Quick Answer

Most AEO agencies charge $3,000 to $10,000 per month for engagements that produce zero measurable deliverables in the first 90 days. They produce strategy documents instead. I have seen enough of these engagements to recognize the pattern: "strategy" is what an agency calls the period before it has done anything. A real AEO engagement owes you four concrete outputs in 90 days: a scored baseline audit, a working llms.txt file, structured-data coverage across your key pages, and a measured citation baseline showing how your brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews responses.

The short answer

An AEO engagement owes you four outputs by day 90: a scored baseline audit against the criteria AI engines use to select sources, a working llms.txt file live on your domain, schema markup validated on your key pages, and a before-and-after citation measurement showing how your brand appears in AI-generated answers. Any vendor that cannot name these deliverables before you sign is selling activity, not outcomes.

Why do most AEO vendors sell activity instead of outcomes?

Activity is easier to invoice. A strategy deck takes a week to produce. A citation measurement system takes months to build. Most vendors have the week.

I have been building AEO systems since before the category had a name. The pattern repeats. A vendor promises visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. At the 90-day check-in, the client has a content calendar and no measurement. The vendor calls this "Phase One.", as of September 2026.

The AEO category is roughly 18 months old in its current form. A practitioner on Reddit's r/SaaS described the landscape accurately: "Half the 'AEO specialists' rebranded from generic SEO last year." The same thread flagged a red flag worth memorizing: "Strategy and audit for 90 days at $10,000 per month is a red flag. Real work produces measurable citation lift by month 2 or 3."

The question buyers ask is almost always the wrong one. "Are AEO agency services worth the cost?" is the wrong frame. The right question is: "What does this vendor owe me in 90 days, by name?" Most vendors cannot answer that. The inability to answer is the answer.

A vendor who pitches "AI search visibility" without naming four concrete 90-day deliverables is selling a process, not a product. That is common. But process without deliverables is not a service-level agreement. It is a retainer for goodwill and effort.

Here is what a real AEO engagement owes you in 90 days. These are specific, verifiable, and achievable by any vendor with an actual system.

1. A scored baseline audit against the criteria AI engines use to select sources (delivered by day 30)
2. A working llms.txt file live on your domain (delivered by week 3)
3. Structured-data coverage across your key service and content pages (complete by day 60 to 90)
4. A measured citation baseline showing how your brand appears in AI answers before and after the engagement (delivered at day 90)

These are not aspirations. They are deliverables. The rest of this article explains what each one contains, what good looks like, and how to tell if yours is real.

What should a baseline AEO audit deliver by day 30?

The first deliverable is a scored baseline audit. Not a document. A score. Something you can measure against at 60 days and 90 days.

A document with no score is a report. A report is not a baseline.

A real AEO audit covers the criteria AI engines actually use to decide which sources to cite. These cluster into roughly 17 dimensions: question-format headings, FAQ schema implementation, structured-data coverage, fact density, original data presence, internal linking architecture, entity authority signals, and direct-answer front-loading, among others.

At AEO Content, we call this the AEO Rank. It is a 0-to-100 measurement derived from those criteria. Our clients receive it by day 14. The score tells you exactly where your content sits against the signals that ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews weight most heavily when constructing answers.

The score matters for a specific reason: you cannot improve what you have not measured. This is obvious. Very few AEO vendors do it anyway. Most deliver a narrative audit: "Your FAQ schema is missing" and "Your headings are not question-format." These observations are correct. They are also incomplete. A narrative without a number gives you no baseline to compare against at 90 days.

A scored baseline audit should include:

• A numerical score for each criterion, not just a pass/fail notation
• Current AI citation presence for your top five to ten target queries, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews
• A prioritized fix list ordered by citation-impact potential, not implementation effort
• A competitive comparison: how your score compares to the two or three sites AI engines currently cite for your target queries

If your vendor delivers an audit at day 30 with no numerical score, no current citation data, and no competitive comparison, you have received a document. Ask for the score. If they do not have a scoring system, that tells you something important about how much of their work is actually measurable.

Why does an AEO engagement owe you a working llms.txt file?

The llms.txt file is a machine-readable index that tells AI crawlers what your site contains, how it is structured, and which pages are most authoritative.

Think of it as the robots.txt file for the AI era. It does not tell crawlers to go away. It tells them where to look.

Most sites do not have one. Most AEO vendors do not mention it. This is a real gap. Without an llms.txt file, your site is harder for AI crawlers to navigate efficiently. They can still scrape your content, but you are relying on them to infer your site's architecture without guidance. You would not do that with Googlebot. You should not do it with GPTBot or ClaudeBot either.

The file should be live by week 2 or 3 of your engagement. It is not a technically complex deliverable. Creating a well-structured llms.txt file takes two to four days of focused work. Producing measurable citation impact from it takes three to eight weeks. That is exactly why it should be shipped early, not late. A vendor who delivers the llms.txt file at week ten has wasted six weeks of potential indexing time.

