What does big-company marketing mean?

Big-company marketing means the team of paid specialists a large company keeps for its website and its customers: a marketing manager, web developers and designers, writers, analysts and search specialists. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median annual pay of a marketing manager at $166,790 in May 2025, and every other role in that team is a separate salary. The team also pays for software that tracks search results and competitors.

What does a search marketing strategist do at a big company?

A search marketing strategist at a big company works so that the company's content, products and services appear when people search. O*NET, the U.S. Department of Labor's occupation database, lists tasks such as reporting on search activity, collecting website numbers and working with developers so search engines can read every page. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes one wage for the wider group, $78,760 a year in 2025.

How much does a big company pay its web developers and designers?

A big company in the United States pays its web developers a median of $92,650 a year and its web and digital interface designers a median of $104,000 a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for May 2025. Median means half of the people in the job earn more and half earn less. A team with both roles pays two salaries before any writer or manager joins.

Why could small businesses not afford a marketing team before?

Small businesses could not afford a marketing team because most of them have no employees at all. The U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy reports, in its February 2026 edition, that 82.3% of US small businesses, 29,811,495 firms, have no employees. For those owners, a single marketing salary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics tables would be the company's first payroll cost.

How many small businesses used SEO in 2020 and 2021?

Surveys by The Manifest found that 30% of US small businesses used SEO in 2020 and that 49% invested in it in 2021. The 2020 survey asked 500 small business owners and managers, and the 2021 survey asked 500 small business employees who knew their company's approach. SEO, search engine optimization, is the work of helping a business appear when people search on Google and similar services.

What changed that lets a small business get the same marketing work as a big company?

What changed is that AI agents, computer programs that each carry out one type of task, can now do much of the work a marketing team does. Licheo uses a team of specialist agents to build a small business its website, make it findable on Google and in AI assistants, and shape pages that turn visitors into customers. The owner learns no tools, and nothing goes live until the owner approves it.

Is AI marketing for small businesses real or hype?

AI marketing for small businesses is real, and it is also new. The U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy reports that 7.6% of US businesses used artificial intelligence between September 2024 and August 2025. The work AI agents do is ordinary search work, and Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Judge any service by the work it shows you.

Does a small business owner still have to do anything if AI agents do the marketing?

Yes, a small business owner still approves the work and supplies what the business alone knows: its services, its prices, its photographs and its customer stories. Google warns that a site owner is responsible for the actions of any company it hires, so approving each change before it goes live protects the business. Licheo publishes nothing until the owner approves it.

How much does it cost to hire a web developer in Canada?

Hiring a web developer in Canada costs a median wage of $38.46 an hour in Canadian dollars, according to Job Bank, the Government of Canada's job site, for the reference period 2023 to 2024. That covers one role. A full website team adds designers, writers and a manager, each with a separate wage, and in December 2024 Canada counted 1.08 million small employer businesses, each with 1 to 99 paid employees.

The work big companies pay whole teams for, now done for small businesses

A large company keeps designers, developers, writers, analysts and search specialists on salary. Here is each role, what it earns, and how a business of one or five people can now have the same work done.

See if customers can find you

Big-company marketing means a team of paid specialists: a marketing manager, web developers and designers, writers, analysts and search specialists. In May 2025 their median US salaries ran from $74,750 to $166,790 a year. A small business with no staff could not hire that team. Specialist AI agents now do much of the same work, and the owner approves each change before it goes live.

What does a big company's web and marketing team look like?

Let us begin with the team itself. A large company that depends on being found keeps a group of paid specialists whose whole job is the website and the customers it brings. A marketing manager sets the plan and the budget. Web developers build the site and repair it, and designers decide how every page looks and how a visitor moves from one page to the next. Writers produce the pages, the articles and the product descriptions. Analysts read the numbers each week, and search specialists study what customers type into Google and make sure the company's pages answer it.

Each of these people is a full salary. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the median annual pay for each occupation, which means that half of the people in that job earn more and half earn less. The table below shows the figures for May 2025, the latest the Bureau has published, in US dollars. For comparison it adds one Canadian figure from Job Bank, the Government of Canada's job site, which reports wages by the hour.

