How Much Does AEO Cost?
AEO costs $1,000 to $5,000 a month for most stores, and that price is a normal SEO retainer with the AEO work inside it. Agencies that bill it as a separate add-on charge about $937 a month on top, and doing it yourself costs only your time. For best results, pay for named pages and questions.
Short answer: AEO costs $0 extra when your SEO already covers it, $1,000 to $5,000 a month inside a retainer, and about $937 a month as a separate add-on.
What Do Agencies Charge for AEO?
Agencies charge $1,000 to $5,000 a month for AEO when it is part of an SEO retainer, which is how most of them sell it. Backlinko’s survey of more than 300 SEO professionals puts the average monthly cost of SEO at $1,000 to $2,500, with $2,501 to $5,000 the range for 34% of providers in the US, UK, and Australia.
The add-on price has survey data behind it too. SE Ranking and Duda surveyed 260 agencies and found that those with final pricing for AI optimization charge, or plan to charge, an average of $937 a month for it. In that same survey, 43% of agencies planned to fold the work into their existing services and only 18% planned to sell it as an extra.
Just know the limits of that number. The survey was published in December 2024, before most agencies had finished their pricing, and 78% of the respondents were shops with under 10 people, so $937 is a small-agency figure. It is still the only surveyed price for this work that I can find.
Then there are the AEO-only shops. The agencies whose public price lists I checked this month quote $3,000 to $15,000 a month, and a few go past that for enterprise accounts. No survey backs those numbers yet, since the category is too new, so treat them as asking prices.
| Service | Typical cost | Who charges it |
|---|---|---|
| SEO retainer with AEO inside | $1,000 to $2,500 a month | Most agencies and freelancers |
| Premium SEO retainer with AEO inside | $2,501 to $5,000 a month | 34% of US, UK, and Australian providers |
| AEO as a separate add-on | $937 a month on average | Agencies selling it as an extra |
| AEO-only agency retainer | $3,000 to $15,000 a month | Specialist AEO shops |
| One-time project or audit | $1,000 to $5,000 | Consultants and freelancers |
| Hourly consulting | $50 to $100 an hour | Mid-level SEO consultants |
| DIY | $0 to $99 a month in tools | You |
Who you hire moves the number as much as what you buy. Backlinko found agencies charge about 30% more than freelancers on average, and US-based providers cost three to five times more than providers in emerging markets. That gap explains most of the spread in the quotes you will collect.
Is AEO a Separate Service or Part of SEO?
AEO is part of SEO, and you should not pay for it as a separate service. Google says so in its own guide to generative AI search:
“From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”
That line comes from Google’s AI optimization guide, and the same page lists the things you can ignore. You do not need an llms.txt file, you do not need to chunk your content into tiny pieces, and you do not need special markup to appear in AI results.
To be fair to agencies, naming the work is not a scam. Labels help buyers find services, and what AEO is under the label is real work: question research, answer-first rewrites, clean structure, and tracking. The problem starts when the same hours get billed twice under two acronyms.
So ask one question of any quote. Which pages change, and what changes on them? Pay for the work on the page, and never for the acronym on the invoice. I walk through the full vetting process in should you hire an AEO agency.
What Are You Paying For in an AEO Retainer?
You are paying for five kinds of work in an AEO retainer, and four of them were in SEO proposals long before the acronym. The table below shows what each one is and how much of the bill it takes.
| Work | What it is | Share of the hours |
|---|---|---|
| Question research | Finding the questions shoppers ask about your products | Small, mostly in month one |
| Answer-first rewrites | Moving the direct answer to the top of each page | The largest share |
| Technical checks | Making sure Google and the AI crawlers can reach your pages | Small, mostly in month one |
| Mentions and links | Getting your brand named on the lists and reviews AI tools read | Ongoing |
| Tracking and reporting | Logging where your brand shows up in AI answers | A few hours a month |
Only the tracking is new. The rewrites, the research, the technical checks, and the link work are what a good SEO was already doing, which is why 43% of agencies in the SE Ranking survey planned to fold AI work into what they already sell.
So when a quote comes in, match each dollar to one of those five rows. Hours that land in none of them are hours you cannot check.
What Changes the Price of AEO?
The price of AEO changes most with how many pages need rewriting. A store with 20 pages that matter needs a fraction of the hours a 2,000-product catalog needs, and hours are what you are buying.
Five things move a quote up or down:
- Page count. Each rewritten page takes one to three hours of research and writing.
- Who does the writing. Answer-first copy in your brand’s voice costs more than templated edits.
- Where the provider sits. US rates run three to five times the rates in emerging markets.
- Tracking. A paid AI visibility tool adds $29 to several hundred dollars a month.
- The state of your SEO. A site with crawl problems or thin pages needs that fixed first, and no AEO work lands until it is.
That last one matters most. AI features pull from pages that already rank and already load, so a store with weak SEO pays for the foundation before it pays for anything with AEO in the name.
One more thing moves the price, and it is the label itself. If a proposal lists AEO and GEO as two line items, you are looking at one job with two names, and my breakdown of what GEO costs shows the pricing lands in the same place.
What Does DIY AEO Cost?
