AEO Agency Costs and a Five-Check Test Before You Sign

As of October 2026, entry plans on four providers' own price pages start between $479 and $3,000 a month, and top plans start between $1,599 and $15,000. The fee mostly buys a monthly content count and a tracking allowance, so compare those before the headline price.

AEO is the work of getting a brand mentioned and cited in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google. We publish this page and sell AI visibility software with done-for-you content, so we are not one of the four providers below.

Our arithmetic, using only plans that state one content count: monthly price divided by that count. Brandify's $479 plan works out to $479 per page and its $799 plan to about $200. AEO Engine's two listed plans come to about $53 and $50 per article. RevvGrowth's come to $300 and $200. That is a band of roughly $50 to $479 per content item. The plans also include tracking, backlinks (links from other sites to yours) or strategist time, so the figure shows how different the offers are, not what an article is worth.

Tracking allowances differ as much as content. Brandify's plans track up to 10, 50 and 100 prompts, and AEO Engine's track up to 150 and 300. Contract terms differ too: Brandify and AI Advantage Agency list month-to-month plans, and AEO Engine lists a 90-day initial term.

No. Google's Search Essentials say a page that meets all its requirements and best practices is still not guaranteed to be crawled, indexed or served, and Perplexity describes its crawler as a way to surface and link sites, not a promise to cite them. An agency can influence inputs, never the output.

Google's own wording is in Google Search Essentials: "just because a page meets all of these requirements and best practices, doesn't mean that Google will crawl, index, or serve its content." Google's guide for AI search features is specific about what is not needed: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search." It adds: "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add." See Google's AI optimization guide (updated July 2026). A pitch that sells a special file (such as llms.txt, a proposed plain-text file that lists a site's key pages for AI systems) or special markup (schema markup, code that labels page content for search engines) for Google visibility fails that test. Perplexity's crawler documentation says PerplexityBot exists to surface and link sites in Perplexity search results, and that Perplexity-User may include a link to a page it visited.

Engines also disagree with each other, and with themselves. In our Citation Research work, the four engines shared a top coaching pick for only 5 of 20 Indian exams, and when the same engine was asked the same question twice, only 20% of repeat pairs named identical providers (Study 001, 800 answers). In Study 010, 71% of the 602 people named in India answers were named by only one of four engines. In Study 007, Google AI Mode cited a community platform such as Reddit, YouTube or Quora in 117 of 150 answers, while ChatGPT did in 3 of 150. Studies 007 and 010 asked each question once per engine on 5 October 2026; Study 001 repeated each question. All were asked from India, so treat them as evidence that engines differ, not as a US benchmark.

Our view is that an agency can legitimately commit to activity and measurement: pages shipped, prompts tracked, sources earned, a review each month. Any promise of a fixed citation count or ranking is a reason to walk away. One of the four price pages above lists a traffic-growth guarantee for "qualified clients"; ask exactly what qualifies before treating it as a guarantee.

Run five checks, in order. Each has a pass and a fail you can verify, and a provider that fails the first or second should not reach the third. These tests are our recommendations, built from the evidence above.

Has the agency already tested your brand in the engines?

Pass: before any contract, the agency shows the prompts it ran, the answer text and the cited URLs for your brand and two named competitors, across at least three engines. For each of three prompts you rerun, the same engines mention or omit your brand in at least two of three runs. Fail: a generic deck, or a score with no prompts behind it.

You can build this baseline yourself first. Our free AI visibility audit checks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI in about 30 seconds, with no signup or credit card, and returns a visibility score, sentiment and the competitors the engines name instead of you. For a larger baseline, our guide to running an AI visibility audit shows how to sample properly.

Does the report break results out by engine on a fixed prompt set?

Pass: the same prompts every cycle, with mention rate and cited domains per engine, the date, and how many times each prompt was run. We recommend at least 25 prompts spread across the buying journey, and more if you sell several product lines. Fail: one blended score, one engine only, or prompts that change between reports.

The reason is that answers vary from run to run and engine to engine. We track the same way: every tracked prompt is asked of every engine on the plan, so answers equal prompts times engines. A Growth plan with 100 prompts on 5 engines records 500 answers a day. Choosing the prompts is the decision that matters most, and the AI citation tracking standard sets out how to compare results over time.

Is the scope written by number?

Pass: the contract states pieces of content, tracked prompts, engines and reporting cadence per month, and says that content and accounts (including Search Console, Google's free site-performance tool, under your login) transfer to you on payment. Divide the fee by the content count and compare it with the $50 to $479 band above. Fail: phrases like "ongoing optimization" or "AI-ready content" with no quantities.

Do the promises survive Google's own guidance?

Pass: commitments to activity, measurement and review, and honesty about what is outside the agency's control. Fail: guaranteed top citations, fixed mention counts, or a claim that llms.txt files or special schema are required for Google visibility. Google's AI optimization guide says no special files or schema are needed for Google Search; use that as your reference.

Can you leave without paying for the rest of the term?

Pass: month-to-month, or an initial term of about three months followed by 30 days' written notice, with any early-exit fee capped at one month's fee. Fail: a rigid 12-month lock-in, auto-renewal that needs 60 to 90 days' notice, or a termination fee equal to the remaining contract value.

Hire an agency when nobody on your team can act on what tracking shows, such as a site that needs restructuring and no one to approve pages. Buy software when a content owner can approve pages every week and you want drafts you control. Use both when earned media and PR are the gap (our recommendation).

Software with done-for-you content is what we do. We start with the baseline from the free audit. We map the prompts your buyers use, group them by buying stage and rank them by intent, visibility gap and how winnable they are. We then draft pages against the sources engines already cite. You approve every draft before anything publishes, and pages go live on your own domain. Citations are tracked back to the page that earned them, alongside clicks and impressions from your Search Console connection.

As of October 2026, our plans are billed monthly, with annual billing saving 8% (pricing):

• Launch, $299 a month: 100 tracked prompts a week on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, with 25 content pieces a month.
• Growth, $699 a month: 100 tracked prompts daily, Gemini and Grok added, 50 content pieces a month, and technical recommendations.
• Enterprise, $1,499 a month: 200 prompts daily across seven engines, including Claude and Copilot, with 100 content pieces, technical audit and fixes, our Outreach Agent and a dedicated account manager.
• Agency: custom pricing for agencies running several client sites, with white-label delivery (reports and publishing under the agency's own brand).

By the same arithmetic as above, our plans work out to about $12, $14 and $15 per content piece ($299 / 25, $699 / 50, $1,499 / 100). A piece from us is drafted by software and approved by you, so it is not like-for-like with an article written by a strategist. If you want to see how this fits your team, Book a demo.