Median pay for the roles in a big company's web and marketing team. US figures in US dollars from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025. Canadian figure in Canadian dollars from Job Bank, reference period 2023 to 2024.
Role	What the person does for the website	Median pay	Country and period
Marketing manager	Sets the marketing plan and budget and directs the team	$166,790 a year	United States, May 2025
Advertising and promotions manager	Runs paid campaigns and promotions	$133,660 a year	United States, May 2025
Web and digital interface designer	Designs how each page looks and how visitors move through the site	$104,000 a year	United States, May 2025
Web developer	Builds the site, keeps it working and fixes what breaks	$92,650 a year	United States, May 2025
Technical writer	Writes help pages, instructions and product documentation	$90,390 a year	United States, May 2025
Market research analyst or marketing specialist, the group that includes search marketing strategists	Studies customers and searches, and reports on results	$78,760 a year	United States, May 2025
Writer and author, including content writers	Writes articles, service pages and product descriptions	$76,910 a year	United States, May 2025
Public relations specialist	Gets the company mentioned in the news and on other websites	$74,750 a year	United States, May 2025
Web developer, Canadian occupation code 21234	The same building and repair work, in Canada	$38.46 an hour	Canada, 2023 to 2024

What the search specialist on that team does

The search role deserves a closer look, because its title says little about the work. O*NET, the occupation database of the U.S. Department of Labor, lists the job as Search Marketing Strategist and describes it as using search marketing tactics to increase the visibility of a company's content, products or services. In plain words, this person works so that the company appears when customers search. O*NET files the job under Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes one wage for that whole group, $78,760 a year in 2025. The figure in the table therefore covers all marketing specialists together.

O*NET's task list for the job describes the everyday work of a large marketing department. These are some of the tasks it names, written here in plain words:

Tracking search activity and reporting the results to the marketing leaders.
Preparing text, images and video so that search engines can read them and people can use them on any device.
Collecting website numbers such as visits, time spent on the site, pages viewed per visit and the share of people who click or buy.
Studying how search engines choose pages, and placing the right words and content where they help the site appear.
Working with the developers on how the site is built, so that search engines can read every page.

Which paid tools does that team use?

Salaries are the largest cost, and software is a second cost added to them. A search team works with paid programs that estimate how many people search for each phrase, record each day where the company's pages appear in Google, and list which other websites link to the company. Semrush, one of these vendors, describes its Pro+ plan as made for teams working across multiple markets, locations or websites, which tells you who the plans are designed for.

Two list prices show the cost. On 27 September 2026, Semrush listed its Advanced plan at $549 a month billed monthly, and Ahrefs listed its Enterprise plan at $1,499 a month with an annual commitment required. Some vendors publish no price at all. Profound, which tracks how a brand appears in answers from AI assistants, shows a free trial and an Enterprise plan with custom pricing, and Similarweb asks businesses and enterprises to contact its sales team. Our page on what big companies pay for lists every plan and its price.

It must be said that Google offers its own search data for free. Google Search Console, which shows how a site appears in Google's results and which searches bring visitors, costs nothing, and Google encourages every site owner to use it because its data comes directly from Google Search. Google also says that third-party tools have no access to its internal ranking data and cannot guarantee performance. A large company pays for them to follow many sites, markets and competitors at the same time.

Why could a small business never pay for this?

The truth is that the team in the table was built for companies large enough to have a marketing department, and most small businesses have no staff at all. The U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy counts 36,207,130 small businesses in the United States in its February 2026 edition, and 82.3% of them, 29,811,495 firms, have no employees. The owner is the whole company. In Canada, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada counted 1.08 million small employer businesses in December 2024, firms with 1 to 99 paid employees, and they made up 98.2% of all employer businesses in the country.

For a business of one person, or of five, hiring even the least expensive role in the table means a new salary of $74,750 a year in the United States, before a single tool is paid for. And that one person covers one role out of eight. A Canadian owner looking for a web developer faces a median wage of $38.46 an hour, and that is also one role.

