optimization and Answer Engine Optimization describe the same work — earning citations inside AI-generated answers. The underlying playbook is the same whichever term a vendor prefers.
How long until I see results?
Lead Networks can start within a week where a property already ranks. Paid social produces leads in days. SEO and AEO show early movement at four to eight weeks and reach their real curve between three and six months. Anyone promising faster on organic is guessing.
What does it cost?
We quote after the diagnostic, because the honest number depends on your market's competitiveness and what already exists. The model is built so you pay for senior strategy, with the production depth agencies charge extra for included as standard.
Do I have to sign a long contract?
Lead Networks are month to month. Growth Programs have a realistic initial window because search and AI visibility genuinely take months to compound — and we tell you that number before you commit rather than after.
Do you guarantee rankings or AI recommendations?
No. Anyone who does is either misleading you or planning to game a metric that doesn't convert. We guarantee the work, report honestly on what it produced, and tell you early when something isn't working.
Do I need a new website?
Usually not. An older domain carries authority worth keeping. We rebuild only when the platform genuinely blocks results — too slow to fix, structurally locked, or unable to carry schema.
Are Lead Network leads shared with my competitors?
Never. Exclusivity is the entire product, and it's the main difference from marketplaces like Angi or Thumbtack, which sell the same enquiry to several contractors at once.
What if my problem isn't lead volume?
Then we'll say so. Response speed is the most common hidden constraint — contact odds fall roughly 100x between a five-minute and a thirty-minute callback (MIT/InsideSales), and the average business takes 42 hours (Harvard Business Review). More leads won't fix that.
Which industries do you work with?
Home services and trades, health and wellness clinics, and appointment or quote-based local businesses generally. The common thread is real capacity to fill and a customer who researches before buying.
How do you measure AI visibility?
By asking. On a schedule we put your customers' actual questions to ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, and record whether you're named, how you're described, and who's named instead. Alongside that we track AI-referred sessions and branded search.
Start here
Tell us the bottleneck. We'll tell you what we'd do.
Every engagement starts the same way: a 20-minute call, then a written read on where your customers are actually looking for you and what it would take to be the answer they find.
You'll get a straight recommendation — including "you don't need us for this," when that's the honest answer. If a Lead Network already covers your trade and territory, we'll say so, because that's the faster route and you'd rather know.