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MBC / Group / Blog / AI & Automation
AI & Automation 9 min read Sep 22, 2026
A business owner wants someone to build the repetitive part of their week once so it runs itself. They go to Google. The question is simple, but the words are not: do you search for ai automation services, ai automation company, or ai automation agency? They mean the same thing in English.
They do not mean the same thing to Google. On 22 September 2026 we ran all three searches, from the same United States location, minutes apart, and asked for a hundred results each. Exactly one website appears in all three top tens: Reddit. Change one word and you get a different shortlist of who to hire.
Matthew Montez
Founder · MBC Group
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00 Key Takeaways 01 What we searched 02 One word, three different page ones 03 Where “services” runs out: nine government departments 04 Where “company” runs out: Boeing, Disney and two pop songs 05 Five firms you could actually hire. No prices. 06 Four of the five never say where they are 07 What to search, and what to ask 08 Method, and what this does not prove 09 Common questions
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00 — Key Takeaways
We ran three searches that mean the same thing in plain English — “ai automation services”, “ai automation company” and “ai automation agency” — from the same United States location on 22 September 2026.
Only one website appears in all three top tens: Reddit. Between any two of the three pages, the overlap is one to three results out of ten.
“Ai automation services” returned 18 organic results in total when we asked for 100. Nine of the last ten are government departments — the IRS, the USDA, the federal Family and Youth Services Bureau, and six state health and employment agencies.
“Ai automation company” falls apart differently: Boeing, Ford, Disney, McKinsey, Merck, a Justin Bieber song, a Tinashe song, and the Broadway musical Company.
Across both pages we found five firms you could actually hire to do the work. Not one of them names a price on the page that ranks.
Four of those five never say what city or country they are in.
Half of what a small team does each week is the same steps in the same order. Someone eventually decides to have that built once, properly, so it runs without a person watching it. Then they have to find someone to build it — and that is where this gets strange.
There are three common ways to ask Google for the same help. On 22 September 2026 we ran all three as Google organic searches from a United States location, in English, requesting the top 100 results for each. We then opened every result in the relevant band and read the actual page. Everything below is counted off what came back, not off memory.
This is the companion to our study of the ai automation agency search, published the day before. That one asked how deep the page goes. This one asks a different question: does the wording of your search change who you end up hiring?
It does. Here is how many of the top ten results the three searches have in common:
Two searches compared
Shared results in the top 10
Which ones
“services” vs “company”
3 of 10
Reddit, automaly.io, domo.com
“company” vs “agency”
Reddit, theaiautomationagency.ai, axeautomation.co
“services” vs “agency”
1 of 10
All three at once
One website is on all three pages, and it is a forum. Everything else changes when you change one word. Two people describing the same need in slightly different English get two different lists of companies to call, with almost no one in common.
It gets worse when you read what the Reddit threads are. The number one result for “ai automation services” is a thread titled “Can someone please guide me with starting an AI …”. The number one result for “ai automation company” is “Anyone Having Success with an AI Automation Business?”. Both are people asking how to start one of these businesses, not how to hire one. The single result the pages agree on is aimed at the wrong reader.
We asked Google for 100 results for “ai automation services”. It returned 18. That is the whole index of things Google thinks answer this question.
Eight of those 18 are on topic. The other ten are what Google reaches for when it has run out. In order: a YouTube channel called Flawless Cleaning Services, the USDA’s Wildlife Services, California’s Department of Health Care Services, the IRS e-Services page for tax professionals, Michigan’s Veterans’ Employment Services, the federal Family and Youth Services Bureau, North Carolina’s Division of Employment and Independence for People with Disabilities, Illinois Healthcare and Family Services, Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services, and the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Nine government departments and a cleaning company. Google kept the word “services” and quietly dropped “ai automation”. For a search with real commercial value — advertisers pay around $39 a click for this phrase — the honest read is that the market has not produced enough good pages to fill one screen.
Swap “services” for “company” and the page holds together slightly longer — nine relevant results instead of eight — then collapses in a completely different direction. Google returned 99 results for this one, and from roughly the sixteenth onward it is about the word “company” rather than about automation.
What is actually in there: Westinghouse Nuclear. Boeing. Investopedia’s dictionary entry for the word company. Bain & Company. The Walt Disney Company. Wikipedia’s article on Company, the Stephen Sondheim musical. Southern Company. Ford, twice. McKinsey & Company. Bristol Myers Squibb. Eli Lilly and Company. Merck. The Riverside Company. LinkedIn’s help article on setting up a Company Page. And two music videos: Justin Bieber’s “Company” and Tinashe’s “Company”.
Neither of these pages is a shortlist. They are a handful of real answers followed by whatever else shares a word with your search. If you scroll and feel like you are not getting anywhere, that is not you.
