This one is for other agencies, including our competitors. Answer engine optimization is a reasonable service line to add and a bad one to oversell, and the industry is currently doing more of the second than the first.
What you can honestly sell
Entity consistency work, structured data, content restructuring for extraction, citation and representation building, and monitoring. All concrete, all deliverable, all defensible.
Frame it as an extension of technical and off-page SEO rather than as a new discipline, because that is what it is and clients who later realise otherwise remember who told them.
What not to promise
- Guaranteed citations or placements. Nobody controls model output.
- Specific timelines for assistant behaviour changes. You control your work, not their re-crawl schedules.
- Attribution from assistant answers to revenue. That chain does not exist.
- Explanations of ranking mechanisms. Not documented, and clients eventually ask someone else.
Want a baseline first? Our free AI Visibility Report gives you one, with no obligation. Request one.
Setting up delivery
Build a repeatable prompt-set process per client. Standardise the entity audit, because it is the same shape every time. Establish a monitoring cadence you can actually sustain across a portfolio, which is usually less frequent than you would like.
Price the audit separately from the retainer. It is genuinely valuable standalone, it qualifies clients, and it prevents you committing to ongoing work before understanding the mess.
The reputational calculation
This field will have a reckoning. Enough agencies are currently promising outcomes they cannot influence that a wave of disappointed clients is arriving, and it will make the whole category harder to sell.
Agencies that were conservative will benefit from that, and agencies that were not will spend the following year explaining themselves. Being the boring one is a commercial strategy as much as an ethical one.
Frequently asked questions
Should my agency offer AEO services?
If you already do technical and off-page SEO competently, yes — it is an extension rather than a new discipline. If your fundamentals are weak, adding it will not help, because AEO layered on a broken foundation produces nothing.
What should agencies not promise about AEO?
Guaranteed citations, specific timelines for assistant behaviour changes, attribution from answers to revenue, or explanations of ranking mechanisms. None are deliverable and all are checkable.
How should agencies price AEO?
Price the audit separately from any retainer. It is valuable standalone, qualifies the client, and stops you committing to ongoing work before you understand the state of their entity data.