AEO agency: what it delivers, what it costs and 7 agencies to shortlist

An AEO agency is a firm you pay to get your brand named and cited inside the answers that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews write for your buyers. In practice it does five things: it audits what those engines say about you today, restructures your content so a model can lift it cleanly, works on your entity and on what third-party sites say about you, makes sure AI crawlers can reach your pages, and measures citations over time. Expect a retainer starting around $3,500 a month among the agencies that publish prices, and expect most of the market to quote on request.

This page is for buyers. If you first need the definition of answer engine optimization, read our AEO guide; if you are trying to work out whether AEO, GEO and SEO are three disciplines or one, see AEO vs GEO vs SEO. Below: what the deliverables should look like, what no honest agency can promise, real published prices, the questions to ask on a sales call, and a shortlist of seven agencies that sell AEO by name, each checked on its own website on October 12, 2026.

What an AEO agency actually delivers

A real AEO engagement produces five types of deliverables, and you should be able to see each one in the proposal. If a proposal only mentions "content" and "schema", you are looking at an SEO retainer with a new label.

1. An audit of AI answers, not just of your website

The starting point is a set of prompts your buyers actually type ("best payroll software for a 50-person company", "alternatives to X", "is Y worth it"), run across several engines, with a record of who gets named, who gets cited as a source, and what is said about you. This is the baseline everything else is measured against. It should also list the sources the engines lean on for your category: review sites, forums, comparison articles, Wikipedia, your competitors' pages.

2. Content restructured for extraction

Models quote passages, not pages. The work here is rewriting key pages so each section opens with a direct, self-contained answer, adding the facts, figures and sources a model can reuse, and building the formats that tend to get picked up: comparisons, definitions, pricing explanations, FAQs. The research behind this is real: the original GEO paper from Princeton and partners found that adding citations, quotations and statistics raised visibility in generative answers by up to 40% in their tests (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024).

3. Entity and third-party mention work

An engine recommends brands it can identify and that other sources vouch for. That means consistent descriptions of what you are across your site, profiles and directories, structured data that names your organization and products, and above all presence on the third-party pages engines already cite for your category. Profound's analysis of citation patterns found Wikipedia accounted for 47.9% of citations among ChatGPT's ten most-cited sources, and Reddit for 46.7% of Perplexity's (Profound). An agency that never talks about earned mentions is only working on half the problem.

4. Technical access for AI crawlers

Each engine uses its own bots, and blocking the wrong one removes you from its answers. OpenAI, for example, separates OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), ChatGPT-User (pages fetched on a user's request) and GPTBot (model training), so you can refuse training while staying visible in search (OpenAI). The agency should check your robots.txt, CDN and firewall rules, and whether your key content renders without JavaScript. You can run the first check yourself with our AI crawler checker.

5. Measurement of citations over time

The agency should report, at a fixed cadence, how often you are mentioned and cited on a stable prompt set, across named engines, against named competitors. Because AI answers vary from one run to the next, a serious report shows trends over many runs rather than a single screenshot. SparkToro's research found that AIs rarely return the same list of brands twice for the same question (SparkToro), which is exactly why one-off screenshots prove nothing.

Key takeaway: ask to see all five deliverables in the proposal: AI answer audit, content restructuring, entity and mention work, crawler access, citation reporting. Missing the audit or the reporting means you cannot tell whether anything worked.

What an AEO agency should not promise

No agency controls what a model writes, so any guarantee of a citation or a "position" in ChatGPT is a red flag. Answers change with the prompt wording, the user's history, the engine version and plain randomness. There is no position one to hold.

Watch for these promises in particular:

• Guaranteed citations or guaranteed mentions on a given engine, or a refund if you are not cited by a date.
• Fixed rankings ("we'll get you to #1 in ChatGPT"). Engines produce a paragraph, not a ranked list you can occupy.
• Results within days. NoGood, which sells AEO itself, describes early volatile mentions in the first one to two weeks, more consistent citations at 30 to 90 days, and sustained visibility over 6 to 12 months, and warns that anyone promising citations within days "isn't describing AEO" (NoGood).
• A secret file or markup that unlocks AI visibility. Google states that no special markup or llms.txt file is required to appear in its AI features (Google Search Central). An llms.txt can be a harmless extra; it is not a strategy.

What an agency can legitimately commit to: the deliverables, the cadence, the prompt set being tracked, and the method for measuring change. Those are the terms worth putting in the contract.

How much does an AEO agency cost?

Among the agencies that publish prices, a dedicated AEO or AI search retainer starts around $3,500 a month and commonly runs up to $10,000 or more; enterprise programs go well beyond that. Most agencies do not publish a number and quote after a discovery call. Here is what we could verify on the agencies' own pages, as of October 12, 2026:

Agency	What is priced	Published price
Percepture	GEO retainer, Launch to Authority tiers	$3,500, $6,000 and $8,500 per month; Enterprise from $10,000 per month
Percepture	Add-ons	AI link and mention building $1,000 to $1,600 per month; digital PR from $4,500 per month
Discovered Labs	One-time diagnostic	€4,370, credited toward a retainer signed within 14 days
Discovered Labs	Monthly retainers	€6,995 and €10,995 per month (€5,995 and €8,995 on a 6-month commitment); custom from €15,995
The Starr Conspiracy	Subscription engagement (all services)	From $15,000 per month; projects from $35,000
NoGood	Monthly retainer	Average retainer stated as above $20,000 per month
Omniscient Digital	Full-service engagement	From $120,000 per year
Citeme	Self-serve platform, no agency service	€59 excl. VAT per month, or €49 per month billed annually

Two things drive the spread. The first is content volume: Percepture's tiers move from 2 to 8 or more AI-ready pieces a month, and Discovered Labs counts "content units" (up to 20, then 30). The second is off-site work, which is often sold separately and is not cheap. When you compare quotes, normalize them: how many pieces per month, how many earned mentions, which engines are tracked, and whether the tracking tool is included or billed to you on top. For a wider look at published fees across AI SEO firms, see our ranking of AI SEO agencies.

