Answer engine optimization services are the packages agencies and software vendors sell to get a brand named inside AI answers, the way SEO services exist to get pages ranked. In 2026 they cost roughly $29 to $500 a month for self-serve tracking tools, $500 to $3,000 for a one-time audit, and $2,000 to $10,000 or more a month for agency retainers, with enterprise programs reaching $50,000 a month. Most providers will not tell you that: we checked the ten pages ranking for this exact search in July 2026, and eight of them publish no pricing at all. One has a heading that says "Pricing" with no prices under it.
This page is the buyer's guide those pages are not: what the services actually contain, what they cost with sources, how results should be measured, and the questions that separate a real operation from a rebranded SEO retainer. Our own numbers are in here too, labeled as ours.
What answer engine optimization services actually include
Strip the vocabulary and every provider sells the same six blocks. What differs is whether each block produces a real artifact or a slide. The decoder:
- The visibility audit. Real artifact: a measured baseline showing which buyer questions you appear in, across which engines, with sample counts and dates. Red flag: a "free AI visibility scan" that runs each prompt once. One run is an anecdote, not a measurement.
- Question and topic mapping. Real artifact: the 10 to 25 questions your buyers actually ask assistants, verified against demand. Red flag: a keyword list with question marks added.
- Answer-first content work. Real artifact: pages restructured so each buyer question gets a direct, extractable answer near the top, the discipline behind ranking inside ChatGPT answers. Red flag: "content optimization" with no before and after.
- Structured data and technical readiness. Real artifact: schema, clean crawl paths for AI crawlers, indexation in the engines that feed the assistants. Red flag: schema presented as the whole strategy. A controlled study by Ahrefs found adding schema moved AI citations by roughly statistical noise.
- Off-site presence building. Real artifact: your brand appearing in the third-party pages assistants cite, review profiles, comparison pages, communities. This is where "best X" answers are actually won. Red flag: a promise to get you into "top tool" listicles without telling you who writes them (see below).
- Ongoing monitoring. Real artifact: a stated prompt set, sampled on a stated cadence, reported as numbers you could re-derive. Red flag: "AI visibility monitoring" with no prompt count, no sample size, and no engine list anywhere on the page.
What answer engine optimization services cost in 2026
Prices below were checked on July 16, 2026. "Listed" means the provider publishes the price; "reported" means it comes from third-party sources because the provider does not publish. Prices in this category churn fast; one tracking tool repriced twice this year.
| Tier | Provider | Entry price | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tracking tool | Otterly | from $29/mo | listed |
| Tracking tool | Peec | from $95/mo | listed |
| Tracking tool | Profound | from $99/mo | listed |
| Tracking tool | Ahrefs Brand Radar | $199/platform/mo | listed |
| Tracking tool | Scrunch | from $250/mo | listed |
| One-time audit | automated scans | $27 to ~$500 | listed |
| One-time audit | Khanna's (this is us) | $490, credited | listed |
| One-time audit | Orange Marketing | $975 to $2,975 | listed |
| One-time audit | Citable | €1,200 | listed |
| Retainer | mid-market agencies | $2,000 to $10,000/mo | reported |
| Retainer | Khanna's (this is us) | $2,500/mo, month to month | listed |
| Retainer | WebFX, Digital Elevator | from $3,000/mo | listed |
| Retainer | First Page Sage | ~$10,000/mo, 12-month minimum | reported |
| Enterprise | iPullRank and peers | $10,000 to $50,000+/mo | reported |
Three things the table cannot show. First, tool sticker prices understate real cost: per-engine add-ons and credit metering commonly push spend 30 to 50 percent higher. Second, the opacity is deliberate; one European agency that publishes its full rate card calls contact-for-quote pricing at the audit tier "an obfuscation tactic," and we agree. Third, a tool subscription and a service are different purchases: the tool tells you a number, the service is someone responsible for moving it.
Who offers these services, and a warning about "top agencies" lists
If you search for providers, you will meet ranked lists. Read them knowing this: we examined twenty "best AEO agencies" and "best GEO agencies" lists in July 2026, and sixteen were written by an agency that ranked itself first. The remainder included a pay-to-play directory with sponsored placements and a LinkedIn article whose author openly describes it as a parasite-SEO experiment designed to win AI citations for his partner agencies. We found zero neutral editorial rankings. None.
This matters beyond irony: those lists are precisely the pages AI assistants cite when someone asks "who should I hire for AEO." The recommendation layer of this industry is, today, a self-referral loop. Until neutral rankings exist, ignore position and use the evidence test: does the provider show its measurement method, its prices, and one verifiable before-and-after? Those three signals are hard to fake and rare in combination.
What "AI visibility monitoring" should mean: numbers, not vibes
Every provider lists monitoring as a deliverable. Almost none define it. Here is the definition we hold ourselves to, published so you can hold anyone to it.
Visibility is measured, not sensed: a stated set of buyer questions, asked across stated engines, multiple samples per question because AI answers are non-deterministic, on a stated cadence. Your visibility on a question is the share of sampled answers that name you, and your baseline is that number across the whole question set, dated. Anything else is a screenshot with confidence. A real audit states its sample sizes, engines, and dates on the page, and keeps the raw answers so every count can be re-derived. We run ours this way and log every piece we publish in a lab notebook with its hypothesis and its result, because we are measuring our own advice with the same instrument we sell.
Six questions to ask before you pay anyone
- Which questions will you track for us, and how did you choose them? Buyer questions verified against demand, not brainstormed keywords.
- How many samples per question, per engine? If the answer is one, the reports are noise.
- Which engines, exactly? ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, Claude, Copilot have different citation behaviors; an average across them hides more than it shows.
- What is our baseline number today? If they cannot state it, they have not measured it.
- Show one client's before and after, with dates. SEO case studies do not count as AEO proof.
- What happens when a model updates? The honest answer: answers reshuffle, we re-measure, and the work compounds through content and citations, not tricks. Anyone promising immunity to model updates is describing a product that does not exist.
How long it takes, and what nobody can promise
Nobody controls what a model says. Citations are probabilistic, which is why sample counts matter and why a guarantee of placement should end the conversation. What honest timelines look like: a measured baseline in week one; first movement on branded and low-competition questions in roughly four to eight weeks, because several engines re-read the web quickly; contested category questions take months and are won mostly off your own site, in the pages assistants already cite. Model updates are re-measurement events, not failures.
Our version
Khanna's is an AI search positioning boutique. The entry point is a $490 audit: your question set, the sampled answer ledger across engines, the citation map, the branded check, and ranked fixes, delivered within a week as a document a founder can read in one sitting. If we keep working together at $2,500 a month, the audit fee is credited in full, and the engagement is month to month, no annual minimum. You keep every measurement either way.
Common questions
Is AEO different from GEO? Same discipline, two names: optimizing for AI-generated answers rather than ranked links. We call the whole practice AI search positioning because the goal is not presence alone, it is being positioned as the answer for the questions you can win.
Can we do this ourselves? The first pass, yes: ask your top ten buyer questions in two engines and write down who gets named. The tools tier of the table exists for exactly this. What a service adds is sampling discipline, the citation map, and someone accountable for moving the numbers.
Why is your audit cheaper than the market floor? Because it is productized: one instrument, run the same way every time, priced to be an easy first yes. The expensive part of this industry is ambiguity, and we removed it on purpose.
To get the audit, write to daksh@khannasllc.com with your domain in the subject line. That is the entire intake process.