AEO is priced the same way as most marketing work: a monthly retainer, not a single invoice. A lean, properly scoped UK engagement typically starts around £1,000 to £1,500 a month, rising for competitive categories or wider engine tracking. Cheap one-off “AI visibility” audits exist for less, but they price a diagnosis. The number that matters is what a proper programme costs to run.
Quick links
- How much does AEO cost?
- Why is there no settled market rate for AEO yet?
- What should a real AEO programme include?
- What does a cheap AEO checklist leave out?
- How does AEO spending sit alongside your existing SEO budget?
- FAQ
How much does AEO cost?
A properly scoped AEO retainer for a UK SME typically starts around £1,000 to £1,500 a month, with more complex or multi-location businesses running higher, and a separate one-off line if the site itself needs rebuilding before any of it can land.
For context rather than a pitch, our own three tiers give a sense of the shape. A Foundation scope, priced from £1,000 a month, suits a small team taking AEO seriously for the first time. A Growth tier, from £1,500 a month, suits a business running several service lines with a sales team that needs feeding. A custom Scale tier covers multi-location or multi-brand operations with a genuine PR angle attached. The full breakdown of what sits inside each one is on our pricing page.
We sell AEO and generative engine optimisation, GEO, as the same commercial retainer, because the content, technical and off-site work overlaps too heavily to price separately. We work through the same numbers from the GEO side, including what moves a quote up or down, in GEO pricing: what generative engine optimisation should cost.
If a quote comes in well under that lean range, ask precisely what is excluded. A single audit, a batch of FAQ pages, or a schema install dressed up as “AEO” are all real deliverables. None of them, on their own, is the programme.
A handful of things legitimately push a quote up or down: how competitive the category already is, how many locations or brands need separate entity work, how many engines and prompts get tracked each month, and how much of the existing site needs technical rework before anything else can land. Two honest quotes for two different businesses can sit a long way apart and both still be fair, which is why the range above is a starting point for the conversation, not the end of it.
Why is there no settled market rate for AEO yet?
Because the buyer behaviour that justifies paying for AEO at all only shifted very recently, and pricing for a service normally lags a year or two behind the demand that made it necessary.
Half of B2B software buyers now start their research with an AI chatbot rather than a search engine, up from 29% just eleven months earlier, according to G2’s Answer Economy report, based on a March 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B decision-makers. That is not a slow-moving trend agencies had years to price against. It is a shift measured over months, which is exactly why the commercial category is still forming underneath it.
Search around for “AEO pricing” and you will find quoted figures spanning from a few hundred pounds a month to numbers with several more zeros on the end, frequently for entirely different scopes filed under the same two letters. Some of that is genuinely tiered by business size. A fair amount of it is two agencies calling very different amounts of work by the same name. Neither of those is dishonest, exactly, but it means a headline number on its own tells you almost nothing. What tells you something is the scope behind it, which is why we set out what an AEO agency actually does, work by work, in a separate piece on the agency side.
What should a real AEO programme include?
A defensible AEO programme covers four things run together: a baseline audit, answer-shaped content work, the technical and schema layer, and ongoing entity and monitoring work. Drop one and the other three do noticeably less.
- A baseline audit. Real prompt testing across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google, plus a check of your schema and whether crawlers can actually reach your pages.
- Content restructured to answer, not just rank. Existing pages rewritten so the answer sits in the first sentence, with new pages built around the questions buyers are genuinely asking.
- The technical layer. Structured data and a hard look at whether the site itself, particularly anything JavaScript-heavy, is quietly stopping AI crawlers from reading what you have already written.
- Entity and off-site signals. Consistent business details across directories and profiles, genuine mentions elsewhere, and reviews that name what you do and for whom. This is the slowest part, and the part a cut-price package tends to skip entirely.
- Monthly monitoring. Testing the prompts that matter, engine by engine, so the programme adjusts to what is and is not moving rather than running on faith for six months.
We go through the underlying shift these four pieces respond to in what AEO actually is, and through the same scope from the GEO angle in the GEO pricing piece linked above.
What does a cheap AEO checklist leave out?
A checklist tells you where you stand today. It does not do the ongoing content, technical and entity work that changes where you stand in six months, and treating the two as interchangeable is the single most common mistake we see buyers make.
The research behind the underlying discipline backs this up structurally. Researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi tested individual optimisation techniques, such as adding citations, quotations and statistics, and found the strongest of them could lift visibility in generative answers by up to 40% on their own, according to their paper introducing the term Generative Engine Optimization. Combining techniques still beat any single one, by a further 5.5% at best, which is the more honest number for what stacking several changes at once actually buys you. A checklist typically hands you one lever. A programme pulls several at once, measures what moved, and adjusts the next month based on what did not.
That does not mean a checklist is worthless. Knowing where you stand is a genuinely useful first step, and it costs nothing but time. If you want the free version before spending anything, our own DIY AI search audit walks through the same six checks we run for a paying client, minus someone doing the fixing afterwards. Just be honest with yourself about which stage you are actually buying.
How does AEO spending sit alongside your existing SEO budget?
Mostly as an addition to what you already spend on SEO and content, not a wholly separate line, because a large share of the underlying work, technical foundations, content quality, structured data, already funds both disciplines at once.
The broader “AI” budget line is already real for businesses the size that get asked about it in surveys. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey, based on responses from 401 marketing leaders across North America, the UK and Europe collected between January and March 2026, found CMOs allocating an average of 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI initiatives. Most respondents in that survey run annual revenue north of a billion dollars, so treat the figure as evidence that a budget category exists, not as a benchmark to copy at SME scale.
For a five-to-twenty-person marketing function, the honest comparison is not AEO against SEO as two competing pots of money. It is AEO as the next line item inside the budget you already run, sized for your business rather than an enterprise’s, and aimed at the same buyers your SEO work is already trying to reach. If your SEO retainer already covers solid technical foundations and decent content, the incremental AEO cost usually buys the answer-shaping, schema and entity work layered on top, not a rebuild of everything underneath it.
If SEO and AEO end up with two separate providers, ask upfront who owns the overlap: the technical foundation, the content calendar, the reporting. Splitting a genuinely shared workload across two invoices without anyone owning the join is the quickest way to end up paying twice for the same schema markup and still missing the entity work that neither provider thought was theirs to do.
Get a number sized to your business, not a category average
Ranges are useful for planning, but the figure that matters is the one that fits your scope. Our pricing page sets out our tiers in full, including exactly what sits inside each one. If you would rather see the evidence before the number, our free AI search audit shows where your site actually stands first, no obligation either way.
- Full tier breakdown, from a lean proof-of-concept scope to full market coverage
- What is genuinely included at each level, not a vague "AI visibility" package
- A free audit first, if you would rather see the evidence before the number