DIY AEO costs $0 to $99 a month, and the low end of that is free. Search Console shows the questions you almost rank for, Google’s documentation spells out what its AI features want, and the People Also Ask box hands you the wording customers use.
The paid part is optional tracking. The cheapest credible tracker I know, Otterly.AI, starts at $29 a month for 15 prompts, and Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit is $99 a month for 25. I compare the field in my post on the best AI visibility tracking tools.
I’d still hold off on paying for a tracker until the free stack is working for you. A tracker measures the work, and it does none of it.
As for the work itself, an hour a week covers one page. Pick a question from Search Console, rewrite the top of the page so the answer leads, add one piece of proof, and move on. Twelve weeks in, you have twelve pages working for you.
Budget DIY AEO like a habit: one reformatted page a week beats a one-time site blitz.
What Should an AEO Budget Buy Each Month?
An AEO budget of $1,000 a month should buy about 10 to 13 hours of work, which covers four to six rewritten pages plus a short report. That math uses the $75 to $100 an hour that Backlinko found for mid-level US consultants.
| Monthly budget | Hours at $75 to $100 | What it should buy |
|---|---|---|
| $500 | 5 to 6 | 2 to 3 rewritten pages, no reporting |
| $1,000 | 10 to 13 | 4 to 6 rewritten pages and a monthly check on your top questions |
| $2,500 | 25 to 33 | 10 or more pages, new posts for missing questions, and tracking |
| $5,000 | 50 to 66 | A full program: pages, new content, links and mentions, and reporting |
Use that table to check any quote. If a $2,500 proposal lists four page rewrites and a dashboard, you are paying about $600 a page, and you should ask where the other hours go.
On a Shopify store, the bigger budget question is usually the whole channel. AEO rides along inside that spend, and I lay out those numbers in how much Shopify SEO costs.
Agency, Freelancer, or Your Own Team?
A freelancer is the cheapest way to buy AEO for most stores, at about 30% less than an agency for the same hours. The work is mostly writing and research on a short list of pages, and that is a one-person job on a store with under a few hundred URLs.
An agency earns its higher rate when the job needs several skills at once. A large catalog, a migration in progress, or a site with technical problems calls for a developer, a writer, and a strategist, and one freelancer rarely covers all three.
Your own team is the third option, and it is the one most stores skip. If someone on staff already writes your product pages and emails, a consultant can teach the answer-first format in a few hours at $50 to $100 an hour, and the rewrites then cost you nothing extra. Backlinko’s survey puts senior consultants at $101 to $150 an hour, so even the expensive version of that training is a few hundred dollars.
Whichever of the three you pick, the test is the same. Ask who writes the pages, ask to see a page they rewrote for another store, and ask how many pages your budget covers each month.
When Is Paying for AEO Worth It?
Paying for AEO is worth it when your buying questions already trigger AI answers and your pages are not the ones quoted. Semrush analyzed more than 600,000 keywords and found the share of commercial searches with an AI Overview grew 71% between November 2025 and April 2026.
That growth is landing on the searches closest to a sale. The same study found finance keywords with an AI Overview cost $4.84 a click in ads against $2.14 without one. When the paid price of a question more than doubles, owning the answer above the ads is worth a lot.
Shopping searches are earlier on that curve than finance, and that is the reason to act while it is cheap. The stores that rewrite their top pages now will be the quoted sources when AI answers reach their category, and the stores that wait will be paying to catch up.
Even so, walk away from anyone who guarantees AI citations or sells placement. Nobody can buy a spot in an answer. A fair AEO proposal names pages, questions, and edits, and it never mentions a special relationship with an AI company.
These four signs mean you are overpaying:
- An AEO retainer stacked on an SEO retainer for the same pages
- A line item for an llms.txt file or “AI markup,” which Google says it ignores
- A monthly fee where the only deliverable is a dashboard
- A price with no page count attached
This is the work I do through my AI search services for Shopify stores, and it is quoted as one program with the SEO.
Should you pay for AEO as a project or a retainer?
Pay for AEO as a project first, at $1,000 to $5,000, if your pages have never been rewritten answer-first. A project clears the backlog of your top 10 to 20 pages. A retainer makes sense after that, when new questions and new content need the same treatment each month.
Does AEO cost more for a Shopify store?
No, AEO does not cost more for a Shopify store, and it often costs less. Product and collection pages share templates, so one fix to the template improves hundreds of pages at once. The cost goes up only when a large catalog needs unique copy on every product.
Is the $937 add-on worth paying?
No, the $937 add-on is not worth paying if the same agency already runs your SEO. The rewrites and research should come out of the retainer you pay now, and paying for them twice is one of the common AEO mistakes. It can be worth paying when your current SEO provider does no content work at all, and a second person is doing the page rewrites.
Want a Straight Number for Your Store?
AEO pricing is simple once you take the acronym off: $0 extra if you do it yourself with the 10-point AEO checklist, part of a normal $1,000 to $5,000 retainer if you hire well, and overpriced the moment it becomes its own line item with no pages attached. If a proposal cannot name the questions and pages behind the number, keep your money.
Book a call and I’ll look at your site and tell you what I’d spend and on which pages first. You will leave with a page list you can hand to anyone, including your current agency.
