AEO fundamentals

Answer Engine Optimization Services: What You Buy and What It Costs

Answer engine optimization (AEO) services are agency work aimed at getting a brand named and its pages cited in AI answers. Prices published on agencies' own pages run from $497 a month for coaching to $15,000 a month for a full program. Nobody can guarantee a citation, so judge an agency on what it will measure and what it will change.

4 November 2026IndexHalo Editorial Team7 min read

Contents

Disclosure: IndexHalo sells software that measures AI visibility, which some readers could buy instead of or alongside an agency. We don't sell agency services. Naming an agency here isn't a recommendation: these are ones we found that publish their prices.

What an AEO service includes

Most of the work falls into four parts. A proposal should say which of them you are paying for.

Part	What the agency does	Could your team do it?
Access	Checks that AI crawlers can reach your pages and that your robots.txt rules do what you intend.	Usually, yes. The AI crawler directory lists what each bot does.
Content	Rewrites key pages so each answer stands on its own, and writes pages for the questions buyers ask.	Yes, if you have a writer who knows the product. See answer-ready passages.
Reputation	Works on the sites AI answers cite: review sites, comparison articles, the press and communities.	It's slow, and it's where outside help is most likely to earn its fee.
Measurement	Asks a fixed set of buyer questions on a schedule and reports who was named and cited.	By hand for a few questions, with an AEO tool beyond that.

Check the balance between those parts. In the 869 AI answers to software buying questions behind our leaderboards, 17% of cited links went to the vendors we track, and the rest went to review sites, publishers, forums and other companies. Other markets may differ, but a package that only produces articles for your own blog may leave most of those sources untouched.

Much of this overlaps with SEO. Google says the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that no special optimizations are necessary. If you already pay an SEO agency, ask what it covers before you add a second one.

What agencies charge

Most agencies quote by proposal. These four publish prices, which we read on their own pages on 4 November 2026.

Agency	Price shown	What the page lists
AEO Engine	$1,597/mo Growth, $2,997/mo Scale, from $10,000/mo Enterprise	Managed content, authority work and AI visibility tracking. Growth and Scale start with a 90-day first term, billed monthly.
Discovered Labs	From €5,495/mo	20+ articles a month, technical audits, schema work and tracking. Month to month with 30 days' notice.
Nugentive	$297 one-time audit, $497/mo Done With You, $1,497/mo Done For You (waitlist)	An audit with a 90-day roadmap. Monthly coaching and re-audits while your team does the work. Done For You adds schema and 3 to 5 pages a month. No contracts.
RevenueZen	$3,000 to $15,000/mo across six packages	Foundation at $3,000 has 4 articles and 3 page refreshes a month, and leaves out link building, LinkedIn, content repurposing and original research.

The largest published sample we found comes from First Page Sage, an agency that sells this work, so read it with that in mind. It says it compiled 1,146 quotes from 214 agencies between July and October 2026, and it puts the median retainer at $6,850 a month. Its tier medians run from $2,950 for local and small businesses to $31,500 for large enterprises. We couldn't check the underlying data.

What to ask before you sign

Which questions will you measure, and can I read the answers? Agree a fixed set before the work starts, and ask to open the full answer behind any number.
What is the baseline? Without a reading from before the work, no later figure proves anything. Answers vary between runs, so the baseline should be a sample of answers, not one screenshot.
What will change in the first 90 days? Ask for named pages and named outside sites. "Content and authority" isn't a plan.
What isn't included? One published package above leaves out link building, LinkedIn, content repurposing and original research. Those may be the parts you need.
How long am I committed? Terms on the pages above run from no contract to a 90-day first term, and longer minimums are common elsewhere.
Who owns what if we part ways? The content, the accounts, the question set and the past readings should stay with you.
How many pages, and who reviews them? Google's spam policies name using generative AI to create many pages without adding value as an example of scaled content abuse. Volume alone isn't a selling point.

Warning signs

A guaranteed citation or position. Google says meeting every requirement doesn't guarantee a page will be crawled, indexed or served, and no agency controls what ChatGPT says.
A required AI file or special markup. Google says you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema.org data to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Other services may read such files, as our guide to llms.txt explains, but none of them is a shortcut.
A single score with nothing behind it. Ask how the score is built, and which answers it came from.
One screenshot as proof. The same question asked twice can name different brands, so one good answer shows very little.
Return figures that give each AI mention a dollar value. Being named isn't proof of traffic or sales. Ask where the value per mention came from.
Vague community work. Ask who posts on forums and review sites, from which accounts, and whether they say who they work for. If undisclosed posts come to light, your brand carries the cost.

Do you need an agency?

Where you are	What to do first
You have never checked what AI says about you	Ask a dozen real buyer questions by hand in two or three AI services. It's free, and a short checklist covers the rest of the first week.
You have a writer but no way to measure	Buy a tool, not a service. Several AEO tools start under $100 a month.
You know the gaps but have nobody to do the work	Hire for a fixed scope, such as a set of named pages, and judge that work before you commit to a retainer.
AI answers keep citing sites that never mention you	This is the strongest case for outside help. Look for an agency that can name the sites it would work on.
You already pay an SEO agency	Ask what it covers, and add measurement before you add a second agency.

Keep your own measurement

Whoever does the work shouldn't be the only one grading it. Keep the question set and the readings in your own account, so the results survive a change of agency. A spreadsheet works for a few questions, and how to measure AI visibility without false claims covers the pitfalls. IndexHalo is one tool for this, and it keeps every original answer. An example report shows what that looks like. If you run an agency yourself, see IndexHalo for agencies.

What this guide can't tell you

Published prices are a small, self-selected part of the market, because most agencies quote privately. We haven't worked with the agencies named here, so we can't say whether their work gets results. Prices change, so check each page before you rely on a figure.

Primary references

Common questions

How much do answer engine optimization services cost?

On the agency pages we read on 4 November 2026, prices ran from $497 a month for coaching to $15,000 a month for a full program, and larger work is often quoted privately. First Page Sage, an agency that sells this work, reports a median of $6,850 a month in its own sample.

Can an AEO agency guarantee that ChatGPT will cite my brand?

No. No agency controls what an AI answer says, and answers vary from run to run. Google says even a page that meets every requirement isn't guaranteed to be crawled, indexed or served. A fair promise covers the work to be done and how it will be measured.

What is the difference between an AEO agency and an SEO agency?

Much of the work overlaps, and Google says the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI Overviews and AI Mode. An AEO service adds measurement of AI answers and usually more attention to the outside sites those answers cite. Ask an existing SEO agency what it already covers.

How long does an AEO engagement last?

Minimum terms on the pages we read ran from none to 90 days, and First Page Sage reports typical minimums of 3 to 12 months depending on the tier. A blocked crawler can be fixed quickly, while content and reputation work needs repeated measurement over several weeks before you can tell a real change from normal variation.

Do I need an agency for AEO?

Not to start. You can check a dozen buyer questions by hand and fix crawler access yourself. An agency makes more sense once you know the gaps and lack the people to write the content or win coverage on other sites.