How much does AEO cost? A sourced pricing index

Answer engine optimization (AEO) services cost from $99 for a one-time report (opens in a new tab) to more than $15,000 a month for a full agency program (opens in a new tab), according to the prices sellers published on their own pages, checked on September 27, 2026. Agency audits were listed at about $1,500 (opens in a new tab) to $5,000 (opens in a new tab). Monthly programs had starting prices from $497 (opens in a new tab) to $12,000 a month (opens in a new tab), and monitoring software cost $29 (opens in a new tab) to $999 a month (opens in a new tab). Many agencies publish no price at all (opens in a new tab).

This page is an index of those published prices. Each price links to the page where the seller states it. The index covers work sold as AEO, as generative engine optimization (GEO), or under other names, because the names describe much of the same work. The prices are list prices: we found no survey of what buyers actually paid.

AEO HQ sells AEO services, so it has an interest in how this market is described. Its own prices are on its pricing page and in How AEO HQ prices below. The index does not rank sellers, and it includes only sellers whose prices we could check on their own pages.

How AEO work is priced

Sellers price AEO in six ways. A software company that sells its own AEO tool describes four of them (opens in a new tab): monthly retainers, one-time audits plus implementation, software subscriptions, and hybrids of these (vendor guide).

• One-time audit. A fixed fee for a report on how a site and a brand appear in search results and AI answers. Some audits are run by software in minutes. Others are done by people over days or weeks.
• Diagnostic or strategy engagement. A fixed fee for an audit plus a plan.
• Monthly retainer. A monthly fee for ongoing work: content, technical fixes, work on third-party sources, and reporting. Many retainers have a minimum term.
• Software subscription. A monthly fee for a tool that sends questions to AI assistants and reports how often a brand is mentioned or cited. The buyer does the work. The price usually rises with the number of prompts tracked. A prompt is one question sent to an AI assistant.
• Hourly consulting. One agency puts hourly rates at $50 to $300 (opens in a new tab), and a guide for agencies puts them at $100 to $250 (opens in a new tab) (vendor estimates).
• Performance-based pricing. Part of the fee depends on a result. See Performance-based and outcome-based pricing.

Two terms recur below. A mention is an AI answer naming a company. A citation is a link to a source shown with an answer. AI visibility is how often answers to a company's buyer questions mention or cite it.

Published prices, September 2026

Each row gives the price as the seller published it, in the seller's currency, on September 27, 2026. Most come from the seller's own pricing or service page. A few come from an article the seller published about itself, as marked. "From" marks a starting price. Rows run from lowest to highest price.

One-time audits and diagnostics

Monthly programs

Monitoring software

These tools measure; they do not do the work. HubSpot says a monitoring tool "doesn't execute the fixes" (opens in a new tab) (vendor guide).

Freelance marketplaces

Fiverr's generative engine optimization category showed more than 3,400 results (opens in a new tab). On the category page, listings started at $10 to $495, and 15 of the 42 listing titles offered backlinks, link building, or directory citations (opens in a new tab) (AEO HQ's count). Google's spam policies list buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam (opens in a new tab) (official documentation).

What published pricing guides say

Several vendors publish guides with market ranges. The guides agree on the broad shape of the market: tools cost tens to hundreds of dollars a month, and managed programs cost thousands. None of them reports a survey of what buyers paid, and several base their ranges on other vendors' articles. For example, one guide's retainer ranges cite an agency's blog (opens in a new tab), and another's cite three other pricing articles (opens in a new tab).

The guides disagree most on audits. One agency writes that most AI audits on the market cost $500 to $1,500 (opens in a new tab), another puts done-for-you audits at $1,500 to $5,000 (opens in a new tab), and two others put a standalone audit at $8,000 to $25,000 (Humanswith.AI (opens in a new tab); Sparkle Technologies (opens in a new tab)). The difference comes from what each one calls an audit, as the next section shows.

What makes prices differ

Price follows scope. HubSpot lists five factors that drive most of the spread (opens in a new tab): content scope, schema and entity work, off-site authority building, monitoring coverage, and reporting depth (vendor guide). For audits, four differences stand out:

1. How many questions are tested, and how many times. AI answers change between runs. When the same prompt was repeated, ChatGPT and Google's AI returned the same list of brands less than once in 100 runs, and Claude only slightly more often (opens in a new tab) (2,961 runs, November–December 2025; vendor study). A test of five questions, run once each, cannot say how often a brand is named: if none of the five answers names it, the 95% range for its true rate still runs from 0% to 43% (AEO HQ's calculation, using the Wilson interval, which suits small samples (opens in a new tab)).
2. Which assistants are tested, and through which interface. In one audit of product recommendations, the API and the consumer app of the same assistant shared only 12.0% (ChatGPT) and 14.8% (Gemini) of cited domains (opens in a new tab) (preprint). An audit run only through an API may not show what buyers see.
3. Whether a person analyses the results. Automated reports arrive in minutes or hours. Audits by people take days or weeks (see the tables above).
4. Whether the audit includes a plan or implementation. One vendor names implementation as the biggest single jump in audit price (opens in a new tab) (vendor guide).

Retainers differ in content volume, off-site work, and reporting. They also differ in costs outside the headline price, covered next.

Terms to compare besides the price

The published terms vary as much as the prices. The right-hand column is our recommendation.

Performance-based and outcome-based pricing

Some sellers tie part of the fee to results. One agency offers "performance-based deals on case-by-case basis" (opens in a new tab), and another describes its own model as "outcome-based" (opens in a new tab). HubSpot's guide lists a retainer "backed by a performance guarantee" as one hybrid model (opens in a new tab), and says that money-back guarantees are fine but that no AEO vendor can promise citations or mentions (opens in a new tab) (vendor guide).

