You already know AI search matters. You can see buyers asking ChatGPT and Perplexity the questions they used to type into Google. So the next question is the practical one nobody answers straight: what does it cost to get cited?
Here is the honest version. AEO has three price tiers, and the right one depends on your category, not on how much an agency wants to charge. This is the breakdown, in real dollars, of what each tier buys, what actually moves the number, and the two ways the pricing tells you to walk before you sign anything. If you want the discipline explained first, start with our pillar on what AEO actually is.
Almost every real AEO engagement lands in one of three buckets. Free if you do it yourself, a foundational retainer, or full-stack. Here is what each one actually includes.
The floor is free if you have the time. You write your own llms.txt and drop it at the site root. You hand-add JSON-LD schema for Organization, Article, and FAQPage. You put real author bios on your posts. You check robots.txt so GPTBot and the rest can crawl you. Then you track by asking the engines your category questions every week and logging who gets named. Google Search Console plus manual sampling, zero spend.
The catch is that it is real recurring work, not a weekend project. Most owners ship the technical floor once and then stall on the content cadence and the weekly tracking, which is the part that moves citations. Free in dollars. Expensive in hours.
This is the entry point for hiring it out. Foundational AEO retainers start around $1,950 per month. That tier covers the floor done for you: a curated llms.txt, validated schema across your key page types, FAQ blocks shaped the way engines extract them, named authors with real bios, and a monthly content cadence. It is the right fit for a local business or a single-location brand that needs to be citable and is not fighting a national field.
Full-stack engagements run $5,000 to $15,000 per month. That tier keeps the foundation and adds the heavy parts: serious content volume, authority and link work to earn mentions on sites engines already trust, citation monitoring across all four major engines, and monthly iteration on what the tracking shows. It fits brands in competitive or multi-location categories where the citation slots are worth fighting for. You can see the full scope on our AI search optimization services page.
Quick map: narrow category and free time, DIY the floor. Local or single-location, foundational at $1,950. Competitive or national, full-stack at $5,000-plus. The tier follows your category, not your ego.
Two agencies can quote you wildly different numbers for the same label. Here is what moves the dial, so you can read a quote instead of guessing.
A plumber serving one Calgary service area needs to win a handful of local questions. A SaaS company chasing a national category needs to be citable across dozens. More territory means more content and more tracking, so the price climbs with the size of the field you are trying to own.
Some categories barely move. The answer to a stable question is the same in June as it was in January. Others churn monthly as new products and rankings ship. A fast-refresh category needs constant updating to stay the cited source, and that recurring work is priced in. Slow category, lower cost. Fast category, higher.
Citations come from content shaped the way engines pull it. Ten citation-ready pages cost more than three. This is the single biggest line item at the full-stack tier, and it is the one cheap providers fake by pointing a bot at your blog. Real volume from real writers is what separates the tiers.
Engines trust brands that other trusted sites mention. Earning those mentions is slow manual outreach, not a software toggle. It is the most expensive input because it is the least automatable, and it is why a serious engagement costs more than a tools subscription.
Being cited on Perplexity tells you nothing about ChatGPT. The answer set differs by engine. Monitoring Perplexity, ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Claude every week is real reporting work, and an agency that tracks four engines properly costs more than one that screenshots a single one once a month. Our roundup of AI search visibility tools shows what real tracking looks like.
The question is not "is DIY good enough." It is "what is your time worth." Run the numbers.
DIY the floor when your category is narrow, the answer is stable, and you have hours every week. You can write the llms.txt, add the schema, and sample the engines yourself. None of it is gatekept. The technical floor is a learnable skill, and for a simple local category it might be all you need.
Hire when the category is competitive, the answer refreshes fast, or your time is worth more than the retainer. The math is blunt. A foundational retainer is $1,950 a month. If doing it yourself eats fifteen hours a month you would otherwise spend billing clients or selling, and your hour is worth more than $130, the agency is the cheaper option. You are not paying for a secret. You are paying to not spend the hours.
The common path: owners DIY the technical floor, see it is steady recurring work they will never prioritize over their actual business, and hand off the content cadence and tracking. That is a fine outcome. The floor is the part worth learning. The grind is the part worth buying.
