Published pricing

What answer engine optimisation costs

Our rates run from £299 for a single consultation to £7,500 a month for full brand-authority work. Most businesses start with a £1,950 measured baseline. 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.

Last updated 31 July 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 is that you shouldn't have to take our word for anything, we publish our clients' results, including the interventions that failed. 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
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 seven questions on our sceptic's page rather than the price tag. Link →

Our service levels

Six levels. Two are one-off, three are ongoing, one is a consultation. Start wherever fits.

01, AI Opportunity Consultation

£299 one-off

The local on-ramp. Two hours on-site across Doncaster and South Yorkshire, plus a written plan.

On-site review of the tools and processes you run today
The two or three highest-impact AI opportunities for your business
A plain-English plan with timescales and rough costs
Quick wins you can action whether or not you work with us

Who it's for: any local business that wants an honest read on where AI fits, including AEO, without committing to a programme.
What it isn't: a measured AEO baseline. This is a conversation with a plan attached, not a data exercise.

Book the consultation

02, AI Visibility Baseline

£1,950 one-off

The recommended starting point for most businesses. You cannot make a sensible decision about this channel until you know where you stand in it, with a real margin of error attached.

Share of voice measured across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, sampled at depth with stated 95% confidence intervals
Supplementary panel across Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot
Your genuine competitive set, discovered from the answers rather than assumed from your own list
Prompt-level gap analysis: where you're absent, and which competitors are there instead
Citation source analysis: which pages and domains the engines are actually pulling from
AI crawler audit, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Bingbot, including whether you're accidentally blocking any of them
A prioritised plan in plain English, ordered by expected impact against effort
Full methodology documented, and your raw data supplied

Turnaround: two to three weeks.
Who it's for: everyone, before anything else.
What happens next is genuinely your call. A meaningful proportion of baselines conclude that the client should fix their fundamentals or their brand presence before buying an AEO retainer from anybody. We'd rather tell you that than sell you a programme that can't work.

Book a baseline

03, Local AI Visibility Programme

£750 setup, then £595/month · 3-month minimum

For regional and service businesses. This tier exists because the local opportunity is the largest in the research and almost nobody is addressing it.

SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index measured over 350,000 business locations. Just 1.2% were recommended by ChatGPT, against 35.9% appearing in Google's local 3-pack. Gemini recommended 11%; Perplexity 7.4%. In local AI recommendation, the field is close to empty.

Setup includes:

Local visibility baseline across the major assistants for your service area
Google Business Profile completeness and category audit
NAP consistency audit and correction across directories
FAQ and LocalBusiness schema on service and location pages
Review platform audit, rating consistency matters more than volume here
Crawler access and Bing indexing check

Monthly includes:

Measured share of voice for your local prompt set, with confidence intervals
Two answer-shaped service or location pages per month, published to your site
Review velocity monitoring and prompting workflow
Directory and community presence building
Monthly report with movement stated against margin of error

Who it's for: trades, professional services and regional B2B with a defined service area. If you're a plumber, an accountant, a commercial vehicle supplier or an industrial cleaner in South Yorkshire, this is the tier.
Why it's cheaper: local prompt sets are narrower, the competitive fields are thinner, and the work is more repeatable. The economics genuinely are different. We're not giving you a worse version of the same thing.

Enquire

04, Agent-Ready Foundation

£3,500 one-off

Technical readiness for AI retrieval and AI-mediated buying. A fixed-scope engineering engagement, not a retainer.