How to choose an AEO agency: questions to ask

The fastest way to separate a real AEO practice from a renamed SEO retainer is to ask for specifics on measurement and on off-site work. Six questions do most of the job:

1. Which prompts will you track, and who chooses them? You want a written prompt set built from buyer questions, validated with you, and kept stable so month-over-month comparisons mean something.
2. Which engines, exactly? "AI search" is not an answer. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Copilot, Grok: each behaves differently and your buyers may favor one.
3. How do you handle the variability of answers? A good answer mentions repeated runs and trends. A weak one shows a single screenshot.
4. What off-site work is included? Ask which third-party sites they would target for your category and why, and whether mentions are earned editorially or paid placements.
5. Can you show your own AI visibility? Ask them to run a few category prompts live on the call. An agency that cannot get itself mentioned for its own service has a harder time explaining why it can for you.
6. What happens to the data if we stop? You should keep the prompt set, the history and the content. Check who owns the tracking account.

Red flags

• Guaranteed citations, positions or timelines measured in days.
• No baseline audit before the content work starts.
• Reports based on screenshots rather than repeated measurement.
• Only on-site work: no mention of reviews, forums, comparisons or press.
• Case studies with impressive percentages but no client name, no time frame and no method.
• A long lock-in with no defined deliverables per month.

Shortlist: 7 agencies that sell AEO by name

Each agency below explicitly sells answer engine optimization, GEO or AI search optimization on its own website. The descriptions and prices come from those pages, checked on October 12, 2026. We have not worked with or tested these agencies, so this is a starting list for your own calls, not a performance ranking. For a separate, broader ranking focused on the GEO label, see our 11 best GEO agencies.

1. Citeme (Paris, France), our own agency

Full disclosure: this is us. Citeme is a GEO and AEO agency and a software platform. The agency engagement is quoted on request, with no public price. It runs on the same platform clients can use on their own: audit, GEO Score, citation tracking across 10 engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI, Mistral, Google AI Overviews and Siri AI), competitive share of voice and AI agents that draft and fix content. The self-serve platform costs €59 excl. VAT per month, or €49 per month on an annual plan, with a 7-day trial for €1; account creation and the first technical audit are free, without a card. Our limits: no public price for the agency side, so you will need a call to budget it, and we work in French and English only.

2. Percepture (New York, US)

Percepture sells GEO and AI search optimization with the most detailed public price list we found: four tiers from $3,500 to $10,000+ per month, defined by the number of AI-ready content pieces, citation mapping and call cadence, plus priced add-ons for link and mention building and digital PR. Useful if you want to budget before the first call.

3. Discovered Labs (location not stated on its site)

Discovered Labs presents answer engine optimization as its main service, alongside SEO, Reddit marketing and link building, and says it focuses on B2B companies in SaaS, fintech, healthcare and professional services. It publishes prices in euros: a €4,370 diagnostic, then retainers from €6,995 per month, with Reddit engagement counted in mentions per month. Its founders are Liam Dunne and Ben Moore.

4. NoGood (New York, Miami and Dubai)

NoGood, a growth marketing agency, sells AI search and AEO work and publishes one of the more candid buyer guides on the subject, including realistic timelines. No price list, but its site states that engagements are monthly retainers averaging above $20,000 per month, which places it at the upper end.

5. Omniscient Digital (Austin, US)

Omniscient Digital is an organic growth agency for B2B software companies that lists "Answer Engine Optimization" among its services, framed as getting recommended by LLMs. Its site lists offices in Austin, New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston, and states that full-service engagements start at $120,000 per year.

6. iPullRank (location not stated on its site)

Founded by Mike King, iPullRank sells AI search optimization under the names GEO and "relevance engineering", covering strategy, content architecture, technical work and authority building. Its service page shows investment ranges of $30,000 to $150,000, $150,000 to $500,000 and $500,000+, without stating whether they are annual or per engagement: ask. The ranges point to large organizations.

7. The Starr Conspiracy (location not stated on its site)

A B2B marketing agency that sells AEO as a named service, with content formats designed for AI extraction, structured data and entity signals. AEO is not priced on its own: engagements are subscriptions from $15,000 per month or projects from $35,000, so it fits companies buying a broader B2B marketing program.

Agency, in-house or tool?

You need an agency when the bottleneck is execution: content production, outreach for third-party mentions and technical changes nobody on your team has time for. If you have a content team and mostly lack visibility into what the engines say, a tracking platform and a few weeks of focused work may be enough before you commit to a five-figure retainer. Many companies do both in sequence: measure first, then hire for the gaps. Either way, run your own baseline before the first sales call, so you can judge every proposal against your numbers rather than the agency's.

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