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Beacon launches today, pitching a $20 GEO audit to 5.6 million small businesses

Change Agents' subscription platform runs about 100 customer queries across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and Claude to show owners how often each assistant names them.

By Ben Krauss·Daily desk lead·

Change Agents Corporation (Nasdaq: CHGA) opens commercial access to Beacon today, a $20-a-month subscription that audits how often ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and Claude recommend a given small business when a prospective customer asks for one. The company announced the October 28 date in an October 21 release distributed via GlobeNewswire, and is pointing the product at what it describes as 5.6 million U.S. small businesses with fewer than 50 employees.

The mechanic is narrow and legible. Beacon runs roughly 100 common customer queries against the five assistants, then reports how frequently each one names the business versus its competitors. The free audit is gated behind registration and finishes in five minutes or less. The paid tier adds monthly reports, on-demand refreshes, and optional implementation work from an in-house services team. MarTech, writing on October 22, characterized the platform as auditing directory listings, formatting schema data, and tracking visibility in generative search engines.

That’s a familiar shape. Generative engine optimization is tracing the arc SEO walked between roughly 1998 and 2005: a channel that was previously opaque becomes measurable, and once it’s measurable, it becomes competitive. Pricing Beacon at $20 is the giveaway. This isn’t an enterprise GEO product; it’s a self-serve dashboard built for owner-operators who’ve just learned that most AI shoppers plan to lean on assistants for discovery during the holiday run.

Director Michael Mathews framed the commercial challenge plainly: “driving awareness and converting free audits into paid subscriptions.” The free-to-paid funnel is the whole business.

The company’s own forward-looking statement, reproduced in a QuiverQuant filing, concedes there’s no assurance Beacon reaches meaningful adoption, and that the platform depends on third-party AI systems whose outputs can shift without notice. That caveat is the structural fact of the category. GEO vendors are selling visibility inside models they don’t control, to owners who can’t yet tell whether the recommendations driving their foot traffic came from Google, Gemini, or a friend.

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