Full crawler access configuration and verification
Schema implementation across page types, Organization, Person, Service, Product, FAQ, LocalBusiness as applicable
Answer-first restructuring of your key commercial pages
Product feed and structured product data readiness where you sell anything
Pricing consistency audit across your site, marketplaces and feeds, agents compare, and inconsistency gets you skipped
Protocol readiness assessment: ACP, UCP and MCP
AI attribution implementation, GA4 configuration, server-log analysis for AI crawler visits, referral pattern isolation
A reporting template separating impressions, click-through with and without an AI summary, and conversions from remaining clicks

Why this matters commercially: the settlement that emerged in 2026 is that AI handles discovery while merchants retain checkout. OpenAI deprecated in-chat Instant Checkout in March 2026 after Walmart reported three times lower conversion on in-chat purchases; Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol at NRF 2026 with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair and Target; Microsoft adopted UCP in Merchant Center. eMarketer put AI platform retail spending at $20.9 billion for 2026, roughly quadrupling the prior year. Businesses whose product and pricing data isn't machine-readable become invisible to shopping agents.

Who it's for: anyone selling products, and anyone who wants to see the channel before investing in it. The attribution work alone tends to pay for itself in decisions avoided.
Frequently bought as: a follow-on from the Baseline, or bundled with it, see below.

Enquire

05, AEO Practice

£2,950/month · 3-month minimum

The ongoing programme. Measurement, content and citation building, run as a loop.

Deep measurement every cycle: 30 tracked prompts sampled at depth, roughly 1,500 answers per source, reported with 95% confidence intervals
Supplementary quarterly panel across Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot
Content production: answer-shaped pages published to your CMS, capped deliberately and gated on originality, every page carries at least one piece of proprietary data, original observation or first-party evidence
Citation building: identifying the sources the engines already trust in your category, and earning placement in them
Competitive tracking against your real discovered set
Monthly reporting that states explicitly whether movement is distinguishable from noise
Intervention log with dates, so causation can be assessed honestly later rather than asserted now
Quarterly strategy review

Content volume: we cap this, and we'll argue with you if you push. The platform can produce 50 to 100 pages a month. The public record of brands that scaled AI content is a steep climb followed by a longer decline once Google's spam systems catch up. Your reputation is not worth the volume.

Who it's for: B2B and national businesses with a functioning brand and reasonable existing SEO, who want to compete for AI recommendation in a contested category.
Who it isn't for: businesses with weak brand presence. If a model hasn't learned your brand, this tier optimises the bibliography while the brainstorm stays closed. See tier 06.

Enquire

06, Authority

From £7,500/month · 6-month minimum

Everything in Practice, plus the layer that actually moves recommendation.

The evidence for why this tier exists: Ahrefs, across 75,000 brands, found branded web mentions correlate 0.664 with AI Overview visibility while backlinks correlate 0.218, roughly three times as predictive. Seer Interactive's 2026 work across 362,388 responses suggests models select which brands to recommend from trained knowledge, then retrieve sources to support the decision. The citation is the bibliography, not the brainstorm.

Which means the highest-leverage work is becoming a brand the model has learned. No platform in this category sells that, because it isn't software.

Includes everything in Practice, plus:

Entity establishment and disambiguation, consistent naming across the web, structured entity signals, Wikidata where genuine notability supports it
Digital PR aimed specifically at the sources these systems retrieve from, which is not the same target list as traditional PR
Community and forum presence, including Reddit, Perplexity weights community sources heavily
Review platform strategy across the platforms that matter in your category
Category-defining thought leadership: original research, published data, the assets that get cited rather than the assets that cite
Speaking, podcast and industry placement
Direct access to me, not an account manager

Who it's for: businesses in competitive categories where being known is the constraint, and where the budget reflects that this is a two-to-three-quarter programme rather than a monthly tactic.
Honest caveat: this is the slowest tier to show movement and the most expensive. It is also the only one addressing the strongest known signal. If you want fast numbers, buy Practice. If you want to be recommended, buy this.

