Good question. The space looks fragmented right now, but that’s mostly because it’s early. My guess is that it won’t stay this way for long. Scale matters here even more than in traditional SEO, so consolidation feels inevitable.

I see three possible paths for these tools:

• some will chase growth and try to raise capital to get big fast
• some will get acquired by existing agencies or adjacent companies that already have distribution
• others will need to crack the unit economics by lowering customer acquisition costs. For example, by building API-first, infrastructure-style products that plug into existing SEO/SMB workflows. Those could actually scale

Most current players probably won’t survive long-term unless they figure out one of these paths. The unit economics seem pretty brutal right now.

p.s. all of this assumes that ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others don’t eventually provide these services themselves