What AEO costs, and what actually drives the number.

Quotes for the same brief routinely differ by a factor of five, which tells you the category has not settled. Some of that spread is genuine scope difference and some is opportunism, and the variables below let you tell which is which.

The three pricing models

Audit only. A one-off assessment: where you appear, where you do not, what is causing it, what to do about it. Low four figures. Sensible if you have people who can act on the findings.

Retained program. Ongoing content, entity, citation and monitoring work. Mid four figures monthly for most mid-market businesses, higher in competitive categories or on large sites.

Project sprint. Fixed scope over six to twelve weeks, usually entity cleanup, structured data and content restructuring. Appropriate when the foundations are the problem and ongoing work is premature.

What actually moves the price

• How much usable content you already have. The largest single variable, and it is not your revenue. A site with fifty solid pages needs restructuring; a site with five needs building.
• Entity mess. A business trading under three names across two decades of listings is materially more work than one that has been consistent.
• Category competitiveness in the sources that matter. Not keyword difficulty — how contested the directories, publications and communities are.
• Number of locations or entities. Multi-location businesses multiply the consistency work.
• Regulatory constraint. Categories requiring clinical or legal review carry real overhead.

Worked examples of how scope sets price

Three simplified cases show why quotes vary so much for the same brief.

• Single-location home services company. Twenty useful pages, one business name for ten years, clean listings. Audit plus a short foundations sprint covers most of it; ongoing work is light monitoring and occasional outreach.
• Multi-location healthcare group. Twelve locations, two rebrands, clinical review required on content. The entity audit alone is a multi-week job and every content change carries review overhead.
• B2B software company. Large site, strong content, weak third-party presence. Little on-site work but significant outreach to review platforms, comparison articles and communities.

Each is “AEO”, and each has a different cost driver. A proposal that prices all three the same has not looked at any of them.

Quotes that should worry you

A fixed price quoted before anyone has looked at your site. That is a package, not a plan, and the scope will be whatever fits the price.

Anything priced as a percentage of ad spend. AEO has no meaningful relationship to media spend, and that pricing model imports an incentive that does not belong here.

Very low monthly retainers. Below a certain point the only deliverable that fits is content volume, which is the thing least likely to move the outcome.

Guaranteed placements or citations. Nobody controls what a model says, so a guarantee is either meaningless or describes something you would not want.

What you should get for the money

Whatever the model, insist on a written list of deliverables per month or per phase, and a baseline taken before work starts. The baseline should include the prompt set itself, the raw answers, the list of sources cited, and the entity audit findings. Those four artifacts are what make the rest of the spend accountable.

Ask as well who owns what at the end. Prompt sets, monitoring history, any listings or profiles created on your behalf, and structured data should all belong to you. An agency that resists that is pricing in the cost of your leaving.

Budgeting the first year

For most businesses a sensible first year looks like an audit up front, a foundations phase in the first quarter, and a smaller ongoing program for the remaining months. Spend is front-loaded because the entity and technical fixes are one-off, while monitoring and outreach are steady.

If a proposal is flat across twelve months from day one, ask what happens in month seven that also happened in month one. There is often a good answer. When there is not, the retainer is paying for activity rather than progress.

Frequently asked questions

How much does an AEO agency cost?

A one-off audit is typically low four figures. A retained program is usually mid four figures monthly for mid-market businesses, more in competitive categories or on large sites. Project sprints for foundational work sit in between.

What makes AEO more expensive for some businesses?

How much usable content already exists, how inconsistent the business's information is across the web, how contested the sources in the category are, the number of locations, and whether the category requires clinical or legal review.

Should I trust a fixed AEO price quoted upfront?

Be cautious. A price quoted before anyone has examined your site is a package rather than a plan, and the scope will be set to fit the price rather than the problem.

Is AEO cheaper than SEO?

It is usually priced as an addition to SEO rather than a replacement, and the increment is smaller than a second full retainer when the SEO fundamentals are already being done well.

Why do some AEO agencies charge per prompt tracked?

It mirrors how monitoring tools price. It is a reasonable way to price the monitoring component, but monitoring is only one part of the work and should not be the whole invoice.