How much does an AEO agency cost?
Published rates across the category
Pricing transparency is unusual here. Of the ten agencies most frequently recommended in AEO roundups, only four publish rates at all. The following are publicly stated figures rather than estimates.
| Agency | Published rate | Positioning |
|---|---|---|
| AIGNCI Digital — Foundation | $2,500/mo | Local and owner-operated |
| Optimist | From $2,500/mo | SaaS content and AEO |
| AIGNCI Digital — Citation Authority | $4,500–6,500/mo | Build the evidence that gets a brand named and cited |
| RevenueZen | From $5,000/mo | B2B SEO and AEO |
| Discovered Labs | ~$5,500/mo | AEO specialist, month-to-month |
| AIGNCI Digital — Category Leadership | $8,500–14,000/mo | Category expertise, earned proof, and public-record governance |
| Omniscient Digital | From $10,000/mo | Enterprise content |
| iPullRank | $50,000/mo minimum | Enterprise relevance engineering |
What should be included at each level
Below roughly $2,000 per month you should expect a defined, narrow scope: multi-engine tracking against a modest prompt set, schema and entity maintenance, a small number of published pages per month, and local optimization if relevant. That is a real program if it is genuinely delivered — but it cannot include a meaningful digital PR component, because earned placements take senior time.
Between $4,000 and $7,000 the addition should be scale and corroboration: a larger tracked prompt set, more published content, full citation-architecture work on priority pages, entity disambiguation, and the beginnings of an earned-mention program.
Above $8,000 you are paying for the consensus layer — sustained digital PR, media relationships, executive positioning, partnership activation, and reputation monitoring. This is where costs rise steeply, because it is people-intensive and cannot be automated.
Across all levels, one question separates real programs from repackaged SEO: ask what the monthly report contains. If it does not include a fixed prompt set re-measured across multiple engines with share of answer against named competitors, you are buying content production with AEO on the invoice.
Pricing signals worth treating as warnings
A guarantee of specific citation placement. Nobody controls model output; anyone promising a named position is either misrepresenting the mechanism or planning to move the goalposts at reporting time.
Answer-engine visibility results promised within thirty days. Measurable citation movement takes three to four months and compounding returns six to twelve. AIGNCI’s 30-day commitment applies to citation-ready website delivery—not to a promised visibility outcome.
Long lock-in contracts in a channel this new. Month-to-month terms are increasingly standard among specialists precisely because the discipline is two years old and nobody can honestly commit a client to twelve months of a method that may need revising.
Refusal to state a price band at all. There are legitimate reasons for custom scoping, but a firm that will not indicate an order of magnitude before a sales call is optimizing for its own conversion rate rather than your time.
How to think about return
The arithmetic in this channel is unusual because volume is low and intent is extremely high. Seer Interactive measured ChatGPT referral traffic converting at 15.9% against 1.76% for Google organic — roughly nine times better.
That changes the calculation on a small retainer considerably. A program that produces a few hundred AI-referred sessions a month can outperform a channel producing several thousand organic ones, which is why per-session cost is the wrong lens here and cost per acquired customer is the right one.
How much does an AEO audit cost?
One-time AEO and AI visibility audits typically cost $1,500 to $5,000 depending on depth. The AIGNCI Introductory Audit is $5,000 and includes a full-estate crawl, raw-HTML structured data inspection, render-path and crawler-access verification, an entity resolution audit, an answer-extractability scan, competitive benchmarking against named rivals, and a priority-banded remediation register — delivered as a written report whose length follows the estate, typically ten to thirty pages. It is credited in full toward any retainer started within 30 days.
Is AEO more expensive than SEO?
Broadly comparable at equivalent scope, and often bundled together since AEO depends on the same technical foundation. AEO engagements tend to allocate more budget to digital PR and earned mentions and less to link acquisition, which can raise cost at the upper end because earned placement is people-intensive.
Should AEO agencies offer month-to-month terms?
It is a reasonable expectation and increasingly common among specialists. The discipline is roughly two years old and best practices are still shifting, so committing a client to a twelve-month contract for a method that may require revision is difficult to justify. Month-to-month terms also align the agency's incentives with continuing to earn the engagement.
Tell us what you are building.
If the question is about discovery, reputation, a new site, or a market move, send the context. AIGNCI will tell you whether an Audit, a build, or a more focused engagement is the right starting point.