Published pricing

What answer engine optimisation costs

Three levels: Visibility at £1,250 a month, Recommendation at £1,995, Dominate at £3,495. Onboarding is £995 one-off, waived on a twelve-month commitment. Most businesses start with the £495 AI Visibility Audit, credited in full against your first month. Across the wider market, mid-market AEO retainers typically land between £1,500 and £8,000 a month, one-off audits between £800 and £3,000, and self-serve monitoring tools between £25 and £400 a month.

Every figure on this page is published because you should be able to work out whether we're worth talking to before you talk to us. Prices exclude nothing hidden: no VAT is added, because we're not VAT registered.

Last updated 7 September 2026

Why we publish this

Very few agencies in this category publish pricing. The standard justifications are that scope varies, measurement standards are immature, and every engagement needs a discovery phase.

All three are partly true. None of them explain the absence of even a range.

The market has started saying the quieter part out loud: with enough public pricing data now available, hidden rate cards mostly protect margins. We agree. So here's ours, and here's what everyone else charges, so you can judge.

There's a second reason. Our whole proposition rests on a dated public record, including the calls we got wrong. A published rate card is the same principle applied to commercials. It would be odd to publish our failures and hide our prices.

The market, for comparison

Before our numbers, the context. These are the published benchmarks as of mid-2026, converted approximately where sources quote dollars.

What you're buying	Typical market range	Notes
Self-serve monitoring tools	£25–£400/mo	Otterly and Promptmonitor from ~$29/mo; Peec AI from €85; AthenaHQ ~$295; Profound ~$99 entry, though reviewers note a real programme starts at their $399 tier
SEO-suite add-ons	£300–£550/mo on top of base	Ahrefs Brand Radar $398–699/mo on top of a $129–449/mo subscription; Semrush and Conductor similar. HubSpot's AEO grader is free with ~$50/mo monitoring
One-off AEO audit	£800–£3,000	Market reports put audits at $1,000–4,000. Ours is £495, see below
Entry-level programmes	£800–£2,000/mo	Basic monitoring plus foundational optimisation
Mid-market retainers	£1,500–£8,000/mo	Most B2B engagements land here. WebFX research puts the full agency range at $1,500–50,000/mo
Enterprise programmes	£8,000–£20,000+/mo	$10,000–25,000+/mo, rising to $50,000 at the top end

Two honest observations about that table.

First, the tooling is cheap and the service is expensive, and the gap is labour, not software. Any agency charging £3,000 a month is spending a small fraction of that on the platform. That's legitimate, the work is analysis, judgement and execution, but you should know the shape of it.

Second, price tells you very little about quality in this category. There is documented evidence of businesses paying $50,000 for nothing. Use the questions on our sceptic's page rather than the price tag. Link →

The front door: the AI Visibility Audit, £495

Before any retainer, and available entirely on its own. Credited in full against your first month if you start within 30 days.

Your current citation position across all major engines on 25 defined prompts, with screenshots
What the machines currently say about your business, including tone, accuracy and anything out of date
Which providers are named in your place, and why
Your entity, schema and record-consistency gaps, listed and prioritised
A twelve-month roadmap: the questions worth owning, in the order worth owning them
Delivered in five working days, in plain English, yours to keep whether you hire us or not

Some businesses will read the audit and conclude their category is too crowded to justify a retainer. We'd rather you found that out for £495 than for £12,000.

Book the audit

The three levels

All prices per month. Three-month minimum, then rolling with 30 days' notice. A twelve-month commitment takes 10% off. Onboarding and build is £995 one-off: entity architecture, schema build, record verification, baseline measurement and question-bank construction, waived on a twelve-month commitment.

01, Visibility

£1,250/month

"Right now, when someone asks an AI about what you do, you don't come up. This fixes that."

You're invisible. Not badly ranked. Absent. The models have no confident basis on which to name you, and nothing about you gives them one.

Baseline and question bank: 30 to 40 high-intent prompts agreed with you, tracked monthly across ChatGPT, Google's AI surfaces and Perplexity, with screenshot evidence
Entity foundation: schema, named-person entities, record consistency across directories and review platforms
8 knowledge assets per month from your question bank: answer-shaped, written in your voice, reviewed, dated, never generic
Google Business Profile discipline: weekly activity, category correctness, review prompting cadence
Monthly report and review call: what we published, what moved, where you appear now, and who appears in your place where you don't

Coverage: one service, one location.
Honest expectation: first movement in citation rates typically shows at 30 to 60 days as models refresh. Meaningful shortlist presence for your flagship service in your area by month four to six.

Enquire

02, Recommendation

£1,995/month

"Being findable isn't the game. Being named is. This gets you into the two or three businesses someone actually rings."

You turn up occasionally, in passing, usually below a corporate group or a comparison site. You're in the room but you're not the recommendation.

Everything in Visibility, plus:

100 to 120 prompts tracked fortnightly across six engines, adding Gemini, Claude and Copilot, with evidence
Up to three services across three locations, architected so they don't cannibalise each other
15 knowledge assets a month, including the full early-question set your competitors ignore
Active third-party citation building across professional bodies, sector directories, regional press, review platforms and referral relationships
Fortnightly competitor citation analysis
Named-person authority building through verified bios, authored answers and quoted commentary
A fortnightly working session with Simon

Honest expectation: consistent presence in shortlist answers for your primary service by month four to six. Measurable displacement of at least one incumbent by month six to nine.

