First Five

Comparison

Brenton Way alternatives for AI visibility

A full-service growth marketing agency working across beauty, ecommerce, healthcare and med spas, SaaS, dental and several other categories. They run paid media, SEO, social, email, influencer and creative production, and have added Answer Engine Optimization to that mix. Engagements are custom monthly retainers.

The short version

Brenton Way is a substantially larger and more established agency than we are, working across more industries and more channels, and they were named in an independent 2026 roundup of AI search agencies for med spas that we were not. If breadth of service or track record is what you are weighing, that is a real point in their favour and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Scope

What Brenton Way covers

Brenton Way

  • Paid media across Google, Meta and beyond
  • SEO, content marketing and conversion optimisation
  • Social media, email and influencer marketing
  • Brand identity and in-house creative production
  • Answer Engine Optimization — their site states the goal as getting "cited in ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, and answer engines"
  • A proprietary AI growth system they call IcarusX

Not published. Their site states engagements are "scoped as custom monthly retainers because the work depends on channel mix, creative volume, analytics complexity, speed, and how much your internal team can own."

First Five

  • Measurement across ChatGPT, Gemini / AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot
  • Listing claims and structured data across every location
  • Review velocity system with a monthly target
  • Third-party, editorial and community presence
  • Monthly score, per-engine breakdown and citation source map

Published at firstfivehq.com/pricing.

Straight answer

Which one you actually want

Choose Brenton Way if…

  • You want one agency running every channel — paid, social, email, influencer and creative — rather than assembling specialists
  • You need creative production. They have an in-house team; we direct photography but do not shoot it
  • You are large enough that a custom retainer is the right shape and you have someone internally to manage the relationship
  • Your marketing problem is broader than visibility. If the real issue is that nobody has run your paid media properly, a full-channel agency is the better answer
  • You want a partner across several industries, not one specialising in local healthcare

Choose First Five if…

  • You want to know the price before a call. Ours is published; theirs is scoped per engagement
  • You want the entry engagement to be a fixed-price project with a finish line rather than a retainer
  • You want the raw measurement log — every prompt, every answer, every cited source — not a summary of it
  • You are an owner-operated practice of one to three locations, which is the size we are built for
  • You want the AI visibility work done by the people who publish their methodology for it

Line by line

Where the two approaches diverge

Not a criticism of SEO — it still matters. These are simply different jobs, and most operators are only buying one of them.

  Traditional agency work First Five
Engines covered Google ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot
Where the work happens Almost entirely on your website Roughly four fifths off it, where citations come from
What success looks like A position on page one Being named in a list of five
Primary data source Google Search Console Business Profile, Bing Places, Foursquare, Yelp, review platforms
How reviews are treated Reputation management A primary input to whether you get named
Monthly deliverable A traffic report A score, a per-engine breakdown, and a citation source map
When you are not cited No visibility into why The exact source that produced a competitor mention instead
What compounds Rankings reset with each core update Presence in the sources engines read

Every row above is checkable. If your current agency covers a row we have marked, tell us and we will correct it.

3 questions

Common questions

Can we use Brenton Way and First Five together?

There is no conflict in running both. A full-channel agency handling paid, social and creative alongside a specialist doing the measurement and directory work is a reasonable structure — and if they are already doing your AEO, we will tell you plainly rather than sell you a duplicate.

Is First Five cheaper than Brenton Way?

Not necessarily, and price is the wrong comparison — the services do different jobs. Our pricing is published so you can rule it in or out without a call. If your budget only covers one, and you have no CRM or booking system, start with the platform rather than with us.

How do we decide?

Run the free audit tools first. If AI engines already name you consistently, you do not need us and we would rather you knew that. If they name your competitors instead, that gap is what we work on.

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A traditional SEO agency

What an SEO retainer covers, and what it structurally cannot.

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