Comparison · Build it yourself

Grow vs DIY (roll your own)

Anyone can write llms.txt. Few teams ship the whole standard.

Everything Grow ships is technically free — semantic HTML, JSON-LD, llms.txt, robots.txt, edge caching. The cost isn't the code, it's the 30+ hours of engineering judgement to do it right and the 6+ weeks of revision cycles to find out you didn't.

Verdict

The short answer

If you have a senior engineer with GEO experience and a free week, build it yourself. Most teams have neither, ship a half-finished version, score 65/100, and convince themselves AI traffic isn't a real channel. Grow is the shortcut: a 100/100 site delivered against a published standard.

Grow is best for: Teams whose eng leads can't justify a quarter of internal time to relearn what we've already shipped 50+ times.

Side by side

Where they differ

DimensionGrowDIY (roll your own)
Total cost
$2,400–$4,800 fixed
30–80 eng hours + opportunity cost
Time to live
48 hours – 5 days
2–8 weeks typical, with revisions
Standard followed
geo-standard@2026.05, published
Whatever your team decides
Verified score at delivery
100/100 on /check or we fix it
Self-graded
Ownership of the code
You own it, host anywhere
You own it, host anywhere
Internal team learns the craft
Less hands-on learning
Deep learning by doing
Maintenance after launch
You maintain
You maintain
Switch to Grow if
  • Your team Googled "llms.txt format" three times this month and is still debating the spec.
  • Your eng roadmap can't spare a week, let alone a month.
  • You want a delivered site that scores 100/100, not a backlog ticket that says "investigate GEO."
  • You'd rather review a finished build than write the brief, hire the contractor, and QA it.
Stay with DIY (roll your own) if
  • You have a staff engineer with shipped GEO experience and explicit headroom for it.
  • Your build pipeline already produces semantic SSR + per-route JSON-LD and you just need llms.txt added.
FAQ

Common questions

Can I just copy your /check criteria and build it myself?

Yes — the standard is public at geo-standard@2026.05 and the /check scanner is free. The gap is execution: most teams stall on edge caching, per-route JSON-LD shape, and the robots.txt bot matrix. If those three sentences sound trivial to you, build it yourself.

What do I actually pay you for?

Compressed time, a published standard, and a verified score. The code is open — the judgement isn't.

Ready to ship a site agents can read?

48-hour delivery. Fixed price. Built semantic-first.