AEO pricing guide: what AI search visibility work costs

Last updated October 14, 2026. Written by the Third Coast AI team.

AEO and GEO work is priced in four ways: a fixed-fee audit, a monthly retainer for content and entity programs, project fees for specific pieces such as a correction campaign or a Wikidata and schema build, and software subscriptions for tracking, which run from about $29 to $489 a month (checked October 2026) at the published OtterlyAI tiers up to enterprise contracts at platforms like Profound. Agency and consultant fees are not publicly benchmarked in any study we would cite, so this page gives you the pricing models, what drives the cost inside each one, our own prices where they are set, and a method for comparing quotes.

We would rather give you a structure than a number we cannot source. If a vendor quotes you "the industry average," ask where it came from; as of October 2026 there is no independent survey of AEO agency pricing that we have been able to verify.

Which pricing models will you see?

Why does the audit price vary so much?

Because the word covers two different products. A tool export runs your brand through a monitoring platform and prints a score, and it costs whatever the subscription costs. A consultancy audit has a person write prompts for your buyers, run them repeatedly across engines, read the pages the engines cite, and check your site against the decision factors page by page, and that is days of skilled work. The second kind costs more and is the only kind that ends in a plan. The what-to-expect guide lists the components so you can see which one you are being quoted.

Does the research say anything about what to spend?

Not directly, but it says where the money should go. Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands found third-party mentions correlate with AI citations at 0.664 against 0.218 for backlinks, and the 5W citation index attributed about 85% of 680 million AI citations to earned media, which argues for budgeting entity and mention work alongside content rather than after it. Aggarwal and colleagues at Princeton found quotations, statistics and cited sources lifting visibility in generated answers by 41%, 33% and 28%, which argues for paying for careful writing over volume. Glenn Gabe's documentation of a site that lost visibility after publishing 850,000 AI-generated pages argues against paying for volume at all. And Semrush's measurement of AI-search visitors converting at 4.4 times the rate of classic organic suggests the return should be judged on lead quality rather than traffic.

Which questions separate a fair quote from an inflated one?

• How many prompts, how many engines, how many runs per prompt? Lower numbers are fine for a small business if the vendor says so plainly.
• Who does the reading? If the citation reads and proof audit are done by software, the price should reflect that.
• How many pages a month, and who writes them? A program that charges for writing you do yourself is mispriced.
• Is entity and mention work included, and is any of it paid placement? Paid placements disguised as coverage are a risk, not a service.
• How is success reported? Prompt-level change across repeated runs is the standard; a single monthly score is not.
• What is the term, and what happens to the audit fee if you continue?
• Which recommendations are backed by published research, and which are the vendor's judgment? Both are fine; conflating them is not.

Should you buy a tool or hire someone?

Both, usually in that order if budget is tight. A tracking tool at the lower tiers gives you a baseline and a monthly read for the price of a software seat, and Bing Webmaster Tools gives you Copilot and Bing AI grounding data for free once you verify. What a tool will not do is write the prompt bank well, capture the engines' hidden searches, read the cited pages, or tell you which sentence to add to which page, and that is the work that moves the answers. A reasonable path for a $5M to $100M company is a tool subscription, one consultancy audit, and then a decision about whether to run the plan in-house or on retainer. Our training option exists for companies and agencies that want the second path.

Are there costs people forget?

A few. Writing time from your own subject-matter experts, because every decision-factor page needs a reviewer who knows the business. Design and development time if the pages need templates, tables or schema your CMS does not produce. The cost of fixing accessibility problems that block AI crawlers, which is sometimes a CDN setting and sometimes a site rebuild. And time, since a six-month horizon is realistic for a trend, which means the budget conversation should be about two quarters rather than one invoice.

What are Third Coast AI's prices?

The audit is a fixed fee for one brand in one market, quoted after a short scoping call, plus a week and a fee adjustment for each additional market or brand, and it is credited against the first month of a program. The GEO content program and the citation and entity program are monthly fees that depend on page volume, whether we write or you do, and the number of target sources. Both programs run month to month after the first quarter. Ask for the current rate card and we will send it the same day.

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