What an AEO engagement costs
Most of what gets sold as AEO is a technical audit and a content rewrite. It costs what those cost. Our numbers are public: retainers at $4,500 and $7,500 a month, projects from $8,000, minimum €3,000 excl. BTW. And a large share of the people reading this shouldn't be buying any of it yet.
Category
Measurement
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6 min
Most of what gets sold as AEO is a technical audit and a content rewrite. It costs what those cost. Our numbers are public: retainers at $4,500 and $7,500 a month, projects from $8,000, minimum €3,000 excl. BTW. And a large share of the people reading this shouldn't be buying any of it yet.
Desses sells this work. The scoped AEO audit can lead into a retainer, and that retainer is the same subscription we sell for design and Framer builds. Every price below moves money toward me, and every study carries its publisher, sample and window.
Search for the best AEO agency and you get agencies listing agencies, each one citing the others. Not one carries a price. That's how a category behaves before anyone has agreed what's being sold.
Why nobody will give you a number
AEO, answer engine optimisation, is the work of getting a page retrieved and cited by systems that answer a question in prose and link out sparingly. Four jobs sit under that label, with four different price shapes.
Crawlability and rendering is whether a retrieval bot receives your text at all: a robots.txt read, a check that OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot aren't blocked, and a raw HTML fetch with JavaScript off, because no major AI crawler executes JavaScript. Reading your situation takes an afternoon. Fixing it runs from one robots.txt line to a rebuild.
Schema and structure is the second job, and the evidence is thinner than the sales pitch. The one controlled study found AI Overview citations down 4.6% on pages that added JSON-LD. The full walk is its own article. A day or two of code, then it sits there.
Content is the third job and it eats the budget. The academic case for content-level tactics is one paper reporting up to 40%, measured in a simulator after retrieval had already happened, with the reproduction attempts landing badly. That argument, with every caveat. Writing a page a working analyst would cite costs what good writing costs.
Measurement is the fourth job and the cheapest. Search Console's generative AI reports, Bing's grounding queries, GA4's AI Assistant channel and your own server logs. The setup is a day.
The job | What it involves | Roughly what it takes | Where the cost sits |
|---|---|---|---|
Crawlability and rendering | robots.txt, verified bot IPs, raw HTML fetched with JS off | An afternoon to read, days to fix, weeks if it means a rebuild | Sits with development |
Schema and structure | JSON-LD through custom code, heading order, one topic per URL | A day or two, then it's done | One-off, small |
Content | New pages answering questions your site currently doesn't | Ongoing, with no end date | The largest line, every month |
Measurement | GSC and Bing AI reports, GA4 channel, server-log analysis | A day to set up, an hour a month to read | Small and permanent |
Rows one, two and four are a week of work. Row three is a publishing operation, which is why quotes vary tenfold.
The three shapes this gets sold in
A one-off audit is the honest version of rows one, two and four. Someone reads your robots.txt, fetches your pages the way a bot does, checks the schema and headings, sets up the reporting and hands you a fix list. It ends.
A retainer is the honest version of row three, because the questions keep arriving and the content has to keep arriving with them. Anyone selling a retainer for rows one, two and four is charging rent on a job that finished in week two.
Tools are the third shape. Profound, Peec AI, Otterly, Semrush's AI toolkit and Ahrefs Brand Radar all sell a dashboard of where your brand turns up in AI answers. Each samples prompts it has chosen, then reports the output as demand. Schulte et al. tracked four engines over 45 days in early 2026 and put the daily Jaccard near 0.35: about a third of cited sources survive to the next day. Run a prompt seven or eight times before the answer counts.
What we charge, in full
The AEO audit is a scoped one-off: crawlability and rendering, schema, content structure, measurement setup, ending in a fix list with owners and an order. It's quoted on the first call, once I've looked at the site, because the range between "your robots.txt has one wrong line" and "your site needs rebuilding" is the whole spread. It can lead into a retainer, and plenty of the time it shouldn't.
The retainers are already public on desses.co. Growth is $4,500 a month, €4,000, one active request at a time, average 48 hour turnaround. Immersive is $7,500 a month, €6,500, unlimited requests, average 24 hour turnaround, one or two sync calls a week. A Quick Launch project starts at $8,000, €7,000, end to end at a flat rate.
Service work starts at $8,000, €7,000. Framer development runs 2 to 4 weeks, website design 3 to 4 weeks, product design 5 to 6 weeks, AI or custom development about 6 weeks. Design and Framer development bought together run 4 to 6 weeks against 7 in sequence.
No hourly, no day rate. The price is fixed after the first call and doesn't move. Subscriptions are cancelable monthly. Minimum project €3,000 excluding BTW.
Chaos is priced at roughly 2x. When nobody can say who signs off, half the time goes to doing things twice, and I'd rather put that on the quote than go quiet in week five. "We move fast here" on a first call is the tell.
When you shouldn't buy this
This is the section the rest of the category skips, and it's most of the value here.
Your site renders client-side
If your pages ship an empty shell and hydrate in the browser, an AEO retainer pays someone to optimise text the crawler never receives. Get the pages server-rendered first, which is a development invoice on a development timeline. Anyone selling that to you as AEO is mislabelling the work.
You get no organic traffic at all
Most pages an AI Overview cites rank somewhere in Google, on every study that has looked. Ranking for nothing is the problem underneath the problem. Fix the search position and much of the AI visibility arrives with it.
You have no informational content
Answer engines cite pages that answer questions. Seer Interactive puts AI Overview prevalence at 36% on informational queries, 8% on commercial and 5% on transactional. A five-page site of product marketing and a pricing table gives a retrieval system nothing to lift. No schema fixes that and no audit does either. What fixes it is a hiring decision.
Four free things to do before you pay anyone
Run Framer's AEO scanner on your site and your closest competitor. It works on any URL and wants a name and business email first.
Open Bing Webmaster Tools and read the grounding queries in the AI Performance report, real phrases that pulled your content into an answer.
Fetch your own homepage the way a retrieval bot does:
If that returns a few thousand characters, your content isn't in the HTML and you've found your real project. On a Framer site it returns the full body text, because every page is pre-rendered on Framer's servers.
Then check Search Console's generative AI reports and add the AI Assistant channel in GA4. An afternoon tells you which of the four jobs you have.
What you're buying, at today's scale
Read the numbers before you sign anything. Across 2025, the best outcome of a successful engagement was a smaller number than the same page earned with no AI Overview above it at all: 2.07% organic click-through when cited, against 3.35% with no AI Overview present. The rebound since December 2025 cuts both ways, because the hole an engagement fills is closing on its own.
What we'd do, in order
Fetch the site as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, then check robots.txt against OpenAI's crawler list. Blocking Google-Extended doesn't remove you from AI Overviews. Blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from ChatGPT search entirely.
Fix the rendering if it needs fixing. On Framer there's usually nothing to do. On a client-side React app it's the whole project, and our Framer development work covers it in 2 to 4 weeks.
Add Organization with sameAs, plus Article and BreadcrumbList on content pages. Skip FAQPage and HowTo, gone from Google's results since 7 May 2026.
Set up the measurement before the content. Then write: one topic per URL, the answer near the top, facts stated directly.
The audit ends. The writing doesn't.
Desses has been running out of Rotterdam since 2018, and about 70% of clients stay for years, which means telling them about the quarters when there's nothing worth buying.
Send me your URL and I'll run Framer's scanner and a curl as OAI-SearchBot against your three most important pages, then send back what I'd change. Twenty minutes, costs nothing. If you don't need an engagement yet, that's the answer you'll get.