Answer engine optimization in 2026 is priced in three layers. Self-serve monitoring tools cost $29 to about $500 a month depending on how many prompts you track. One-time audits run from $99 for a five-query scan to $1,500 and up for a human-scoped report. Monthly agency retainers that publish prices mostly start between $2,500 and $3,500 a month, with mid-market programs at $5,000 to $10,000 and enterprise work quoted at $15,000 or more. Every figure here comes from a vendor’s own pricing page, checked October 30, 2026.
The spread is wide because “AEO” covers everything from a software dashboard to a team that writes your pages, builds your citations and runs your review program. The useful question is what a specific scope costs, who does the work, and how you will know it worked.
The three layers, priced
| Tier | What you get | Published reference points (October 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| DIY tools | A dashboard that asks a fixed set of prompts to several AI engines and logs who was named. You do the fixing. | Otterly Lite $29/month for 15 prompts; Semrush AI Visibility $99/month per domain for 25 prompts; Peec Starter $95/month for 50 prompts; Ahrefs Brand Radar AI from $199/month |
| One-time audit | A baseline of what each engine says today, a gap list and a plan | Optimum Web $99 for a five-query scan; Constant Concepts $1,500 fixed; AI Advantage Agency cites $800 to $2,500 |
| Monthly retainer, small | Tracking, fact and profile fixes, a few pages a month | Space & Story Local plan $300/month (reporting only); AI Advantage Agency Starter $2,500 to $4,500/month; Revv Growth from $3,000/month; Young Company Visibility Support $3,500/month |
| Monthly retainer, mid | More engines, more content, citation work, named lead | AI Advantage Agency Mid-Market $5,000 to $10,000/month; Revv Growth $8,000/month for 40 articles; Young Company $6,500 to $7,500/month |
| Enterprise | Dedicated strategist, full-site program, weekly reporting | AI Advantage Agency $15,000+/month; Digital Elevator full three-pillar program $21,000 to $25,000+; Peec, Profound and Semrush enterprise tiers quoted custom |
None of these firms is in Michigan, and none of them is us. They are useful because they publish numbers, which most agencies in this category do not.
DIY tools: $29 to $500 a month
The cheapest way into AEO is a monitoring subscription. You enter the questions your customers ask, the tool runs them against ChatGPT, Google’s AI features, Perplexity and others on a schedule, and you see who gets named. Prompts are the unit of pricing.
Otterly lists Lite at $29 a month for 15 prompts, Standard at $189 for 100 prompts and Premium at $489 for 400, with ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot included. Google AI Mode and Gemini are add-ons at $9, $59 or $149 a month depending on tier, Claude is $29 to $439, and an extra 100 prompts costs $99 a month on the two larger plans.
Peec AI prices Starter at $95 a month for 50 prompts, Pro at $245 for 150 and Advanced at $495 for 350, each with three active models chosen from ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot and Gemini. Enterprise is custom.
Semrush’s AI Visibility product is $99 a month per domain, billed annually, for 25 custom prompts tracked daily across ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini and Perplexity, plus an AI readiness site audit. Enterprise is custom.
Ahrefs Brand Radar AI starts from $199 a month. Ahrefs sells prompt tracking in packages of checks, where one check is one prompt on one platform in one location: $50 a month for 2,500 checks, $100 for 7,000 and $250 for 25,000, with overage billed per check. Profound publishes a free seven-day trial of 50 prompts and an enterprise tier with custom pricing; it does not list a dollar figure.
Two things to understand before you buy. A tool tells you where you stand; it does not fix anything. And prompt counts are smaller than they look once you multiply by engines. A 50-prompt plan is plenty for a single-location business and thin for a company with ten services in three markets.
One-time audits: $99 to $1,500 and up
An audit is where most businesses should start, because it answers the question that matters: what do the engines say about you right now, and why do they name your competitors?
At the low end, Optimum Web sells a $99 fixed-price scan that runs five test queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews and checks whether AI crawlers can reach your site. That is a snapshot, useful as a sanity check and not much else.
At the other end, Constant Concepts, a Phoenix firm, charges a fixed $1,500 for presence checks across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, a review of how easily your pages can be quoted, a check of business facts and schema for mismatches, a citation baseline with share of voice against named competitors, and a prioritized 90-day plan. The fee is credited toward a retainer if you continue. AI Advantage Agency, in Oceanside, California, lists audits at $800 to $2,500 and says onboarding fees of $1,500 to $5,000 are common across the industry, sometimes folded into the first month. Young Company lists a Website and Visibility Checkup at $3,500.
A worthwhile audit has four parts: a prompt baseline across more than one engine, a facts and listings check (does your name, address, phone and service list match everywhere), a citation and review gap list against the competitors getting named, and a plan in priority order. Skip the baseline and nothing that follows can be measured.
Monthly retainers: $300 to $10,000 and up
Retainers are where the real money goes, and where the scope varies most.
Space & Story, a Toronto studio, lists a Local plan at $300 a month that includes a monthly AI-traffic report. That is monitoring with a human attached, not a program.
AI Advantage Agency publishes the clearest tier map we found. Its Starter tier is $2,500 to $4,500 a month for two engines tracked (Google AI Overviews and Perplexity), two to four optimized pages a month and a monthly summary report with a shared strategist. Mid-Market is $5,000 to $10,000 a month for three to four engines including ChatGPT, six to ten pages a month, twice-monthly reporting with citation benchmarking and a dedicated account lead. Enterprise is $15,000 and up for five or more engines, ongoing full-site work and weekly reporting.
