Should You Hire an AEO Agency?
You should not hire an AEO agency if you already pay for SEO. Google says optimizing for its AI features is still SEO, so the work belongs with the team already on your pages. Hire one when nobody owns your search work and AI answers already sit on your buying searches. For best results, vet it like an SEO hire.
Key Points
- An AEO agency sells question research, answer-first rewrites, crawl fixes, and citation tracking, and all four are SEO work.
- AEO-only agencies quote $3,000 to $15,000 a month, against $1,000 to $5,000 for an SEO retainer that includes the same work.
- Google’s hiring guide now tells you to check any “AEO” or “GEO” advice against its official guidance.
- Only 30% of business owners would recommend their current SEO provider, so vet the people before the acronym.
What Does an AEO Agency Do?
An AEO agency gets your pages quoted by AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews. The work is question research, answer-first rewrites, crawlability fixes, and citation tracking, and every item on that list already lives inside a competent SEO engagement.
| What the agency sells | What it is | Already part of SEO? |
|---|---|---|
| Question research | Finding what shoppers ask about your products | Yes |
| Answer-first rewrites | Putting the direct answer at the top of each page | Yes |
| Crawl and index fixes | Making sure Google and AI crawlers can read the site | Yes |
| Mentions and digital PR | Getting your brand named on lists and reviews | Yes |
| AI visibility report | Logging where your brand shows up in AI answers | New |
That is not a knock on the work. The work is real and most sites need it, as I lay out in my breakdown of what AEO is. What I push back on is the idea that it needs a second team.
Google backs that up in two places. Its AI features guide says there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” And its AI optimization guide puts it in one line:
“From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”
So read any AEO proposal next to your current SEO scope. An AEO line item should replace SEO work, and it should never sit on top of it.
When Does Hiring an AEO Agency Make Sense?
Hiring an AEO agency makes sense when AI answers already show on your buying searches and nobody is doing your SEO fundamentals well. In that case the label on the invoice matters less than finally having someone own the pages.
Three situations justify the hire:
- You have no SEO provider, and your team has no one who owns search.
- Your current SEO provider does technical work only and writes nothing.
- Your top buying searches trigger AI answers, and competitors are the ones quoted.
The third one is worth checking before you budget anything. Semrush tracked AI Overviews on 6.49% of keywords in January 2025, a peak of 24.61% that July, and 15.69% by November. Shopping was one of the least affected categories, with AI Overviews on fewer than 3% of keywords.
That means a store’s exposure is uneven. Your how-to and comparison searches are far more likely to trigger an AI answer than your product searches, so search your own top 20 queries and see what shows up.
Where an answer does appear, the clicks thin out. Pew Research found users clicked a regular result on 8% of visits when an AI summary was present, against 15% without one, and clicked a link inside the summary on just 1% of visits. Being the quoted source is the position worth paying for on those searches.
You Don’t Need One If Your SEO Already Covers It
You don’t need an AEO agency if your SEO provider already rewrites pages, fixes crawl issues, and reports on AI visibility. Adding a second agency in that case means two teams editing the same pages, and neither one owns the result. Paying twice for the same work is one of the most common AEO mistakes I see.
The quick test is to ask your current provider three things. Ask which of your pages were rewritten answer-first in the last quarter, ask whether AI crawlers can reach the site, and ask to see where your brand shows up in AI answers today. A provider who can answer all three is already doing AEO.
If they can’t, give them the chance to add it before you hire someone new. Most of the work is a change in how pages are written, and a good SEO can make that change in a month. This is how I run it in my own AI search services for Shopify stores: one plan, one team, and one report covering Google and the AI tools together.
A small store can also skip the hire entirely. Rewriting the top of your ten best pages so the answer leads is an afternoon of work per page, and it costs nothing but time. Start with the pages that already rank on page one, since those are the pages AI tools are most likely to pull from.
What Does an AEO Agency Cost?
An AEO agency costs $3,000 to $15,000 a month when it sells AEO alone, and $1,000 to $5,000 a month when the same work sits inside an SEO retainer. The first range comes from the public price lists of AEO-only agencies, and the second from surveyed SEO pricing.
| Option | Typical monthly cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| SEO retainer with AEO inside | $1,000 to $5,000 | Pages, content, links, and AI reporting in one plan |
| AEO add-on from your SEO agency | About $937 | The AI work billed as an extra |
| AEO-only agency | $3,000 to $15,000 | AI-focused rewrites, mentions, and tracking |
| One-time AEO audit or project | $1,000 to $5,000 | A page list and a batch of rewrites |
That spread is the whole argument of this post. The specialist label can triple the price of work your SEO retainer should already include, and I break down each of those numbers in how much AEO costs.
Just know that price is a weak signal of quality here. The category is new, there are no surveyed benchmarks for AEO-only retainers yet, and agencies are setting prices by what the market will bear.
Red Flags in an AEO Pitch
The red flags in an AEO pitch are guaranteed placements, secret methods, and tools that claim inside access. Google lists the same warnings for SEO hires, and its guide to hiring an SEO now names AEO and GEO services directly.
