AI Visibility Services: What AEO/GEO Actually Costs
By Guillaume Rufenacht, RouterGrowth · published aug 2026
AEO pricing is chaotic because the category is young and three different products share its name. Before comparing quotes, sort out which of the three you're being offered. Here's the map, our own price in the open, and the questions that expose a bad vendor.
Three products, one label
Monitoring tools: dashboards that track what assistants say about your brand and competitors; SaaS pricing, sold per seat or per brand. Audits and consulting: one-time "how visible are you and what should change" projects, priced as projects. Done-for-you input work: the ongoing building of the mentions and structure that visibility actually comes from; priced as retainers, because the input is monthly labor. Most AEO disappointment is a category error: paying input-work prices for a dashboard, or expecting a dashboard to move the number it measures.
Why the real service is priced like content and community work
Because it is that work. Assistants recommend from third-party sources they consider credible (Profound's citation data puts Reddit first among them), so moving AI visibility means earning honest mentions in citable places and making your own pages worth citing. A legitimate AEO retainer's deliverable list therefore reads like community and content deliverables plus measurement. A vendor whose deliverables contain no visible mention-building plan is selling you a scoreboard and calling it a team.
What we charge, in the open
The one-time version, our AI Search Audit, is $1,500 flat, delivered in ten business days: the frozen buyer-question panel, the recorded answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews, the citation source map, your site's readability for assistants, the search opportunity list, and a two-page memo naming the channel to fund first. If you go on to hire us, that fee comes off the first retainer invoice, because the panel it freezes becomes the first month's report rather than being thrown away.
The ongoing version, RouterGrowth's AI Visibility service, runs from $2,500/month on top of the Reddit Growth engine: a buyer-question map for your category frozen so months stay comparable, community-voice Reddit presence engineered for citability, the LLM-readable site checklist (structure, schema, llms.txt), and a monthly AI share-of-voice report with mentions, sentiment and cited sources. "From", because input work scales with how contested your category is and how many channels feed it.
The guarantee test
Nobody controls assistant outputs. The platforms retune constantly: Semrush watched ChatGPT's Reddit citation rate swing from roughly 60% of responses to 10% within two months. So the honest vendor guarantees inputs (the mentions built, the pages fixed, the presence maintained) and transparent measurement of outputs. Anyone guaranteeing "you will be cited by ChatGPT" is selling a coin flip with your money. Second red flag: deliverables you can't inspect, usually labeled "proprietary optimization".
Questions to ask any AEO vendor
Which sources will you build mentions in, and can I see them as they happen? How do you measure: what panel, what cadence, which competitors? What happens to the program when an answer engine changes its weighting? Is site-structure work (schema, llms.txt, answer-shaped pages) included or extra? And who writes the community content, under what disclosure rules? That last one is where the astroturfers out themselves; undisclosed shill posts are the one deliverable that can permanently cost you the asset you're paying to build.
Frequently asked questions
Is AEO worth buying before our classic SEO is fixed?
Don't sequence them, merge them: the inputs overlap heavily. Citable structure, clean pages and third-party credibility serve both, so month one of an honest AEO program usually is technical SEO work under another name.
Can we do AEO ourselves?
The measurement, absolutely: our DIY audit guide is the exact procedure and costs an hour a month. The mention-building is daily labor with platform-norm judgment, the same in-house-versus-agency trade as any channel.
Why does RouterGrowth bundle AEO with Reddit?
Because the citation data says that's where the leverage is: assistants lean on community sources and Reddit above all. Buying AEO without a mention engine underneath is buying a scoreboard for a game you're not playing.
The AI Search Audit runs a frozen question panel across ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews, maps the sources they cite, finds your search openings and names the channel to fund first. Ten business days, and the fee comes off your first retainer invoice if you go on to hire us.