AEO App vs DIY: Should You Use Comergent AI or Do It Yourself?

You can do AEO without an app. The question is whether the time cost justifies it compared to $499/month.

What you can do manually

Write your own llms.txt. A basic llms.txt file takes 2–4 hours to write and 30 minutes per month to maintain if your catalog is stable. For a store with under 50 products and infrequent catalog changes, manual maintenance is manageable.

Rewrite product descriptions for AI citation. The format is learnable. Lead with the specific buyer question the product answers. Follow with material facts, use case, price comparison context. For 10–20 products, this is a one-time effort of 1–2 days.

Check ChatGPT manually for your category queries. Slow (30 queries takes 30+ minutes) and provides no competitive context, but it's free.

What breaks at scale

LLMs.txt maintenance with a large catalog. A 200-product store with weekly inventory changes needs llms.txt updated every few days to stay accurate with Perplexity. A stale llms.txt doesn't just underperform — it actively misleads AI crawlers. Products that are out of stock still get cited. New products don't appear.

Prompt research across 5 platforms. Manually identifying buyer queries competitors rank on across all five platforms requires 3–5 hours per week asking AI platforms questions and logging results in a spreadsheet. No one does this consistently. It degrades within 6–8 weeks.

Scaling content rewrites. 20 product rewrites are manageable manually. 200 are not. A 500-SKU catalog would require 250+ hours of writing.

Attribution beyond session tracking. Building Shopify order-level attribution manually requires custom UTM tracking, JavaScript injection, and ongoing maintenance. Practical for a developer team; not for a merchant.

The cost comparison

	DIY	Comergent AI (Starter)
LLMs.txt setup	3–4 hours once	Automatic
LLMs.txt maintenance	2–4 hrs/month	Automatic
Prompt research	3–5 hrs/week	Automatic
Content rewrites (50 SKUs)	50–75 hours once	Included
Revenue attribution	Not possible without dev work	Included
Monthly time cost	15–25 hours	2–4 hours (review only)
Monthly dollar cost	$0 + your time	$499

At an implied hourly value of $50, 20 hours of monthly DIY AEO maintenance costs $1,000/month.

When DIY makes sense

DIY is right when your catalog has fewer than 30 products, your catalog rarely changes, or you want to test whether AI generates any referrals before committing to a paid tool.

The recommended path: spend one week doing it manually. Write llms.txt, rewrite your top 5 product descriptions, check ChatGPT for your category. Get a baseline. Then assess whether the manual approach produces meaningful referrals and whether you want to scale it.

For a Shopify store doing $10K+/month with more than 50 products: an AEO app is worth the cost if it saves more than $499/month in time and generates attributable revenue. Both are true by month 2 for most brands on Comergent AI.