Chapter ten of ten
AEO touches your site, your product team, your PR and your reporting. Pick a partner who can cover all of that and explain how. Ask to see the results in your pipeline.
Buyers ask Should we hire an agency for AEO?
By Maeva Cifuentes · Updated October 2026
Three agencies, one set of questions
A partner you can check
The short answer
In over half of companies the SEO team runs AEO, so a partner should strengthen that team. A good partner brings senior strategy, technical and on-site skill, outreach to the pages engines cite, plus reporting tied to demos and signups. Ask every agency the same questions and score the answers side by side. Walk away from anyone who guarantees results.
Existing SEO teams run AEO in 52.8% of companies, according to a June 2026 survey of 599 SEO, content and growth professionals by Minuttia with Kevin Indig and Growth Memo. Cross-functional teams run it in 19.4%. Agencies alone run it in 2.7%. The sample leans toward agency and freelance respondents, so read those shares as directional.
| In-house | Agency | A mix | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Suits | Teams with an SEO lead and room to hire | Teams without SEO depth or capacity | Teams with SEO staff who need strategy, outreach or extra hands |
| Strength | Deep product knowledge and fast approvals | Patterns seen across many clients and categories | Your team keeps the knowledge while the partner fills gaps |
| Watch for | One person covering technical, content, outreach and reporting | Generic playbooks that ignore your product | Unclear ownership of who ships what |
An in-house AEO hire costs more than the salary suggests. First Page Sage puts the median salary at $96,400 and the fully loaded cost at $146,028 a year (October 2026). Eli Schwartz argues the right hire works like a product manager, reading data and understanding users, more than a person who reports prompt scores (Product-Led SEO, June 2026).
Each chapter of this guide covers one part of the job. A good partner handles all of them, or tells you plainly which parts it leaves to you.
Its founder and strategists worked in SEO long before AEO. They can show the sites they grew.
It learns your product and buyers from sales calls, tickets and customer research before choosing prompts. Chapter 5 covers this.
It confirms bots can reach, read and find your key pages before any content work. Chapter 4 covers this.
It works on rankings and on content that states plainly what you sell, with your product team involved. Chapter 6 covers this.
It finds the third-party pages engines cite and works to get you named there, with every placement checked for relevance. Chapter 7 covers this.
It ties results to demos and signups and reads AI numbers as trends per engine. It labels proxies as proxies. Chapter 8 covers this.
It checks what engines say about you and fixes the sources behind wrong answers, starting with your own site.
median monthly AEO retainer for B2B SaaS, with a typical range of $4,500 to $20,000
First Page Sage, October 2026, 1,146 quotes from 214 agenciesmedian price of an AEO audit, which usually takes 2 to 6 weeks
Same reportmedian monthly AEO retainer across all industries
Same reportServices cost thousands of dollars a month, as the figures above show, and a tracking tool adds its own subscription. Kevin Indig argues monitoring alone is turning into a commodity (Growth Memo, November 2025). He places the value in shipping the changes that move results. Budget for the work, then pick the tool that reports on it.
First Page Sage sells AEO services itself, so read its figures as one market view. Retainers rise with scope, especially once digital PR and original research are included.
To build your shortlist, start with our roundup of six answer engine optimization agencies winning in AI search. Then ask every agency the same questions and write down the answers. A strong answer names a method, gives an example and states what it needs from you.
Listen for buyer research, themes and a reason for each prompt. A long list generated by a tool is a weak answer.
Listen for bot access, rendering and indexing of your key pages.
Listen for a review of your existing pages before new ones are proposed.
Listen for cited pages, relevance checks, honest labels and open fees.
Listen for demos and signups and for trends per engine. A clear line between observed numbers and proxies is a good sign.
Look up the founder and the strategist on your account. Check how long they have worked in search and where. Look at what they published before AEO had a name. A history that starts in 2025 deserves a closer look.
Ask for names and roles. Ask how much time senior people spend on the account.
Listen for approvals, product experts, developer time and access, stated up front.
Ask for the before and after and the time it took. Ask which metrics moved.
AEO has drawn founders and agencies with zero history in search. Advice from people who have never run SEO can damage the rankings, site structure and indexing that retrieval depends on. Check the founder's track record before you check the pitch deck.
Engines vary run to run and rank on factors nobody controls fully. Targets are fine. Guarantees are a sales line.
A rolled-up AI rank or proprietary score is easy to inflate. Ask to see the prompts and the answers behind it.
Thin pages built per prompt or per fan-out bloat the site and hurt the rankings retrieval depends on.
Google applies its spam policies, including scaled content and inauthentic mentions, to its AI answers (May 2026).
Eli Schwartz warns that many agencies swapped the word keyword for prompt and kept selling the same content volume (September 2026).
Changing dates without changing pages earns nothing durable.
Compare them
Name up to three agencies. After each call, rate how well they answered each area and mark the areas you must have. Tick any red flags you heard. The scorecard compares them in your browser and gives you a summary to share.
Red flags you heard
Ratings stay in this page and leave your browser only when you copy them. Must-have areas count double. Any red flag is listed beside the score, since one serious flag can outweigh a high total.
Flying Cat is a founder-led AEO and SEO consultancy for B2B SaaS companies. We built this guide from the work we do for clients, so the method in each chapter is the method we use.
Flying Cat's founder has worked in search for more than 15 years. Senior leadership runs strategy on every account. Writers and editors with experience in your field handle execution. We keep our client list small on purpose.
Every engagement starts with a 3 to 5 week Strategy Launch covering product and buyer discovery, competitors, technical access, keyword and prompt research, plus the content and off-site plan.
We work alongside in-house SEO, content and product teams. Clients with their own writers can take briefs and strategy only.
Every off-site placement passes a relevance and quality check. Publisher fees pass through at cost.
Monthly reports and quarterly reviews come with every retainer, built on the tiers in chapter 8.
| Option | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy Launch | $5,000, one time | The full strategy and audit, delivered in 3 to 5 weeks |
| Advisory | From $2,000 a month | Ongoing strategy and review for teams that execute in-house |
| Full service | Priced to scope | Strategy, content, off-site outreach and reporting, scaled to your goals |
Its share of tracked AI answers rose from 12% to 33% in nine months. Demo requests from organic search and AI assistants rose 73% year over year.
It was named in 88% of ChatGPT answers for its category, up from 76% in four months. The share of answers citing its own site rose from 25% to 41%.
Eli Schwartz expects the useful AEO agency to be smaller and to sell strategy and PR relationships (September 2026). He expects it to bill like a consultancy.
Forrester's AEO technologies landscape (August 2026) covers tracking platforms and, as summarized by one listed vendor, urges buyers to examine the data behind each platform's insights.
We found zero Gartner or Forrester guidance on choosing an AEO services partner as of October 2026. Agency-written checklists exist. Each one favors its author.
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