Compare
Four ways to do this. Honestly compared.
Every row below is a structural difference you can verify by asking — who owns the account, who else gets the lead, who answers for the result. No invented statistics, and no pretending we win every line.
There are four realistic ways to get this work done: DaxReach, a traditional SEO or marketing agency, buying leads from a marketplace, or hiring in-house. They differ most in who owns the accounts, whether anyone else receives the same lead, whether AI-search visibility is included, and who is accountable for the result.
| DaxReach | Traditional agency | Lead marketplace | Hire in-house | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who owns the accounts | You. Site, ad accounts, Google Business Profile, domains and analytics stay in your name, and you keep them if you leave. | Usually you, but not always — worth asking specifically about ad accounts and any domains bought for you. | Not applicable. You are buying contacts, not building an asset you keep. | You, entirely. |
| Does anyone else get the same lead | No. The visibility is yours and the enquiry comes to you. | No. | Commonly yes — the same enquiry is often sold to several businesses, and you compete on response speed. | No. |
| AI-search visibility (AEO/GEO) | The core of the service, not an add-on line item. | Varies widely. Some have built the practice; many are adding it to a retainer and learning on it. | Not offered. The marketplace's own visibility is the product being sold. | Only if you hire for it, which is a specialist skill against demand you may not be able to size yet. |
| Who is accountable for the outcome | A named person, in a monthly reporting call. Under a Fractional CMO engagement, in a weekly one. | The agency, for its channel. If you use several, nobody is accountable across all of them. | Nobody. You are buying volume, and quality is your problem once it arrives. | Your hire — which is the strongest version of accountability, and the most expensive. |
| Trade-specific knowledge | Built around six trades: roofing, solar, HVAC, plumbing, construction and real estate, each with different buying behaviour. | Depends entirely on the agency. Generalists templatise across industries. | Category-level at best. | You already have it — that is in-house's real advantage. |
| Is ad spend marked up | No. Budgets are paid by you directly to Google or Meta from your own accounts. | Sometimes. A percentage-of-spend fee is common and worth asking about directly. | Not applicable — you pay per lead. | No. |
| Who reviews the work before it publishes | A person, every time, before anything goes live on your site. | A person, normally. | Not applicable. | You. |
| Shape of the cost | A monthly fee, month to month, no setup fee. See the pricing page for figures. | Usually a monthly retainer, often on a minimum term. | Per lead, whether or not it converts, and priced by competition for the category. | Salary plus tools, and it is a fixed cost from month one. |
| How quickly it produces anything | Publishing starts in the first month; search and AI visibility compound over months, not days. | Similar — this is how the underlying work behaves, not a difference between vendors. | Fastest. Leads arrive as soon as you pay, which is genuinely the reason to use one. | Slowest to start: hiring, onboarding, then the same compounding curve. |
Columns describe categories of option, not named companies — a specific agency or marketplace may differ from the general case, and the way to find out is to ask them these same questions.
When we're not the answer
A comparison where the author wins every row is one you should discount. Here is where each of the others is genuinely better.
- When is a traditional agency the better choice?
- When you need a channel DaxReach does not run, when you want an agency in your own city you can sit down with, or when you already have one performing well and the only gap is AI search — in which case adding that specifically is cheaper than replacing what works. Our agency partnership exists for exactly that case: your agency can resell this work rather than you switching vendors.
- When is buying leads from a marketplace the better choice?
- When you need calls this week and can afford to compete on response speed. Marketplaces are the fastest way to buy demand and honest about what they are. The trade-off is that you are renting access to customers rather than building visibility you own, and you stop the moment you stop paying. Most businesses that use both treat marketplace leads as the floor and organic visibility as the thing that eventually replaces them.
- When is hiring in-house the better choice?
- When you have the volume to keep a specialist busy and the management capacity to direct them. In-house has the best version of accountability and the deepest knowledge of your business. It is also a fixed cost from month one against demand you may still be guessing at, and AEO and GEO are specialist enough that one generalist marketing hire will not cover them well.
- How is DaxReach different from an agency that says it does AI search too?
- Ask them two questions. First, what do they report per engine — a real practice reports mentions by engine rather than blending them into one score, because ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode disagree often enough that an average hides the useful information. Second, what do they say about schema markup — anyone selling it as the unlock for AI citations has not read the evidence, which shows it barely moves them.
- Can I use DaxReach alongside what I already have?
- Yes, and it is common. AI Visibility runs alongside an existing agency handling paid ads or a marketplace supplying leads while organic visibility builds. Under a Fractional CMO engagement, existing agencies and freelancers report to that person rather than to you, which is usually the point of it.
- Do you have case studies comparing results?
- No. DaxReach is early and has no client results to show yet, so every comparison on this page is about how the options are structured rather than what they produced. Anyone showing you a results comparison between four categories of vendor is showing you numbers they chose.
Not sure this is the right option?
Twenty minutes, no obligation. We will tell you which of the four above we would actually pick for your business — including when it is not us.
Book a call