That guide tells you to ask whether a provider’s advice on AI experiences is “aligned with Google Search’s official guidance on optimizing for generative AI features.” If a pitch contradicts Google’s own documentation, you have your answer.
Watch for these five:
- A guarantee that ChatGPT or Google will cite you. Google’s guide says “no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google,” and nobody controls an AI answer either.
- A proprietary tool or a claimed special relationship with an AI company. Google’s AI optimization guide says no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems.
- A line item for an llms.txt file, content chunking, or special AI markup. The same guide lists all three as things you can ignore.
- An AEO retainer stacked on an SEO retainer for the same pages.
- A pitch that spends ten slides on the trend and none on your pages.
Guaranteed AI citations are the new guaranteed number one rankings. The same skepticism applies whether you are vetting a big shop or weighing a Shopify SEO agency against a freelancer.
From there, the cleanest test is to pick one page and ask what they would change on it. A real practitioner answers in specifics on the spot, down to which sentence moves where. A packager steers back to the trend.
Ask These 6 Questions Before You Sign
Ask an AEO agency six questions before you sign, and judge it on how specific the answers are. The first four come straight from Google’s list of questions to ask an SEO, and the last two are the ones I’d add for AI work.
| Question | A good answer | A bad answer |
|---|---|---|
| Can you show brands you made visible in AI answers? | Named clients, prompts, and screenshots | “Our results are confidential” |
| What will you change on my site? | A page list with edits per page | “We optimize for LLMs” |
| What results do you expect, and when? | A range with checkpoints | A promise about next month |
| How will you measure it? | Search Console, analytics, and a named tracker | “AI visibility is hard to measure” |
| Who writes the pages? | A named writer who knows your products | A template or an unnamed team |
| What access do you need? | Read access to Search Console first | Full admin on day one |
Measurement is the answer I weigh most. Search Console now has a performance report for Google’s AI features, and visits from the chat tools show up in analytics, so an agency has no excuse for vague reporting.
The access question matters too. Google’s hiring guide says to grant read access to Search Console during an audit and hold back write access at that stage. An agency that asks for full control before it has shown you a plan is skipping a step.
Also, ask for the contract terms early. A first agreement should run about three months with a clear list of pages, since that is long enough to see the edits ship and short enough to leave if they don’t.
What Should the First 90 Days Look Like?
The first 90 days with an AEO agency should produce a question list, 10 to 20 rewritten pages, and one baseline report. If the first quarter ends with a strategy deck and no edited pages, the agency is selling planning.
| Month | What should ship | What you should see |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Audit, question list, crawler check, first 3 to 5 rewrites | A page list with the edits marked |
| 2 | 5 to 10 more rewrites, new pages for missing questions | Pages live on the site, logged by date |
| 3 | Remaining rewrites, first outreach for mentions | A report comparing AI visibility to the baseline |
Hold the agency to that pace, and check the pages yourself. Open three of the rewritten pages and read the first two sentences of each. If the answer to the page’s main question is there, the work is being done. My AEO checklist lists the other nine things to look for.
Rankings and citations will lag the edits, so judge month three on shipped work and early movement. A page that climbs a few positions or picks up its first AI citation inside the quarter is a fair sign, and a flat line after six months is a fair reason to leave.
Can your current SEO agency do AEO?
Yes, your current SEO agency can do AEO if it already does content work. The skills are the same: research the question, answer it at the top of the page, and keep the page crawlable. Ask them for an answer-first rewrite of one page as a trial before you look elsewhere.
Should you hire a freelancer for AEO instead?
A freelancer is the better hire for AEO on most stores under a few hundred pages. The work is mostly writing, and one good writer who knows SEO will cost less than an agency team. An agency fits a large catalog or a site with technical problems that need a developer.
Why So Many Store Owners Regret the Hire
Store owners regret agency hires most often over results that never showed up. Backlinko surveyed 1,200 business owners and found only 30% would recommend their current SEO provider to a friend, and 82% of those who left a provider cited unhappiness with business results.
The other answers in that survey read like a warning for anyone buying AEO. A quarter of owners said they were not sure what they were paying for, and 65% had already worked with several providers. A new label on the same vague retainer will not fix that, and GEO vs AEO is mostly a choice between two labels for one job.
So the protection is the same as it has always been. Get the page list in writing, define the reporting before month one, and tie the renewal to the work shipped.
I sell this work, so weigh my view with that in mind. I would still tell a store with a good SEO provider to keep that provider and ask for the AI work inside the same plan, since switching teams costs you months of context.
Want AI Visibility Without Paying Twice?
AEO agencies sell real work under a new label, and the label is harmless. Paying for the same work twice is the problem, and so is a guarantee nobody can keep. Vet the pitch the way Google says to vet an SEO, and most of the field sorts itself out in one call.
If you want a straight read first, book a call and I’ll pull your Search Console, show you which of your searches already trigger AI answers, and tell you whether you need an agency or an afternoon of edits. If you want it handled, my AI search services cover SEO and AI answers in one plan.