Hiring outside help was the other option. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the work of helping a business appear when people search on Google and similar services. Ahrefs' survey of 439 SEO service providers, updated August 15, 2024, put the average cost of SEO at $2,917 a month. Surveys of owners show how many went without. The Manifest's 2020 survey of 500 US small business owners and managers found that 30% of small businesses used SEO, and its 2021 survey of 500 small business employees found that 49% invested in it.

What changed: agents do the tasks, and the owner approves

What changed is who does the tasks. An AI agent is a computer program that carries out a piece of work from start to finish: reading every page of a website and listing what is missing, drafting a new service page, or preparing the details for a Google Business Profile, the free listing that shows a business on Google Search and Maps. A team of such agents, each one built for one type of task, can now do much of the work that the people in the table do inside a large company.

This is what Licheo does. It is a done-for-you service, founded in 2024. A team of specialist AI agents builds a small business its website, makes it findable on Google and in AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews, and shapes the pages so that visitors become customers. The owner learns no tools and manages no dashboard, and the work continues every month. Nothing goes live until the owner approves it.

People call this democratizing SEO, meaning that work once reserved for companies with a full team is now available to a business of any size. We prefer a plainer sentence: the website, search and AI work that big companies pay whole teams for, done for your small business.

The approval step matters more than it may seem. Google warns that a site owner is responsible for the actions of any company it hires, and that deceptive or misleading content created on the owner's behalf can get the site removed entirely from Google's index, the list of pages Google can show. An owner who sees and approves each change keeps control of that responsibility, which is how a careful marketing manager works in a large company too.

What is still hard, and what still takes time

Let us be honest about the limits, because they are real. Search results change on Google's schedule. Google's own SEO Starter Guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months, and it suggests waiting a few weeks before judging whether the work helped. An agent can publish a better page today, and Google decides when to show it.

Some things must also come from the business itself, and no program can produce them. Reviews come from real customers after real jobs. A mention in a local newspaper, or a link from a supplier's website, comes from a real relationship. Photographs of the shop, the team and the finished work have to be taken by someone who is there. Expertise, the knowledge that makes a page worth reading, belongs to the owner. The agents turn the owner's answers into clear pages, and the answers come from the person who runs the business.

Finally, nobody can promise a position in Google. Google says that no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and it tells owners to be careful with anyone who claims a special relationship with Google. Its guidance on third-party tools and services adds that using a service or tool does not guarantee ranking success. Any honest provider, Licheo included, works inside those limits and says so before the work starts.

Is this real, or is it hype?

It is a fair question, so here are the figures. Artificial intelligence is still new in business. Between September 2024 and August 2025, 7.6% of US businesses used it, according to the Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy. In Canada, Statistics Canada found that in 2023, among businesses with five or more employees, 6% of small businesses had used AI. Healthy doubt is reasonable, and the right answer is to look at the work itself.

The work itself is the ordinary work of search, done carefully and done every month. Google says the best practices for SEO remain relevant for its AI features, AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that there are no additional requirements or special optimizations to appear in them. It also says that site owners need no new machine-readable files, no AI text files and no special structured labels in the page code. In other words, the tasks that help a site appear in AI answers are the tasks a good search team has always done: clear pages, accurate business information, and a site that search engines can read.

Our own records show how much of that basic work remains undone on ordinary websites. When visitors ran Licheo's free Get Found Check between 31 March and 24 September 2026 (Pacific time), the latest grades across 215 websites were 13 A, 30 B, 46 C, 55 D and 71 F. These are the websites that visitors, and our own team when testing, chose to type into the tool, so the group is self-selected, and some of the websites belong to organizations other than small businesses. Read the grades as a description of the sites people chose to test, and then test your own.

Where to go next

If you want to understand the search work itself, begin with our guide to small business SEO. It explains what the work includes, how long it takes and where a small business should start, and from there it leads to separate pages on cost, a month-by-month plan, the free tools and how to check results yourself.

If your question is who should do the work, read our comparison of the five ways to get it done: a marketing agency, a freelancer, hiring someone, doing it yourself, or AI agents. Each option has its own cost, asks for a different amount of your own time, and has its own limits, and that guide sets them next to each other so you can compare them and choose.