Enquire

07, Vendor-Selection Advisory

£2,500 one-off

Independent advice on which AI visibility platform to buy, for businesses who'd rather build in-house than hire an agency

Requirements definition against your actual prompt set and market
Structured comparison of the platforms relevant to your situation, Profound, Peec AI, AthenaHQ, Conductor, the SEO-suite add-ons, the budget monitors
Realistic total cost of ownership, including the internal time nobody quotes for
Implementation plan and measurement framework you can run yourself
A follow-up session once you're live

Disclosure, prominently: where we hold a commercial relationship with a platform we're assessing, we say so on every page of the deliverable, and we will recommend against it where it isn't the right fit. If you'd rather have advice from someone with no platform relationships at all, we'll tell you that too and point you elsewhere.

Who it's for: businesses with in-house capability who want the analysis without the retainer.

Enquire

Bundles and commitments

Combination	Price	Saving
Baseline + Agent-Ready Foundation	£4,750	£700
Baseline + first 3 months of Practice	£9,995	£805
Practice, paid annually	£31,860	£3,540 (one month)
Authority, paid annually	£81,000	£9,000 (one month)

The Ledger option, 15% off any ongoing tier.

If you allow us to publish your baseline, interventions and results, including the ones that don't work, on our public ledger, we'll reduce your fee by 15% for the life of the engagement.

This isn't a marketing gimmick with a discount attached. Published, dated, honest results are the only credible evidence in this category, and they're worth more to us than the margin. You keep approval over anything commercially sensitive; we keep the right to publish the numbers, including the disappointing ones.

What affects the price

The published figures assume a reasonably typical engagement. Things that move them:

Number of markets or languages. Each country and language needs its own prompt set and measurement. Roughly additive.
Number of brands or locations. Platform licensing is per brand. Multi-location and multi-brand portfolios are quoted separately, and usually work out better per unit.
Existing technical state. A site with clean architecture and existing schema needs less foundation work. A site that's blocking AI crawlers needs more.
Competitive density. Contested categories need larger prompt sets and more content to move a point of share.
CMS. Direct publishing works with WordPress, Webflow and Wix. Anything else means either manual publication or a build, and we'll quote it honestly.

What's included in every tier

Named accountability. You deal with me, not a rotating account team.
Published methodology. You get the full method, and you can hand it to anyone.
Your data, portable. If you leave, you take your historical measurement data with you in a usable format. Our methodology is documented independently of any single platform, so your history stays comparable even if we change tooling or a vendor gets acquired, which happens: Scrunch AI was bought by Sitecore in June 2026.
No long lock-ins. Three months on Practice, six on Authority, then monthly.
Every number we report carries a margin of error.

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.
High-volume AI content. See the Practice tier. We cap it.
Guaranteed citation counts or share-of-voice targets. A single measurement in these systems carries a margin of error of ±9 to ±13 points. 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. URL accessibility is the highest-scoring citation factor in the evidence at 9.5 out of 10, and 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 platform for £25 to £400 a month and run it yourself. Take the Advisory tier if you want help choosing, or don't. We'd rather you spent £2,500 once than £2,950 a month on something you could do.

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 to do it in the £299 consultation and you'll get most of the available value.

You need results this quarter. Technical and attribution work lands in weeks. Citation gains take one to three months to become statistically visible. Brand-signal work 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, 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 own rates run £299 to £7,500 a month and are 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 at statistical depth is genuinely more work than rank tracking, and because the brand-signal layer is labour rather than software. Whether the premium is justified depends on your category, measure first.

What's the minimum commitment?

Three months on Practice, six on Authority, then monthly. The one-off tiers have no commitment at all.

Do you offer payment plans?

Yes on the one-off tiers, split across two or three months. Ask.

Can I start with just measurement?

Yes, and most people should. The £1,950 Baseline is designed to stand alone, full data, full methodology, prioritised plan, no obligation. Some baselines conclude that you shouldn't buy an AEO retainer from anyone yet, and we'll say so.

What if it doesn't work?

We publish the interventions that don't work, with dates, on our ledger. You'll see the failures before you buy. 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 that you can stop paying us the moment the numbers stop justifying it.

Are prices in pounds or dollars?

Pounds, excluding VAT. VAT is added where applicable.

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