Before you compare features or read a single case study, the price tells you most of what you need to know. Two signals to walk on.
AEO done right is real technical and editorial work, and that has a floor cost. A $300 a month "AI SEO" package cannot pay a human to write citation-shaped content, so it ships AI-generated filler on autopilot. Think of it like an author byline. AI engines weight named, accountable humans higher than anonymous pages, so flooding your site with unsigned slop works against the exact signal you are paying to build. Cheap does not buy a smaller version of the result. It buys the opposite of the result, billed monthly.
If an agency will not name a starting number before a sales call, that is the tell. Usually it means the price is custom-shaped to whatever they think you will pay, or they rebranded an SEO retainer and do not want it compared. Either way, AI engines cite brands that publish specifics, so an agency that hides its own pricing is failing the test it wants to sell you. A transparent shop names a starting number, says what that tier includes, and explains what moves it up. No number, no deal.
If you want it handled and you are a local or single-location brand, budget the $1,950 foundational tier and expect the floor done right plus a monthly content cadence. If you are fighting a national or multi-location category, budget $5,000 to $15,000 and expect content volume, authority work, and real four-engine tracking on top.
If you want to start free, DIY the technical floor this month and watch how much time the content and tracking actually take. That experiment answers the hire-or-not question better than any sales call. Then, before you pay anyone, run their own site through the free AEO audit and check that the people selling you AI citations are cited themselves. If you want the full vetting checklist, read how to choose an AEO agency.
The price is not the mystery. The work behind it is. Pay for the work, not the label.
There are three tiers. DIY is free if you do it yourself with Search Console and manual sampling, but it costs your time. Foundational AEO retainers start around $1,950 per month and cover llms.txt, schema, FAQ blocks, named authors, and a monthly content cadence. Full-stack engagements run $5,000 to $15,000 per month and add content volume, authority and link work, multi-engine citation monitoring, and monthly iteration. Where you land depends on category breadth, refresh cadence, content volume, authority work, and how many engines you track.
Yes, the floor is free if you have the time. You can write your own llms.txt, hand-add JSON-LD schema, put real author bios on your posts, and check crawler access in robots.txt. You track by asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude your category questions every week and logging who gets named. The catch is that it is real recurring work, not a weekend project. Most owners can ship the technical floor once and then stall on the content cadence and tracking, which is the part that actually moves citations. DIY is free in dollars and expensive in hours.
Five things. Category breadth, because a national field needs more content than a single Calgary service area. Refresh cadence, because a category where the answer changes monthly needs constant updates and a stable one does not. Content volume, because more citation-shaped pages cost more to write. Authority work, because earning mentions on sites engines already trust is slow manual outreach. And the number of engines you track, because monitoring ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude weekly is more work than checking one. Move any of those up and the price moves with it.
DIY the floor if your category is narrow, the answer is stable, and you have hours every week. You can write the llms.txt, add the schema, and sample the engines yourself. Hire when the category is competitive, the answer refreshes fast, or your time is worth more than the retainer. The math is simple. If a foundational retainer is $1,950 a month and doing it yourself eats fifteen hours a month you would otherwise bill or sell, the agency is cheaper. Most owners DIY the technical floor, see it is steady recurring work, and hand off the content and tracking.
Because AEO done right is real technical and editorial work, and that has a floor cost. A $300 a month AI SEO package cannot pay for a human to write citation-shaped content, so it ships AI-generated filler on autopilot. AI engines weight named, accountable authors higher than anonymous pages, so flooding your site with unsigned slop works against the exact signal you are paying to build. Cheap does not get you a smaller version of the result. It gets you the opposite of the result while charging you for it.
Usually because the number is custom-shaped per call to whatever they think you will pay, or because they rebranded an SEO retainer and do not want it compared. Either way it is a tell. AI engines cite brands that publish specifics, so an agency that hides its own pricing is failing the exact test it wants to sell you. A transparent agency names a starting number, tells you what that tier includes, and explains what moves the price up. If you cannot get a number before a sales call, walk.
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Meridian15 publishes its tiers, ships the technical floor, and tracks all four engines weekly. See the full AI search optimization service, or run your site through the audit first to see where you stand.
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