AEO Pricing: What "Cheap," "Fair," and "Overpriced" Look Like

What you are actually buying

Strip the branding off any AEO proposal and you should find some subset of this list. If an item is not here, ask what it is.

• —Technical readability: server-rendered content, fast mobile pages, sitemap, robots.txt, canonicals, llms.txt.
• —Page structure: one page per service, real pages for the towns or industries you serve.
• —Answer-first rewriting: question headings, answers in the first two sentences, specifics instead of adjectives.
• —Structured data: LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage markup that reflects what the pages state.
• —FAQ development: four or five real customer questions per page with factual answers.
• —Consistency work: name, address, phone, hours and services identical across site, profile and listings.
• —Measurement: conversion tracking, plus a monthly log of which businesses answer engines name for your key questions.

Roughly two-thirds of that is one-time. That single fact should shape every price you accept.

The cheap tier, and when it is fine

Under about $300 a month, or a couple hundred dollars one-off, you are generally getting a plugin or a template: schema injected automatically, a generic FAQ block, maybe an AI-written post or two with no review.

It is not always worthless — automatic schema on a site that had none is a genuine improvement. But it cannot fix the two things that matter most: whether your content is readable and whether your pages say anything specific. A label on an empty box stays empty.

Fine if: your foundation is already strong and you want the markup handled. Not fine if: your site is a five-page brochure with no prices, no service pages and no named towns.

The fair tier

A fair AEO engagement is priced against the deliverable list, has an end date for the structural work, and hands you something you keep. In practice that looks like a build or a rebuild with the AEO work inside it, plus a small ongoing cost for hosting and any new content you genuinely want.

It should include a before and after you can check yourself: what your pages looked like, what they say now, and which questions you are tracking in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google. No guarantees about placement — nobody can promise a citation — but clear evidence the work was done.

The overpriced tier, and how to spot it

Overpriced is not defined by the number. It is defined by paying monthly for work that finished months ago. A few reliable signals:

• —A separate AEO retainer stacked on an SEO retainer with overlapping deliverables.
• —No item on the proposal that is described as one-time.
• —Guaranteed placement in AI answers — which nobody controls.
• —Deliverables measured in hours, calls and dashboards rather than in pages, markup and copy.
• —A twelve-month contract with a cancellation fee, on a five-page site.
• —“Proprietary AI optimization” with no explanation of what changes on your pages.

Two questions cut through most of it: which of these deliverables are one-time, and what happens to my fee when they are done? And: what specifically will be different on my pages in 30 days?

Do the twelve-month math before you sign

Multiply any monthly quote by twelve and compare it against a website build. A $1,200-a-month AEO-plus-SEO retainer is $14,400 a year. A ten-page build with us is $300 plus $250 in extra pages plus $600 in hosting — $851 in the same year, with the structural work finished.

That comparison is the whole argument, and it is why our savings calculator exists: put in what you pay now, how many pages you need and whether you run ads, and it shows the twelve-month difference on your numbers rather than ours.

What one-time work should cost, item by item

Rough shape of the structural work, so you can sanity-check any quote against it.

• —Technical foundation — rendering, speed, sitemap, robots, canonicals, llms.txt: part of a competent build, not a separate service.
• —Each additional service or city page: a small per-page cost. Ours is $50.
• —Answer-first rewriting of an existing page: under an hour per page once the facts are gathered.
• —Schema for a local business site: a one-time setup, then it maintains itself unless your services change.
• —FAQ development: the slow part is deciding on real answers with real numbers, which only you can supply.
• —Conversion tracking: one setup, then leave it alone.

Add those up and a ten-page local site is a four-figure project at most — not a $14,000-a-year commitment. Anyone quoting the latter should be able to explain which line item recurs monthly and why.

What is worth paying for every month

Being fair to ongoing spend: three things genuinely recur, and they are worth funding if you want them.

• —New content. If you are publishing service pages, city pages or posts every month, pay for that specific output.
• —Accuracy. Prices, hours, services and staff change, and stale facts actively hurt you now that engines cross-check.
• —Hosting. Ours is $50 a month, with the first payment 30 days after checkout.

If you also run Google Ads, management is genuinely ongoing work: $300 to set up the first campaign, $200 per additional campaign, and $100 a month per active campaign. Ad spend goes to Google. That is a real monthly service because the auction changes weekly — unlike your schema markup.

Why we can price it this way

Not because we cut scope. Because of how the work is produced: AI drafts copy, assembles pages and handles the repetitive parts, while people in the US decide the structure, verify every claim, review the copy and approve what ships. The efficiency goes into the price instead of the margin.

The alternative model — billing a local business monthly for a finished five-page site — made sense when production was slow and manual. It does not anymore, and pretending otherwise is the actual reason local marketing got so expensive.

If you are holding a quote and want a second opinion grounded in your own site, run the free audit, then run the savings calculator. Both are free, and neither puts you on a call.