Enquire

03, Dominate

£3,495/month

"When anyone in your region asks about your category, yours is the name that comes back. Every engine. Every time."

You're on the shortlist and you want to be the shortlist. Or you're a genuine specialist with a window to close.

Everything in Recommendation, plus:

30 fully researched knowledge assets a month, each filling an identified gap, each carrying something original
250+ prompts, weekly monitoring across all engines, live dashboard
Unlimited services and locations in agreed scope
An editorial placement programme across regional and professional press
Your own original data asset, published annually under your name
Competitor displacement campaigns on named prompts
Area exclusivity in your category and catchment, which is why this level is capped
Weekly reporting plus a quarterly on-site with Simon

Honest expectation: category ownership in a defined service and catchment within six to nine months. Results depend most on you at this level: your time for review and comment is what makes it work.

Enquire

The local on-ramp

Not ready for a retainer, or not sure AI visibility is even your first problem? Across Doncaster and South Yorkshire we run a £299 on-site AI Opportunity Consultation: two hours at your place, plus a written plan covering the two or three highest-impact AI opportunities in your business, AEO included where it fits. Quick wins you can action whether or not you work with us.

Book the consultation

What we don't sell, at any price

llms.txt as a visibility service. Cyrus Shepard's 2026 synthesis of 54 studies scored it 2.0 out of 10, no credible evidence of measurable effect. Google has said it won't use it. We'll add one for free if you want it; it takes ten minutes.
Bought brand mentions or citations. That's 2010 link buying renamed, with the same eventual cost.
Derivative AI-generated content at volume. Every knowledge asset we publish has to carry something original: proprietary knowledge, first-party evidence or a real opinion. Restating what's already online gives a model no reason to cite you.
Guaranteed citation counts or share-of-voice targets. A single measurement in these systems carries a wide margin of error. Guaranteeing an outcome in that environment is either innumeracy or dishonesty.
Content chunking for hypothetical retrieval models. A guess about undocumented implementation details is not a deliverable.

When not to buy from us

Genuinely. Four situations:

Your fundamentals are broken. If your site isn't crawlable, your Google rankings are poor and your technical SEO has been neglected, fix that first, with us or anyone. Nothing above it works without it. Google's May 2026 guidance is right that its AI features run on core Search systems.

You want a tool, not a service. If you have in-house capability, buy a monitoring platform for £25 to £400 a month and run it yourself. We'd rather tell you that in the audit than sell you a retainer you don't need.

Your budget is under £500 a month. At that level the honest answer is a monitoring tool, a properly completed Google Business Profile and a review process. We'll tell you how in the £299 consultation and you'll get most of the available value.

You need results this quarter. Technical work lands in weeks. Citation gains take one to three months to become visible. Third-party authority takes two to three quarters. If your timeline is shorter than that, this channel isn't your answer and paid media probably is.

FAQ

How much does AEO cost with Question.Marketing?

Three levels, per month: Visibility £1,250, Recommendation £1,995, Dominate £3,495. Onboarding and build is £995 one-off, waived on a twelve-month commitment. The front door is the £495 AI Visibility Audit, credited in full against your first month if you start within 30 days.

How much does AEO cost, generally?

Across the market, mid-market retainers typically run £1,500–£8,000 a month, one-off audits £800–£3,000, and self-serve tools £25–£400 a month. Enterprise programmes reach £8,000–£20,000+ monthly. Our rates sit at the accessible end of the mid-market band, and they're published above.

Why do so few AEO agencies publish pricing?

The stated reasons, variable scope, immature measurement standards, discovery-dependent quoting, are partly legitimate. But enough public pricing data now exists that a hidden rate card mostly protects margin. Ask any vendor for a range before you agree to a call.

Is AEO more expensive than SEO?

Usually somewhat, at the same level of service. Ahrefs' 2024 survey of 439 agencies found the most common SEO retainer was $500–1,000 a month. AEO carries a premium because multi-platform measurement with evidence is genuinely more work than rank tracking, and because the third-party citation layer is labour rather than software. Whether the premium is justified depends on your category, measure first.

What's the minimum commitment?

Three months, then rolling with 30 days' notice. A twelve-month commitment takes 10% off and the £995 onboarding fee is waived.

Can I start with just measurement?

Yes, and most people should. The £495 AI Visibility Audit is designed to stand alone: your current citation position across the major engines on 25 defined prompts, with screenshots, delivered in five working days, yours to keep whether or not you hire us. Some audits conclude that your category is too crowded for a retainer to pay back, and we'll say so.

What if it doesn't work?

We publish our own record, including the calls we got wrong, dated, on the about page. What we won't do is guarantee an outcome, because the variance in these systems makes any such guarantee meaningless. What we will do is report honestly enough, same prompts, every cycle, screenshot evidence, that you can stop paying us the moment the numbers stop justifying it.

Are prices in pounds or dollars?

Pounds. No VAT is added, because Question.Marketing is not VAT registered.

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