And if you want to know where your own website stands today, run the free Get Found Check. It reads your homepage, your domain's public settings (the DNS records that connect your name to your website and your email), and your security certificate, the file that makes the padlock appear in a browser. It returns a grade in under 60 seconds. For the full work, done every month, contact us for pricing.

Questions people ask

What does big-company marketing mean?: Big-company marketing means the team of paid specialists a large company keeps for its website and its customers: a marketing manager, web developers and designers, writers, analysts and search specialists. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median annual pay of a marketing manager at $166,790 in May 2025, and every other role in that team is a separate salary. The team also pays for software that tracks search results and competitors.
What does a search marketing strategist do at a big company?: A search marketing strategist at a big company works so that the company's content, products and services appear when people search. O*NET, the U.S. Department of Labor's occupation database, lists tasks such as reporting on search activity, collecting website numbers and working with developers so search engines can read every page. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes one wage for the wider group, $78,760 a year in 2025.
How much does a big company pay its web developers and designers?: A big company in the United States pays its web developers a median of $92,650 a year and its web and digital interface designers a median of $104,000 a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for May 2025. Median means half of the people in the job earn more and half earn less. A team with both roles pays two salaries before any writer or manager joins.
Why could small businesses not afford a marketing team before?: Small businesses could not afford a marketing team because most of them have no employees at all. The U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy reports, in its February 2026 edition, that 82.3% of US small businesses, 29,811,495 firms, have no employees. For those owners, a single marketing salary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics tables would be the company's first payroll cost.
How many small businesses used SEO in 2020 and 2021?: Surveys by The Manifest found that 30% of US small businesses used SEO in 2020 and that 49% invested in it in 2021. The 2020 survey asked 500 small business owners and managers, and the 2021 survey asked 500 small business employees who knew their company's approach. SEO, search engine optimization, is the work of helping a business appear when people search on Google and similar services.
What changed that lets a small business get the same marketing work as a big company?: What changed is that AI agents, computer programs that each carry out one type of task, can now do much of the work a marketing team does. Licheo uses a team of specialist agents to build a small business its website, make it findable on Google and in AI assistants, and shape pages that turn visitors into customers. The owner learns no tools, and nothing goes live until the owner approves it.
Is AI marketing for small businesses real or hype?: AI marketing for small businesses is real, and it is also new. The U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy reports that 7.6% of US businesses used artificial intelligence between September 2024 and August 2025. The work AI agents do is ordinary search work, and Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Judge any service by the work it shows you.
What still takes time when AI agents do the marketing work?: Search results still take time when AI agents do the marketing work, because Google decides when to show a changed page. Google's SEO Starter Guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months, and it suggests waiting a few weeks before judging results. Reviews, local press and relationships with suppliers also grow month by month, because they come from real people.
Does a small business owner still have to do anything if AI agents do the marketing?: Yes, a small business owner still approves the work and supplies what the business alone knows: its services, its prices, its photographs and its customer stories. Google warns that a site owner is responsible for the actions of any company it hires, so approving each change before it goes live protects the business. Licheo publishes nothing until the owner approves it.
How much does it cost to hire a web developer in Canada?: Hiring a web developer in Canada costs a median wage of $38.46 an hour in Canadian dollars, according to Job Bank, the Government of Canada's job site, for the reference period 2023 to 2024. That covers one role. A full website team adds designers, writers and a manager, each with a separate wage, and in December 2024 Canada counted 1.08 million small employer businesses, each with 1 to 99 paid employees.

Sources

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Writers and Authors, Occupational Outlook Handbook, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Updated 2026-08-27, accessed 27 September 2026.
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70% of Small Businesses Do Not Have an SEO Strategy as Online Visibility Becomes Critically Important, The Manifest, via PR Newswire. Published 2020-04-01, accessed 27 September 2026.
Only 49% of Small Businesses Invest in SEO; 18% Say Never Will, The Manifest, via PR Newswire. Published 2021-01-27, accessed 27 September 2026.
Do you need an SEO?, Google Search Central. Updated 2026-06-05, accessed 27 September 2026.
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What 102 website audits and 215 website checks showed us about small business SEO (Licheo's own records), Licheo. Accessed 27 September 2026.

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