What Is an AEO Agency? What GEO Agencies Actually Do (and Cost) in 2026

What Is an AEO Agency?

An AEO agency (also called a GEO agency or AI search agency) is a firm that gets your brand cited, mentioned, and recommended inside AI-generated answers — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews — as a done-for-you service. Where an SEO agency optimizes for ranked positions in a list of links, an AEO agency optimizes for being the source an engine names when it writes the answer.

The category is about eighteen months old, which is the important context for everything below: it's new enough that most agencies selling it are traditional SEO shops that changed their label this year without changing what they do. Knowing what the work actually is — below — is how you tell them apart.

TL;DR: An AEO agency does five things — AI visibility audit, technical access fixes, extraction restructuring, entity building, and weekly citation reporting — for $8–20K/month. Vet them by demanding a citation artifact (real prompt + earning page + what they changed). Can't produce one = rebranded SEO.

What a Real AEO Agency Actually Does

Five workstreams, in the order they gate each other:

1. AI visibility audit. Baseline measurement across every engine: are you mentioned, cited, described accurately? 78% of brands have factual errors in how AI describes them — a real agency checks accuracy, not just presence.
2. Technical access. Crawler permissions (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot), Bing indexing, server-side rendering — the binary gates that block everything downstream.
3. Extraction restructuring. Rewriting priority pages answer-first, question-based headings, FAQ blocks, self-contained passages — the structural work that makes content liftable (2.8x citation-rate correlation).
4. Entity and authority building. Wikidata, Organization schema, consistent entity data, third-party mentions — the compounding layer. Branded mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.664 vs 0.218 for backlinks.
5. Measurement and reporting. Citation rate, mention rate, share of voice per engine per query — weekly, not "we'll check in quarterly."

The full 40-point version is our AEO checklist — which doubles as a vetting script, below.

What It Costs

• Full retainers: $8,000–$20,000/month for senior-level done-for-you work (Altyzo Managed starts at $8K)
• Audit-led engagements: $5,000–$10,000 one-time — the lower-risk entry that usually credits toward a retainer
• Below $5K/month: you're usually buying junior account management with an "AI" label, not senior execution

For the full cost math across tools, hires, and agencies: agency vs. tools vs. in-house.

How to Vet One — The Test That Works

Ask them to show you a citation artifact: a real prompt where a client's brand is cited, the page that earned it, and what they changed to earn it. Every real AEO agency can produce this — it's literally their product. A rebranded SEO shop produces a case-study PDF about traffic instead.

Secondary checks:

• Can they walk you through their tracking cadence — which queries, which engines, how often?
• Do they talk about entity building and extraction structure, or just "AI-optimized content"?
• Do they name the engines separately, or treat "AI search" as one blob? The engines have different indexes and different mechanics (ChatGPT ≠ Perplexity ≠ Claude)
• Do they guarantee anything? Honest shops guarantee process (priority prompts, timelines); dishonest ones guarantee positions nobody controls

Red Flags — Rebranded SEO Checklist

• Their pitch is "we do SEO plus AI" with no separate methodology
• No citation tracking infrastructure — they can't show you a dashboard or log
• Deliverables are all content volume ("10 posts/month") with no entity or technical work
• They can't explain what llms.txt, sameAs, or query fanout are
• Their case studies are traffic charts from 2023
• They promise "rank #1 in ChatGPT" — that position doesn't exist to promise

When an Agency Is the Right Answer (and When It Isn't)

Right answer when: you need results this year, can't hire senior AI-search talent (a senior in-house hire runs $120–180K loaded and ramps in 4–6 months), and one new client covers the retainer.

Wrong answer when: you're an agency yourself — then the done-for-you model inverts and owned infrastructure makes more sense. If you have the team to supervise output but not to produce it, an execution platform is the fourth path most comparison lists skip.

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between an SEO agency and an AEO agency?

An SEO agency optimizes for ranking positions in link lists. An AEO agency optimizes for citations inside generated answers — different signals (entity strength, extraction structure vs. backlinks, keywords), different measurement (citations, share of voice vs. rank, traffic).

Are AEO agencies legit or a fad?

The discipline is real and research-backed — the Princeton GEO study established the field. The market is young, which means quality varies wildly. Vet with the citation-artifact test above.

How long until an AEO agency shows results?

Structural work shows movement in 2–4 weeks; machine-readable formats measured coverage lift in 14–21 days. Meaningful citation share takes 90 days; entity authority takes quarters. A guarantee of anything faster is a red flag, not a feature.

What should an AEO agency report on?

Citation rate and share of voice per engine, mention accuracy, priority-prompt coverage, and AI referral traffic/conversions. If the report is a rank tracker screenshot, they're an SEO agency.

Altyzo Managed is the done-for-you version of everything above — senior strategist plus a seven-agent fleet, from $8K/month, two engagements per month. See how it works.