An AEO agency where you own the machine

What an AEO agency actually does

A growing share of B2B buying research now ends inside an AI answer instead of a results page. Someone asks ChatGPT which vendors to look at, or reads a Google AI Overview, and gets one synthesized response built from a handful of sources. If your site is not one of those sources, you lose the deal without ever seeing the loss in a report.

The job of an AEO agency is to make you one of the cited sources. In practice that splits into two halves. The first half is classic technical SEO, and it is most of the work: pages the crawlers can fetch and render, speed that survives a bot's render budget, schema that matches reality, and content structured so a machine can lift the answer cleanly. We have written elsewhere that AEO is roughly 60 to 70 percent SEO, and nothing about that has changed.

The second half is the answer-engine layer. Your robots file explicitly welcomes the AI crawlers you want. Your best pages lead with the answer instead of burying it. Your FAQs are marked up as answers rather than decoration. Third parties talk about you in the places the models read. And someone measures, every month, whether the engines actually cite you for the prompts your buyers really type. That last part is where most programs quietly fail, because you can't improve a number nobody tracks.

The failure modes are boring and common. When we fetched 27 B2B sites as GPTBot, four of them blocked the crawler outright, which means no amount of content strategy could ever have gotten them cited. That is the kind of problem an audit finds in minutes and a brand never finds on its own.

How the work starts: the Machine Score

We don't scope engagements by conversation, because conversation is guesswork. Every engagement starts with the Machine Score, a $2,500 scored diagnostic. Your operation gets graded 0 to 5 across the five layers of a working machine, from crawler access up through measurement, and the output is a ranked roadmap: what to fix first, what each fix is worth, and what can be automated instead of staffed.

The audit also ships one working automation from a named catalog, installed on your data, and you keep it whether or not we ever speak again. $1,000 books the audit. The balance is due only after that automation is demonstrably running, which keeps the incentives honest. Kickoff to delivered roadmap takes two weeks, on the calendar, with dates set the day you book. Access is read-only wherever possible: analytics, Search Console, and CRM reporting views cover most of it.

What makes this different: you own everything

Most agency AEO programs live in the agency's tooling. The dashboards are theirs, the tracking is theirs, the workflows are theirs, and the day you stop paying, the capability walks out the door with them. You were renting the whole time.

Everything we build goes in your accounts, on your tools, under your logins. Running costs, typically $20 to $80 a month in tool fees, are paid by you directly to the vendors, and you see that number in writing before anything gets built. When the engagement ends, the crawler monitoring keeps monitoring, the citation tracking keeps tracking, and the content workflows keep queueing work. The handoff document is not a farewell gift. It is current the whole time.

The founder runs the same machine on his own properties first, every day, before any version of it reaches a client. The numbers on the homepage are pulled from that live fleet, not from a demo environment. Capacity is capped at two new engagements a month so nothing gets half of anyone's attention.

AEO, GEO, AI SEO: same job, different names

The industry has not settled on a label. Answer engine optimization (AEO), generative engine optimization (GEO), AI search optimization, and AI SEO all describe the same shift: the win moved from ranking in ten blue links to being the source an AI answer trusts enough to cite. If you have been searching for a generative engine optimization agency or an AI search optimization agency, the work you would be buying is what this page describes. We use AEO because it names the thing being optimized for, the answer, but we don't spend client money arguing about vocabulary.

What it costs

Prices are public, on one page, with no call required. The full ladder in short: the Machine Score audit is $2,500 one time, credited toward your first retainer month if you continue within 60 days. Ongoing tiers run $3,500 a month (Machine Room, one new build a month), $6,500 a month (Machine Room Plus, two builds and a senior operator steering), and $10,000 a month for the Fractional Head of Growth seat, which is capped at two concurrent clients permanently. Retainers carry a 90-day minimum and then 30 days written notice. There are no hourly invoices and no scoping calls.

One number worth holding those prices against: an AI answer citing a competitor instead of you doesn't show up in any analytics you currently look at. The cost of that is real and unmeasured, which is exactly why the first deliverable is measurement.

How to start without spending anything

Run the free AI visibility check first. It takes about thirty seconds: it fetches your site as a browser and again as an AI crawler, reads your robots.txt and structured data, and pulls real Core Web Vitals where they exist. If it comes back clean, you may not need an agency yet. If it comes back with a blocked crawler or missing answer markup, you'll know precisely what the first fix is, and whether you want to make it yourself or have it built for you.

Frequently asked questions

What does an AEO agency do?

It gets a company found, read, and cited by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The work is roughly 60 to 70 percent classic technical SEO plus an answer-engine layer: explicit crawler access, direct-answer structure, off-site credibility, and monthly citation measurement.

What is the difference between an AEO agency, a GEO agency, and an AI search optimization agency?

Three names for the same job. AEO is answer engine optimization, GEO is generative engine optimization, and AI search optimization is the plainest label for both. The work being sold is earning citations inside AI answers.

How much does answer engine optimization cost?

Here, the Machine Score audit is $2,500, with $1,000 booking it and the balance due only after your first automation is running. Ongoing tiers run $3,500 to $10,000 a month with a 90-day minimum. Tool costs of roughly $20 to $80 a month are paid by you directly to vendors.

Do we need to stop doing SEO to do AEO?

No. AEO sits on top of the SEO foundation. If a crawler cannot fetch and parse your pages, answer-shaped content cannot save you.

What do we own when the engagement ends?

Everything. Automations, dashboards, schema, and measurement workflows are built in your accounts on your tools, and they keep running if we part ways.

How is progress measured?

By citation, monthly: your real category and brand prompts run across the major engines, recorded as cited, not cited, or competitor cited, with share of voice tracked over time in your own accounts.