Pricing
What our audit costs and why.
Read →Agent view — served from /aeo-agency-vs-engineering.md.
Comparison · updated September 2026
Do you need an AEO agency, an in-house hire, or an engineer?
Most AEO agencies do four things: audit your AI citations, restructure content into answer blocks, implement schema, and build off-site mentions. All four are content work. None of them check whether an AI crawler can physically load your page — which is a separate, cheaper and usually more urgent problem.
What does an AEO agency actually deliver?
The playbook is remarkably consistent across providers. An audit of how your brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews for your priority queries. Content restructuring into extractable answer blocks and FAQ formats. Structured data implementation. Then off-site work securing mentions on the sources models draw from.
That is genuinely valuable and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If your content is thin, unstructured or absent from the places engines cite, an agency fixes a real problem and you should hire one.
What it does not include: whether your page renders without JavaScript, whether your host is blocking AI crawlers, whether your structured data matches your prices, or whether an assistant can complete your contact form.
What does it cost?
Published rates cluster fairly tightly, which makes comparison easier than in most agency categories.
| Option | Typical cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| AEO audit, agency | From ~$1,200 | Citation audit, schema review, prioritised fix list |
| AEO retainer, small business | $1,000–$3,500/mo | Content production, monitoring, schema upkeep |
| AEO retainer, mid-tier | $4,000–$12,000/mo | Above plus authority building and strategy |
| Senior agency retainer | $5,000–$25,000+/mo | Senior team execution |
| In-house specialist | $108,000–$121,000/yr | One person, salary and benefits |
| In-house team | ~$290,000 year one | Three roles before tooling and recruitment |
| Code4X audit | $4,500 one-off | 55 technical checks plus the remediation code |
The in-house rows are the useful comparison for us, and we would rather show them than hide them. Reporting on in-house AEO builds puts a minimum of three specialised roles at roughly $290,000 in year one before benefits and tooling, and notes that a single-specialist approach still leaves critical engineering and content gaps.
That phrase — engineering gaps — is exactly the space we occupy.
So which one do you actually need?
| Your situation | What to hire |
|---|---|
| Thin content, few pages, no answer-shaped writing | An AEO agency. Content is your constraint. |
| Good content, traffic falling, nobody can explain why | An engineering audit first. Find out whether AI can read you at all. |
| AI describes you inaccurately or as the wrong category | Both, engineering first. Fix readability, then reshape what is read. |
| You already pay an AEO agency and see no movement | An engineering audit. Their work may be invisible to crawlers. |
| Large content operation, continuous need | In-house plus an engineering partner. Cheaper at scale, still needs the technical half. |
| You sell through an assistant, or want to | Engineering. Interaction is not a content problem. |
Why does the order matter?
Because content work performed on an unreadable site is wasted, and you will not know it was wasted.
Consider a common case. An agency spends three months restructuring your pages into clean answer blocks. Your site renders client-side, so every crawler that does not execute JavaScript receives an empty div. The content is excellent and no engine has ever seen it. Six months later the agency is blamed for poor results, and the actual cause was a rendering setting nobody checked.
The technical audit takes five days and costs less than a month of most retainers. Doing it first tells you whether the content work will land. That is the entire argument, and it is why we are usually a complement to an agency rather than a replacement for one.
Where this is contested
We have an obvious interest in the answer, so weight this accordingly. The counter-argument is fair: for many sites, particularly on WordPress, Shopify or Webflow, the technical layer is already fine and content genuinely is the binding constraint. In those cases an agency is the right and only hire, and we will tell you so after the scan.
The free scan exists partly for this reason. If it comes back clean, spend your money on content. We would rather lose a sale than take one for work you do not need — and we would rather write that down publicly than say it privately.
Questions
Frequently asked
How much does an AEO agency cost?
Published rates run roughly $1,000-$3,500 per month for small businesses and $4,000-$12,000 for mid-tier retainers, with senior agencies quoting $5,000-$25,000+. One-off AEO audits start around $1,200.
Is it cheaper to hire AEO in-house?
Not at first. Reporting on in-house builds puts a minimum three-role team at roughly $290,000 in year one before benefits and tooling, and a single specialist at $108,000-$121,000 while still leaving engineering and content gaps.
Why is a Code4X audit more expensive than a $1,200 AEO audit?
Different deliverable. An AEO audit reviews citations, schema and content structure and returns recommendations. Ours runs 55 technical checks and returns the deployable code and files that fix what failed, generated from your own site data.
Do I need both an agency and an engineering audit?
Often yes, and the order matters. Content restructuring performed on a site AI crawlers cannot read produces no result and no explanation. The technical audit takes five days and tells you whether the content work will land.
What if my technical setup is already fine?
Then spend your budget on content. The free scan will show you, and if it comes back clean we will say so rather than manufacture findings.
Find out which half is your problem.
Eight technical checks against your domain. If it comes back clean, hire a content agency instead.