Revv Growth prices by content volume: packages start at $3,000 a month for 10 articles and top out at $8,000 a month for 40, with citation tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Copilot and Claude.
Young Company publishes a ladder of monthly programs from a $3,500 Visibility Support Program to an Integrated Agency Partnership at $8,500 and up, covering SEO, AI visibility, content, site updates and reporting together.
Digital Elevator prices in 90-day sprints instead of open-ended retainers. Sprints start at $3,500, a full three-pillar program typically runs $21,000 to $25,000 or more, and its off-site mention program starts at $3,495 a month. Its pricing guide puts most credible mid-market retainers at $2,000 to $10,000 a month.
Put together: under $500 buys monitoring, $2,500 to $4,500 buys a small program with a few pages a month, $5,000 to $10,000 buys several engines, regular content and citation work, and $15,000 and up buys a team. Our marketing agency cost guide shows how those numbers compare with general agency retainers.
The price line is production. Tracking is cheap. The jump from a $300 plan to a $3,000 plan is almost always someone writing pages, building citations and running a review program for you, the same pattern we see in social media management pricing.
What drives the price
| Driver | Low end | High end | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prompts tracked | 15 to 50 | Hundreds, per market | Each service, city and buyer question is a prompt. Tools price on this directly; agencies price on it indirectly |
| Engines covered | Two (AI Advantage’s Starter tracks Google AI Overviews and Perplexity) | Five or more, adding ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude | Each engine draws on different sources and needs its own fixes |
| Content included | Zero to two pages a month | Revv Growth’s 40 articles a month at $8,000 | Writing answer-first pages is the largest labor cost |
| Citation building | Facts fixed on your own site and Google profile | Directory and list placements, editorial mentions (Digital Elevator’s off-site program from $3,495/month) | AI engines corroborate across sources, so one good site is not enough |
| Review program | None | Managed review requests and responses | Review volume and recency are inputs to Google’s AI and local answers |
| Reporting | Monthly summary | Twice-monthly or weekly with competitive citation analysis | More frequent reports cost more and are only worth it if you act on them |
| Markets and services | One location, one service | Several cities, a service menu | Scope multiplies prompts, pages and citations |
Ask which of these rows a quote covers and in what quantity. Two proposals at $4,000 a month can differ by eight pages of content and a review program.
What is usually excluded
Read for what is missing. These are commonly billed separately or left to you:
- Photo and video for the new pages. Answer-first pages still need to look like a real business.
- Review generation. Many plans track reviews and tell you to get more; fewer run the program.
- Paid directory listings and the fees some lists charge for inclusion.
- Web development beyond page copy, including site speed and structure fixes.
- Ongoing Google Business Profile management rather than a one-time cleanup. Our Google Business Profile guide covers that work.
- Tool subscriptions, which some agencies pass through at cost and others fold in.
- Onboarding fees, which AI Advantage Agency puts at $1,500 to $5,000 across the industry.
None of these is a hidden cost if it is written down. The problem is a low monthly fee that quietly assumes you supply the content, the photos and the reviews.
Red flags
Guaranteed placement. No one controls what ChatGPT or Google’s AI says. Answers change with phrasing, with the day and with what competitors publish. An agency can commit to deliverables and to a monthly record. It cannot commit to being named.
Selling llms.txt or “AI schema” as the fix. Several vendors in this market, including some cited above, list llms.txt files and AI-specific markup as deliverables. Google’s own documentation for AI features says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, no special structured data to add, and no need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup. A file that takes an hour to make is not worth a line item, and it is not what moves results. Structured data that matches your visible page text is good practice for ordinary search; it is not an AEO product.
Prompts chosen to flatter. If the baseline tracks “best agency named YourCompany,” you will win every month. Prompts should be the questions a stranger asks: who does X in Y, how much does X cost.
No baseline. If the first report is month two, you cannot tell what changed.
Mentions with no business link. The point of being named is leads. A report that never connects to calls, forms or bookings is incomplete.
How to judge value
Two documents tell you whether an AEO engagement is working.
The first is the monthly prompt report: the same fixed prompts every month, asked to each engine the plan covers, with who was named and in what order. Because AI answers vary from run to run, a prompt counts as won only when you are named consistently across repeated checks. Google’s Search Console also reports how often a site appears in Google’s AI features, a second, independent number.
The second is lead-source tracking. Ask every new inquiry how they found you and record the answer, and watch for referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and copilot.microsoft.com in your analytics. If the prompt report improves and the lead log never changes, the prompts are wrong or the pages are not converting.
Set your budget from the job backward. One service in one city needs a short prompt list, a handful of pages and a clean profile; a monitoring tool plus a one-time audit may be enough to start. Several services across Metro Detroit and beyond need content, citations and a review program, which is retainer territory. Our guide to how AI search picks local businesses covers which signals matter most before you spend anything.
Questions to ask before you sign
- How many prompts will you track, on which engines, and can I see the list before we start?
- What is in the baseline report, and when do I get it?
- How many pages a month do you write, and who shoots the photos and video for them?
- Which directories, lists and review sites will you build citations on, and which cost money?
- Do you run the review program or tell me to?
- What do you report each month, and how does it connect to leads?
- What happens to the tool subscription and the content if I leave?
How we handle this at RAW Digital Group
RAW Digital Group quotes AEO by scope and does not publish AEO prices. We make no guarantees about placement. You can request rates on our AI search optimization page.