Mode researches the market it competes in: Companies House data, industry accounts, and the benchmark surveys, refreshed on a monthly pulse. No hot takes, no invented numbers. Every figure carries its source.
Google now lets UK site owners opt out of AI Overviews and AI Mode, under a CMA order. Should you? The honest math from our research desk: AI sends ~0.1% of visits, ~83% of AI-Overview searches were already zero-click, and Google hands you the exit door without the click data to decide. For most UK small businesses, no · and for many the site is not even readable by AI to begin with.
READ THE RESEARCHAn honest map of the category: monitoring tools (Otterly, Peec, Profound, the SEO-suite add-ons) tell you whether AI mentions you; Mode tells you, then does the work to change it. Includes when a £29 tool is the right call and Mode is not. We run monitoring ourselves · a thermometer is useful, it just is not a doctor.
READ THE RESEARCHDirector records behind 29,609 new UK marketing companies: the median founder is 32-34, under-25 founders’ companies die at roughly twice the rate of 45-54s’ (first-pass estimate, caveats stated), and the solo-founder death myth barely shows up: 6.3% vs 5.7%. A near-null, published anyway.
READ THE RESEARCHWe checked 28 UK providers selling GEO/AEO/AI-visibility services. Only 13 publish any price. The full map: free checkers, £95-995 published diagnostics, £149-800/mo productised plans, £1,250-10,000/mo agency retainers, $29-699/mo tools, quote-only above that. Aggregated honestly, refreshed as the market moves.
READ THE RESEARCHAn evidence review from a company with every incentive to say yes: reproducibility studies show under 1% chance the same prompt returns the same brands twice, cited domains churn 40-60% monthly, and the platforms with the most data offer no guarantees at all. Verdict: no · confidence: strong · what would change our mind, on record.
READ THE RESEARCHOf 29,609 UK marketing companies formed since January 2025, the 364 with “AI” in their name dissolved at 2.3 times the age-adjusted rate of their peers · the Q3 2025 AI-named cohort is already 27.9% gone. The skill is entering job ads while the label dies on the register. The name is not a strategy.
READ THE RESEARCHThe UK’s first tracker of GEO as a hiring skill. July 2026 baseline: 47 UK job listings name “generative engine optimisation”, 15 name “answer engine optimisation”, against 2,044 for SEO · roughly 2% of the established discipline’s footprint. Real, and early. Re-measured quarterly, same method, misses published with hits.
READ THE RESEARCHThe guide the quote-only industry never wrote: every published price we could collect and date · websites £150 to £16,000+, SEO and multi-channel retainers, £104/hr benchmark agency economics, branding, and the wild-west AI-visibility market. Derivations labelled, sources named, refreshed as data moves.
READ THE RESEARCH88% of the UK’s top 50 digital agencies show no pricing on their homepage, and across the agency pricing pages Mode monitors monthly, quote-only is the overwhelming norm. Why the industry hides its prices, and what the opacity costs buyers.
READ THE RESEARCHThe unusually honest answer from an agency, held to the data: AI genuinely replaces the drafting layer (do it yourself), and stalls at the last mile · deployment, findability, accountability. Where the line actually sits, with the Klarna and BenchPress evidence.
READ THE RESEARCHONS says 93.4% survive year one and 38.4% reach five years. The register runs harsher: 27% of new marketing companies dissolved within 18 months, and six trades ran 17-24%. Both are true · they measure different things, reconciled here.
READ THE RESEARCHWe ran AI-readability checks on the Prolific North Top 50 Digital Agencies: 38% have no structured data, only 14% have an llms.txt, 88% show no prices, three are effectively invisible to AI crawlers and three block ChatGPT’s crawler outright. If the experts fail this test, what about your site?
READ THE RESEARCHOur flagship research: every marketing company incorporated since January 2025 (29,609 of them), the filed accounts of the industry, and the major benchmark surveys in one place. A quarter of new agencies die within 18 months; rates fell for the first time on record; AI is redrawing the map.
READ THE RESEARCH