For AEO agencies · indicative UK pricing
How much does it cost to hire an AEO agency in the UK? Get an indicative estimate of typical monthly retainers for Answer Engine Optimisation — visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and beyond. Pricing transparency in this category is still emerging.
Answer a few quick questions about your AEO scope. AEO is a young category — we show a wider band to reflect that.
Tier sets the price band. Move on to fine-tuning in the next steps.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is a young category — pricing transparency is still emerging. Six factors explain most of the variation in UK 2025/26 fees.
Agencies with thin content (<20 pages) need significant build phases — content production is the biggest line item. Agencies with deep libraries (100+ pages) shift effort to refactor and schema work, which is faster.
Each AI engine (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Copilot) has its own retrieval and citation patterns. Each platform targeted adds 10–20% to the retainer for monitoring, optimisation and platform-specific content tuning.
The AEO equivalent of keyword scope. Tracking 200–1,000 prompts is standard mid-market; 1,000+ pushes into programmatic territory and can nearly double the retainer.
Light schema (FAQPage, HowTo on key pages) is the baseline. Site-wide schema rollouts add 10–15%; full-site refactors with entity modelling add 30–50%. AI engines lean heavily on structured data, so this is rarely optional.
Wikipedia, Wikidata, citation building and knowledge panel optimisation are labour-heavy. A full brand-entity bundle typically adds £500–£2,000/mo as a flat add-on. AI engines lean heavily on entity signals when deciding who to cite.
Monthly checks are the cheap baseline. Weekly or daily real-time monitoring across multiple platforms adds 20–40% to the retainer (the cost is mostly tooling, not labour).
Indicative monthly UK AEO retainers, 2025/26. AEO pricing transparency is still emerging — figures are wider than other specialisms and best treated as a starting point for conversation.
£1,200 – £3,000 / mo
Founder-led specialists or SEO consultancies adding AEO as a service. Best for 50–200 prompt scopes targeting 2–3 major AI platforms.
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£3,000 – £8,000 / mo
10–75 staff with structured AEO pods. The sweet spot for 200–1,000 prompts, full platform coverage and site-wide schema work.
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£8,000 – £25,000+ / mo
75+ staff or specialist GEO firms. Built for 1,000+ prompts, brand entity work, daily real-time monitoring and multi-brand coverage.
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Four common pricing models in UK digital marketing. Most agencies use a blend; what matters is that the proposal is explicit about which.
A flat monthly fee covering an agreed scope of deliverables. Standard for SEO, content, social and email. Provides predictable cost but make sure scope is specified per month, not just at the contract level.
Fixed-fee for a defined deliverable — a website launch, a content campaign, a competitor audit. Good for one-off work; risky as an ongoing model because incentives drift away from outcomes.
Common in PPC and paid social. Agency charges 10–20% of media spend as a management fee. Aligns the agency with bigger budgets; can incentivise spend over efficiency, so check for performance guardrails.
A reduced base retainer with KPI-tied bonuses (e.g. % of revenue uplift, cost-per-lead targets). Strong alignment but only works when attribution and reporting are watertight.
A clear picture of what the retainer typically buys you.
£1,200 – £25,000+ / mo · indicative
Typically includes: Schema and structured data (FAQPage, HowTo, entity markup), source-of-truth content design tuned for AI extraction, AI-citation tracking across ChatGPT/Perplexity/Google AI Overviews/Gemini/Claude/Copilot, prompt-mode keyword research, content tuning for AI answer surfaces, brand entity work (Wikipedia, Wikidata, knowledge panel), monitoring and reporting. Many UK agencies bolt AEO onto an existing SEO retainer at a 15–25% uplift.
Plain answers about how UK AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) agencies cost, charge and contract — a young category where transparency is still catching up.
Indicative UK AEO retainers fall between £1,200/mo (boutique, basic, 50–200 prompts, 2–3 platforms) and £25,000+/mo (enterprise, 1,000+ prompts, daily monitoring, entity work). The mid-market sweet spot for 200–1,000 prompts with full platform coverage is £3,000–£8,000/mo. Pricing transparency is still emerging — fewer than 30% of UK AEO agencies publish rates.
SEO targets the traditional "ten blue links" results — getting your page to rank in Google search. AEO targets AI-generated answers — making sure your brand is cited or recommended when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini or Claude. They overlap (both reward authoritative content and structured data) but the deliverables differ: AEO weighs schema, entity signals and prompt-mode research more heavily.
If you already have an SEO agency you trust, ask whether they add AEO at a 15–25% uplift — that's the typical UK route in 2026 and avoids overlap. Specialist AEO-only agencies make sense if you have a complex schema or entity-modelling requirement, or if AI search is a strategic priority and your SEO agency isn't yet credible there.
Three reasons: (1) the category is genuinely new — agencies are still calibrating pricing, (2) tooling stacks vary enormously, from free open-source monitoring to £1,500/mo enterprise platforms, and (3) the work itself spans content production, schema engineering and brand entity (Wikipedia/Wikidata) work, with very different cost profiles. The calculator above narrows the range based on your specific inputs.
Yes, but it requires tooling. Most UK AEO retainers include AI-citation tracking — running your target prompts against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and others on a regular cadence and recording where your brand appears. Track citation rate, position and sentiment over time. Attribution to revenue is harder than SEO and still maturing.
Faster than SEO in some cases. AI engines re-index more dynamically than Google, so well-structured content with strong schema can start appearing in AI answers within weeks. Brand entity work (Wikipedia, knowledge panels) is much slower — 3–6+ months. Most UK agencies suggest a 6-month minimum to see meaningful citation lift.
AI engines lean heavily on Wikipedia and Wikidata when deciding who to cite. Getting (and maintaining) a Wikipedia article that meets notability guidelines is a specialist skill — labour-heavy, often slow, and never guaranteed. Most UK agencies price this as a flat £500–£2,000/mo add-on. Don't expect quick wins.
It depends on how much of your customer research has shifted to AI. For B2B SaaS, professional services and high-consideration consumer purchases, AI search is now a meaningful share of pre-sale research. For commodity ecommerce and impulse buys, SEO and PPC still own the funnel. The honest answer in 2026: it's a fast-growing channel worth defending, not yet a primary acquisition channel for most brands.