This is usually the second question business owners ask about AEO, right after "does this actually work." Here's a straight answer, along with what actually drives the price up or down.
The Range
AEO pricing generally falls into three tiers, scaled to competitive intensity and company size:
AEO Index: local competition (from $5,000/month). For businesses competing in a single local market: schema implementation, entity clean-up, initial content, and baseline monitoring.
AEO Authority: regional competition (from $15,000/month). For businesses competing across a region or several metro areas: a full audit, ongoing technical optimization, and regular authority content and backlink production.
AEO Dominate: national and international competition (from $25,000/month). For brands competing nationally or internationally in highly competitive categories: deeper competitor analysis, a larger content cadence, and more extensive entity and backlink work across markets.
Engagements typically run on 12- or 24-month terms, since AEO is a cumulative discipline: authority and content compound over time rather than delivering results in a single burst.
What Actually Drives the Price
Competitive intensity. A business in a category where AI assistants already have several well-established names to choose from needs more content, more authority-building, and more time to break in than a business in a category with little AI-optimized competition yet.
Number of markets or locations. Each additional city or service area typically means additional location-specific content and entity work, since AI systems evaluate authority market by market, not just brand-wide.
Starting point. A business with an already-strong website, existing schema, and decent review volume needs less foundational work than one starting from zero; audits typically surface this in the first 30 days and can adjust scope accordingly.
Content cadence. Higher tiers include more frequent publishing (original research, comparison pages, expert guides), which is the main lever separating a $5,000/month engagement from a $25,000/month one.
Why the Range Is So Wide Compared to a Typical SEO Retainer
Two things drive AEO's higher entry price relative to traditional SEO. First, AEO requires deeper technical and entity work up front. SEO for years mostly meant content and links; AEO adds structured data, entity consistency across the entire web, and multi-platform monitoring as core requirements, not add-ons. Second, the category is newer and less commoditized, so agencies with real expertise here are pricing to reflect specialized, still-scarce capability rather than a mature, price-competitive service.
What You Get for the Money, Regardless of Tier
Every legitimate AEO engagement should include:
- An initial AI visibility audit across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews
- Schema markup and entity optimization
- Content built to directly answer real customer questions
- Backlink and citation development from credible sources
- Regular reporting on where and how often you're being mentioned, against named competitors
If a proposal is missing more than one of these, the price may be low for a reason.
Is It Worth It?
The honest framing: AEO is a bet on where search is heading, made with today's dollars. For businesses in categories where customers are already asking AI assistants for recommendations, which is most categories at this point, the cost of staying invisible compounds the same way the cost of ignoring SEO did fifteen years ago. The businesses that build AI authority now will be harder to displace later, the same way early SEO winners built a lead that took years for competitors to close.
Not sure which tier fits your business? Get in touch first, and we'll help you figure out where you stand and how much work is actually needed before you commit to a number.