No platform guarantees placement. OpenAI says of ChatGPT search that "Placement is not guaranteed" (opens in a new tab). Bing says "GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations in AI experiences" (opens in a new tab). Google says third-party tools "can't guarantee performance" (opens in a new tab) (all official documentation). A performance fee therefore pays for a result that neither the buyer nor the seller controls.

If you consider a performance-based contract, we recommend four conditions:

1. Pay on a rate, not a rank. Define the result as how often answers mention or cite you, for each assistant. Positions are too unstable to pay on: it took about 1 in 1,000 runs to see two brand lists in the same order (opens in a new tab) (vendor study).
2. Fix the measurement before signing. Agree on the questions, the assistants, the number of runs, clean sessions, and who runs the tests. A 2026 survey of 45 studies recommends 7 to 8 runs per prompt, 3 to 5 paraphrases, several named engines, and several time windows (opens in a new tab) as a starting design (preprint).
3. Agree on a baseline and a comparison. In the only controlled field study we found, ChatGPT referrals to pages that were not changed grew 3.5 times (opens in a new tab) over the study period (preprint; one site). A simple before-and-after comparison would have credited that growth to the work.
4. State what happens when the result is missed, and what you still pay for.

How AEO HQ prices

AEO HQ sells AEO services, so this section describes its own offer. Its four packages have fixed, one-time prices, published on its pricing page, and each can be bought online there.

Terms, as the pricing page states them:

• The full $2,500 Audit price is credited at checkout if you upgrade to the Blueprint within 30 days of buying the Audit, using the same email.
• The Audit is typically delivered in about two weeks from completed intake.
• Content writing is not included in any package.
• Two services are priced differently. The Technical Implementation add-on starts at $5,000 and is scoped by email. A monthly retainer for ongoing content work after the Blueprint has no published price; the pricing page asks buyers to book a call.

The $499 audit is a quick technical check plus a small sample of one AI model's answers, and the methodology page describes what it does and its limits. Two limits matter here: the model answers each of five buyer questions once, and the model writes the readiness score without a fixed formula, so the score is a summary judgment, not a measurement.

Against the index above, the $499 audit is priced at the top of the range for automated reports ($99 to $499), and the $2,500 Audit sits inside the $1,500 to $5,000 range of one-time audits by agencies. The $4,995 and $8,995 packages are one-time fees, while most of the agencies listed sell monthly retainers.

Why AEO HQ publishes fixed prices: transparent pricing has been buyers' top wish-list item in TrustRadius surveys for four years running (opens in a new tab) (review-platform survey). 27% of US B2B professionals who use AI at work said AI vendor recommendations don't reflect real pricing or contract structures (opens in a new tab) (vendor survey; 519 respondents, March–April 2026). In a controlled test of six AI models, a source that mentioned a price was significantly more likely to be cited first in all six (opens in a new tab) (peer-reviewed; laboratory). None of these studies shows that publishing prices wins more customers. Hiding prices is entry 10 in Answer engine optimization antipatterns.

What the evidence shows and does not show

FAQ

How much does an AEO audit cost?

Published one-time audits ran from $99 for a report (opens in a new tab) to $5,000 for a flat-fee agency audit (opens in a new tab), and one strategy engagement started at $7,500 (opens in a new tab). The difference is mostly scope: how many questions are tested and how many times, on which assistants, whether a person analyses the results, and whether a plan is included.

How much does an AEO agency cost per month?

Published starting prices for monthly programs ran from $497 a month (opens in a new tab) for a done-with-you plan to $12,000 a month (opens in a new tab), and top tiers reached $15,000 to $18,000 or more (opens in a new tab). Several agencies started at $2,500 (opens in a new tab) to $4,000 a month (opens in a new tab). A software vendor's guide puts ongoing agency programs at about $9,000 to $15,000 or more a month (opens in a new tab).

How much does a GEO agency cost?

About the same, because sellers use both names for the same work. Several retainers in the index are sold as GEO, including WebFX's (opens in a new tab) and Omniscient Digital's (opens in a new tab).

How much does HubSpot AEO cost?

HubSpot AEO costs $50 a month on its own, with no other HubSpot subscription required (opens in a new tab). HubSpot's blog adds that it is included in Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise, costs $45 a month when billed annually, and has a 28-day free trial that tracks 25 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity (opens in a new tab). It is a monitoring tool, so the work itself is extra.

Why are some AI visibility audits so much cheaper than others?

They test less and analyse less. An automated report can send a few questions to one AI model once each and return in minutes; AEO HQ's own $499 audit, for example, asks one model five questions, once each. A human-led audit may test many questions several times on several assistants and add a plan. Because answers vary between runs, the smaller test gives a much less precise result; see What makes prices differ.

Do I need a separate budget for AEO?

Often not all of it. Google says optimizing for generative AI search "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO" (opens in a new tab) (official documentation), so much of the work overlaps with SEO. HubSpot warns that cutting SEO to fund AEO "can weaken the rankings that feed those citations" (opens in a new tab) (vendor guide). In our view, the parts that usually need new money are measurement across several assistants and work on third-party sources.

What is outcome-based GEO pricing?

A contract in which part of the fee depends on a measured result, such as how often AI answers mention the brand. See Performance-based and outcome-based pricing for what to agree before signing.

Is AEO worth what it costs?

That depends on whether your buyers use AI assistants and on what you can measure. Is AEO worth it? What the evidence says sets out the evidence for and against.

Change log

• September 28, 2026: First published. All prices checked on September 27, 2026.

Next steps

AEO HQ's packages and what each includes are on the pricing page. To compare providers, including AEO HQ, see How to choose an AEO or GEO agency and AEO HQ's answer engine optimization services.