AI search optimization services are sold in three vehicles: tracking tools, one-time audits, and monthly retainers. The right one depends on your situation, not the vendor's pitch, and the pages ranking for this phrase will not help you choose, because nearly every one of them sells only the retainer. Nine of the ten we checked in July 2026 publish no price at all. The full sourced price map of this market, every provider named, lives in what answer engine optimization services cost; this page is the other half of the decision: which vehicle you actually need.
What these services optimize, and the part they all skip
Every provider sells roughly the same six blocks: a visibility audit, question mapping, answer-first content, structured data, off-site presence, and monitoring; the decoder for those blocks covers what each one should contain. What almost none of them sell is the layer that decides everything else: positioning - choosing which answers you should win, in what order, and why. Tracking tells you a number. Content fills a calendar. Positioning is the difference between publishing and winning, and it is the part this practice is named for: defend the questions about your own name first, then take the ground nobody holds yet.
The three vehicles
Tracking tools are self-serve dashboards that sample AI answers on your prompts. They start around $29 a month and climb toward $500. What they produce: a number and its movement. Who they fit: teams with someone who will act on the number. What they cannot do: tell you which questions matter or what to publish next.
One-time audits are a measured baseline with a diagnosis: where you appear, who gets named instead, which pages the machines cite, and what to fix first. Credible productized audits run from about $500 to $3,000; ours is $490, delivered in a week, priced a hair under that floor on purpose and credited in full if you continue. What they fit: any company that has never measured its AI presence once, which is most of them.
Monthly retainers are the full loop run for you: measurement, positioning calls, published moves, and re-measurement. Real mid-market retainers run $2,000 to $10,000 a month; anyone quoting far below that is reselling a tracking tool with a logo on it. What they fit: companies whose category is already contested inside AI answers, where every month of silence compounds.
Which one fits your situation
Nobody has asked an assistant about you yet. Vertical product, niche category, buyers who found you through sales. Start with the audit, not the retainer: measure the ground before paying anyone to fight for it. Half the time the finding is that your branded questions are winnable this quarter and the category questions are not - which changes everything about what to buy next.
You appear, but wrong. The machines describe you stale, confuse you with someone else, or name you third in comparisons you should win. That is a positioning problem, not a volume problem: an audit to freeze the baseline, then targeted moves against the specific broken answers.
Your category is contested and deals get LLM-compared. Buyers paste your name next to competitors into an assistant mid-deal. This is retainer ground - but only after a measured baseline, because one run is an anecdote and a retainer without a baseline can never prove it worked.
What a real first engagement produces
Whatever vehicle you choose, week one should end with artifacts you could hand a skeptic: a measured baseline with sample counts and dates, a question set verified against real buyer demand, a positioning call naming the one or two answers to take first, and KPIs you could re-derive from the raw data. If a provider cannot show you what those artifacts look like before you pay, you are buying a calendar, not a service.
Our version
Khanna's sells AI search positioning in exactly two forms, both priced in public: the $490 audit, one week, credited in full toward the first month; and the $2,500 monthly positioning engagement, month to month, no minimum - the scoreboard, four shipped moves, the publish plumbing, and one report a founder reads in one sitting. The prices are public because the expensive thing in this industry is ambiguity, and removing it is the product.
Common questions
Is AI search optimization different from AEO or GEO? Same discipline, different vocabularies: optimizing for AI-generated answers instead of ranked links. Buyers search all three names, so the honest move is one clear page per name; the AEO version carries the full market pricing.
Do we need the retainer, or is the audit enough? Start with the audit; it is the decision instrument. Most companies learn from the baseline which vehicle they actually need, and about half discover their first moves are cheap and specific rather than a monthly program.
Can our current SEO agency do this? Partly. The content and technical blocks overlap with good SEO. What usually does not exist there: sampled measurement across engines with stated error, and the positioning layer that decides which answers to take. Ask them for your baseline number; the silence is your answer.
To find out where you stand, write to daksh@khannasllc.com with your domain in the subject line. That is the entire intake process.