Strip out the forum threads, the software comparison articles and the “top 10 companies” listicles, and across both pages there are five businesses offering to do the work for you: automaly.io, Chetu, Tezeract, The AI Automation Agency, and Axe Automation. Automation Anywhere ranks third for “company” but sells software, not the build.
We fetched every page in the relevant band and searched each one for a dollar figure. Three pages could not be read: both Reddit threads blocked our request, and Tezeract’s page returned a 403 challenge to an ordinary browser request — worth noting on its own, because a page that will not answer a plain request is also harder for AI search engines to quote.
Of the ten pages we could read, the number that names a price for having the work done is zero. Dollar figures do appear — but only inside three articles comparing software platforms, and they are subscription prices for tools you would still have to set up and run yourself. Not one is the cost of having someone build the thing.
That is the same result we found the day before on the “agency” search, on a mostly different set of companies. Two overlapping markets, one shared habit. We take the opposite position and publish what we charge — $980 a month to start, $1,500 for the next tier up — on a page anyone can read without talking to us first.
We also checked each of those five pages for a city, a state or a country. Four of them name none. The only one that does is Automation Anywhere, which mentions California — and it is the software vendor, not a firm you would hire to build your process.
You can run automation work remotely, so this is not automatically a problem. But it does mean that from these pages you cannot tell what time zone your builder is in, which country’s law your contract sits under, or whether anyone could sit down with you. For a small business handing over the way it actually works day to day, those are reasonable things to want to know before the first call.
No page we read named a Colorado city. If you are searching from Denver, page one has nobody near you on it.
Two practical conclusions come out of this.
And five questions worth asking whoever you call, all of which this research says you will have to ask, because the answers are not on their websites:
If any of that sounds like the kind of thing you would rather have answered in plain English up front, that is roughly how we work. We build AI automation for small businesses in Denver and run it inside Aiden OS, where nothing goes live without a human approving it. The related question of whether you need a tool or a system is covered in this piece.
All three searches were Google organic results, United States location, English, run on 22 September 2026 within a few minutes of each other, requesting up to 100 results each. Google returned 18 results for “ai automation services”, 99 for “ai automation company” and 77 for “ai automation agency”. Overlap was counted on the top ten organic results of each search, by website. Every page in the relevant band was then fetched with an ordinary desktop browser identity and read as text.
What this does not prove. A search run tomorrow, from another city, or while signed in, can return a different page — results move constantly. Three pages would not give us their text, so “no price” is a statement about the ten we could read, not all thirteen. “No price on the page that ranks” does not mean a company has no prices; several may quote on a call, and one may have a pricing page we did not land on, because we read the page Google ranked. And a firm not naming its location on that page is not evidence it is hiding one.
What it does establish is narrower and still useful: on the day we looked, three plain-English ways of asking the same question returned three near-separate sets of companies, and the pages Google chose did not answer the two questions a buyer asks first.
Q Is there a difference between an AI automation service, company and agency?
A Not in plain English — all three describe someone who builds software that does repetitive work for you. The difference is only in how search engines treat the words. On 22 September 2026 the three searches shared exactly one result in their top tens, so the phrasing you happen to type decides which companies you ever see.
Q How much do AI automation services cost?
A Page one will not tell you. Of the ten readable pages ranking for “ai automation services” and “ai automation company”, none names a price for doing the work; the only dollar figures belong to software subscriptions in comparison articles. For what it is worth, we publish ours on our pricing page — $980 a month to start and $1,500 for the tier above it.
Q Why does Google return government websites for “ai automation services”?
A Because it runs out of relevant pages. We asked for 100 results and Google returned 18 in total, of which eight are about AI automation. To fill the rest it matched on the word “services” alone, which is how the IRS, the USDA, the federal Family and Youth Services Bureau and six state health and employment departments end up on the page.
Q Are the “top AI automation companies” lists trustworthy?
A Read who published them. Four of the nine relevant results for “ai automation company” are ranked lists, and several are published by businesses that sell automation services themselves. That does not make them wrong, but a list written by a competitor of everyone on it is a marketing asset first and a ranking second.
Q Is there an AI automation company in Denver?
A Not on page one of any of the three searches — no page we read named a Colorado city. We are in Denver and do this work: see our AI automation page, or get in touch.
Q What should I ask before hiring one?
A What it costs and what moves that number, where you and the people doing the work are based, what you own at the end, who notices when it breaks and how fast, and one example built for a business your size. Our research says you will have to ask — these answers are almost never on the websites that rank.
Related reading
The rest of our research on this market.
→ AI Automation Agency: Google Runs Out of Real Answers After Eight Results → Who Actually Owns Page One? We Classified 240 Search Results → AI Tool vs AI System: what the difference costs you → What we charge
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