How Much Does Answer Engine Optimization Cost?

Short answer: a diagnostic starts at $950, implementation starts at $1,500 if your own team does the work and $3,500 if we do, a new build starts at $4,500, and ongoing work starts at $1,500 a month. Those are our numbers and we publish them rather than making you ask. What nobody can honestly quote you is a single market rate, because a five-page business and a forty-page firm with twenty attorneys are not the same job.

That is the number. The rest of this explains what moves it, and how to tell whether a quote is honest.

Why nobody wants to answer this question

Search "how much does AEO cost" and you will mostly find pages that spend eight hundred words explaining that every business is unique before inviting you to book a call. That is a sales technique, not a limitation.

Pricing is genuinely variable. It is not unknowable. A firm that has done this work more than twice can tell you a range in the first conversation, and one that will not is usually either pricing off your perceived budget or does not know what the work involves.

What actually drives the price

Five things, roughly in order of impact:

1. How wrong your existing data is. This is the biggest variable and the least visible. A business with one clean Google Business Profile and consistent details across a handful of directories is a fraction of the work of one with four duplicate listings, three phone numbers in circulation, and a former partner still attached to the address. Nobody can quote this accurately without looking first, which is exactly what a paid diagnostic is for.

2. How many services or locations you have. One location and one service is straightforward. Six locations, or fifteen practice areas that each need distinguishing in structured data, is not.

3. Whether your site can carry the work. If the structured data and speed fixes drop onto your existing platform, the cost is the work itself. If your site physically cannot be made fast — a decade-old theme with widgets that cannot be removed individually — you are looking at a rebuild, and that is a different budget.

4. Whether it is one-time or ongoing. A retrofit fixes what is broken today. A retainer keeps you competitive as rivals do the same work and as the engines change. Both are legitimate; they are not the same purchase.

5. Who is doing it. A solo practitioner and a thirty-person agency price differently, and the difference is not only quality. You are also paying for account management, offices, and the salespeople who quoted you.

What you should get for the money

Regardless of who you hire, a real engagement should include:

• A written audit you keep, whether or not you continue
• Entity and citation correction across the places that describe your business
• Structured data deployed and validated against the tools search engines actually publish
• Business Profile configuration done deliberately rather than left on defaults
• A measurable before and after — including which AI tools name you now versus at the start

If a proposal does not include a baseline measurement, ask how you are meant to know it worked. That question sorts vendors quickly.

Five pricing red flags

"Free audit." Usually an automated scan tuned to produce alarming numbers, which then requires a paid engagement to resolve. Real diagnostic work costs money because it takes a person several hours.

A guaranteed ranking or placement. Nobody controls a search engine's output, and nobody controls what a language model generates. A guarantee is either misunderstanding or misdirection.

Twelve-month lock-in on a one-time fix. Ongoing work justifies a term commitment. A retrofit does not.

Pricing quoted before anyone has looked. If a firm names a number for entity correction without seeing your listings, they are guessing, and you will meet the real number later as a change order.

Reporting built on impressions. If the monthly report leads with impressions and traffic percentages rather than enquiries, you are buying a report rather than an outcome.

Is it worth it?

Depends entirely on what a client is worth to you.

If your average client is worth a few hundred dollars, a $3,500 implementation needs to produce a good many before it pays back, and there may be cheaper places to spend first. If your average client is worth five figures — which is typical for a law firm, an accounting practice, or a specialist medical group — the arithmetic is not close. One additional client covers it many times over.

The honest version: AEO is worth more the higher your client value and the more competitive your market. A firm in a crowded metro with $20,000 clients should have done this last year. A sole trader in a small town with no local competition can probably wait.

What we charge, and why we publish it

Our diagnostic starts at $950 and is credited in full toward any engagement signed within 14 days. From there you choose who implements the roadmap: your own developer or marketing team working to our specifications, from $1,500, or us doing it directly, from $3,500. A new build, when the diagnostic says the site itself is the obstacle, starts at $4,500. Ongoing work is $1,500 a month on a six-month minimum, because the work compounds and anything shorter cannot honestly be evaluated. Every one of those is a floor set by scope, not a flat rate.

We publish these because a service business hiding its prices behind a form is asking you to spend a call finding out whether you can afford it. You can see the full pricing breakdown with what each engagement includes.

Want to know what your business specifically would need? Book a free call — and if the answer is that you do not need us yet, we will tell you that instead.