AEO services pricing: adding AI search to your SEO retainer

Start as an add-on, not a new service line

Most of the work that improves AI visibility is work SEO teams already know: crawlable pages, clear structured data, answer-first content and earning mentions on sites that rank. What's new is measuring the AI answers and reporting on them.

That makes AEO easiest to sell as an add-on to an existing retainer, with its own line in the monthly report, rather than a separate engagement with a separate team.

A scope clients understand

Keep the scope concrete and countable:

• Tracking: a fixed set of buyer questions checked weekly across the main AI engines.
• Audit: AI crawler access in robots.txt, structured data, llms.txt and page-level answer quality.
• Content: a set number of answer-first pages or updates per month, chosen from the questions the client is losing.
• Reporting: an AI visibility section in the monthly report, with competitors and sources.

Pricing it

Price on the number of tracked questions and content pieces, not on outcomes. A small tier (around 10 questions, two content updates a month) is an easy yes for existing clients; larger tiers add more questions, more competitors and more content.

Avoid performance pricing tied to mentions. AI answers change too often for either side to agree on what counts as a win in a given month.

The first 90 days

Set expectations early: answers that use live web search can change within weeks, while what models learned in training changes only when they're retrained.

• Month 1: agree the questions and competitors, take a baseline, fix crawler access and schema issues.
• Month 2: publish or update pages for the highest-value questions the client is missing.
• Month 3: review the trend with the client and adjust the question set and content plan.

Make the report do the selling

A clear monthly report with the agency's branding, the client's score, share of voice against named competitors and a short list of what was done is what renews the add-on. When the client can forward it to their boss without editing it, you've done the job.