Can we charge more for AEO than SEO?

For the genuinely new work, yes, because it is additional labour. For the relabelled parts, a client who checks will notice, and that conversation costs more than the uplift earns.

What deliverable convinces clients?

A before-and-after of how the assistants describe them, using a fixed prompt set. Showing a client that a model currently describes their company wrong is more persuasive than any deck.

Do we need new tooling?

A monitoring tool saves time and is not essential to start. The scarce input is someone who can rewrite a page so it answers cleanly, which no tool provides.

For agencies

Adding AEO as an agency service

Most of what is being sold as answer engine optimisation is work your team already does. Selling it as new invites a client question you should be able to answer.

The short answer

For an agency, the honest version of an AEO service is three things that are genuinely additional: prompt-set monitoring across the assistants, rewriting pages for extraction rather than ranking, and managing third-party descriptions. The rest of a typical AEO deck is technical SEO and content work under a different name.

What ranked on 23 September 2026: The agency listicles that dominate this category mostly describe identical service lists. The differentiator that appears in none of them is what the agency will report, which is the question a client asks in month three.

What is actually new work

Separating the new from the relabelled protects you when a client asks what they are paying extra for, which they will.

Prompt-set monitoring is new: choosing the questions, sampling them across engines, recording descriptions rather than rankings
Extraction editing is a real skill: turning a well-ranking page into one whose paragraphs survive being quoted alone
Entity and third-party description work overlaps with digital PR but targets sources models retrieve rather than publications clients like
Everything about crawlability, structure, schema and internal linking is your existing technical practice
Content strategy is content strategy, with the unit changed from page to passage

Things that sound right and are not

ClaimGuaranteed AI citations.
Nothing about these systems supports a guarantee, and the client will eventually test it against a model update that moves everything at once.
ClaimCharging a separate retainer for a dashboard.
Monitoring is cheap and the client can buy the same tool. Charge for the editing and the third-party work, which is where the effort actually goes.
ClaimReporting opens as the headline.
Opens have been unreliable since image pre-fetching became standard, and citation counts are not published by the engines. Report the sampled prompt set and be honest about its limits.

Where to start

01Write the one-page version of what is new and what is your existing service, and use it in the sales conversation rather than hiding it.
02Standardise a prompt-set methodology across clients so results are comparable and defensible.
03Price the diagnosis separately from the execution, because they are different purchases with different value.
04Decide in advance what you report and what you refuse to promise, and put both in the proposal.
05Pick two clients to run it properly before it goes on the website as a service line.

Questions

Can we charge more for AEO than SEO?: For the genuinely new work, yes, because it is additional labour. For the relabelled parts, a client who checks will notice, and that conversation costs more than the uplift earns.
What deliverable convinces clients?: A before-and-after of how the assistants describe them, using a fixed prompt set. Showing a client that a model currently describes their company wrong is more persuasive than any deck.
Do we need new tooling?: A monitoring tool saves time and is not essential to start. The scarce input is someone who can rewrite a page so it answers cleanly, which no tool provides.

Doing this yourself and want a second opinion on what the assistants say about you? Tell me what you are seeing, or read the AEO Playbook for the whole framework.