A properly built llms.txt file for a B2B company should include:

• Your key service and product pages with descriptive plain-English labels
• Your best evidence pages: original data, case studies, original research
• Your FAQ sections and knowledge base entries
• Author credentials and expertise pages
• A reference to your XML sitemap for full site discovery

Here is a test to run on your AEO vendor before you sign. Ask: "Which six to eight pages would you include in our llms.txt file and why?" A vendor with a real system can answer in two minutes. They will name your highest-authority pages, your most-cited content types, and your key FAQ resources. A vendor without a system will tell you it depends and ask for another call.

The llms.txt file is not a bonus deliverable. It is a baseline requirement for any AEO engagement that takes AI crawler access seriously. Any engagement that does not include it is structurally incomplete.

What structured-data coverage does a 90-day AEO engagement owe you?

Structured data is how you communicate with AI engines in a language they prefer over plain prose.

There are four schema types that move the needle most for AEO citations: FAQ schema, HowTo schema, Organization schema, and Article schema.

FAQ schema is the highest priority. AI engines pull FAQ blocks directly into answers. A page with properly implemented FAQ schema is considerably more likely to be cited for question-format queries than an identical page without it. This is not a theoretical advantage. It is observable in citation tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

Here is the timeline your engagement should follow:

The common objection is developer access. "We cannot implement schema without a developer sprint." This is true. A real AEO vendor accounts for it from the start. They either handle schema implementation directly, produce validated JSON-LD that your developer can deploy in a single sprint, or both. Saying "we do not have developer access" at day 90 is not an explanation. It is evidence that the engagement was not planned.

By day 90, your top five service pages, your pillar articles, and your FAQ pages should all have validated schema. Google's Rich Results Test and Schema.org validators are free. Your vendor should run validation as part of delivery, not leave it as a client task.

If your vendor has not touched your structured data by month three, they have done content work. Content work is good. But it is not an AEO engagement. AEO without structured data is SEO with a new logo.

What does a measured citation baseline look like at day 90?

The fourth deliverable is the hardest to fake. At day 90, you should receive a citation baseline: a record of how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers for your target queries, measured before the engagement began and again at day 90.

A valid citation baseline requires three components. Without all three, it is not a baseline. It is a claim.

1. A defined prompt set: the specific queries your buyers actually ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Not generic industry queries. Your queries. The ones your ICP types when evaluating vendors in your category.
2. A measurement methodology: a documented process for testing each prompt across AI engines, recording whether your brand appears, and noting the context and source of the citation.
3. A before-and-after comparison: a pre-engagement measurement taken at day zero and a repeat measurement at day 90 using the same prompts and methodology.

A HubSpot survey of 300 marketers found that 57% are already actively optimizing for AI search engines and 32% are already seeing real traffic from AI search channels. The question is no longer whether AI citations drive business results. It is whether your vendor is measuring them.

A citation baseline at day 90 should look like this: "Before the engagement, your brand appeared in AI-generated answers for two of your ten target prompts. At day 90, it appears in six. Here are the prompts, the response excerpts, and the sources AI engines cited alongside you." That is a result. It is verifiable, repeatable, and improvable.

If at day 90 your vendor cannot produce that document, two things are true. First, they have not been measuring citations. Second, they have no way to know whether the work they did made any difference. That is not an AEO engagement. That is an SEO engagement with more expensive slides.

The citation baseline is also your key input for month four and beyond. Without it, you cannot make informed decisions about which content to prioritize, which prompts to target, or which AI engine is most responsive to your specific content changes.

How do you hold an AEO vendor accountable for these deliverables?

The simplest method is to ask for the deliverable list before signing. Write down the answers. If the answers are vague, the deliverables will be vague.

The four pre-contract questions to ask every AEO vendor:

1. What is in my baseline audit and by which specific day do I receive it?
2. Will you create an llms.txt file for my domain, and by which week?
3. Which schema types will you implement on which pages, and by which day?
4. How will you measure citation lift, what is the methodology, and what does the day-90 report look like?

A vendor who answers all four clearly is worth talking to. A vendor who answers with "we take a holistic approach" or "every client is different" is giving you a signal. The signal is that they do not have a system.

One more thing worth knowing. Most vendors who entered the AEO category in 2024 rebranded from generic SEO work. They are not fraudulent. Many are learning the discipline at the same time their clients are trying to buy it. That is an honest description of a new market. But it is not a reason to pay $5,000 a month without a deliverable contract.

Buyers who know what they are getting become clients who can measure results. Clients who can measure results stay longer and get more from the engagement. The deliverable contract protects both parties. Ask for it. If a vendor resists, that is your answer.

Example llms.txt file structure

# llms.txt - place at yourdomain.com/llms.txt
About
> [Company] helps [ICP] achieve [outcome]. Founded [year].
Key Pages

[/services/core-service]: Primary service offering
[/faq]: Answers to 50+ buyer questions
[/about]: Team credentials and company background
[/case-studies]: Verified outcomes with measurable data
[/knowledge]: Original research and published data

Sitemap

[/sitemap.xml]

Your vendor should deliver a populated, validated version of this file - with your actual pages, real descriptions, and live links - by week 3 of the engagement. A template handed to you as a deliverable is not a deliverable.

What will matter most in AEO engagements over the next 12 to 24 months?

The AEO category is consolidating. Vendors who cannot produce the four 90-day deliverables will stop winning renewals. Vendors who can will build the measurement infrastructure that separates them from the rebranded-SEO field. That gap is widening now and will be decisive by mid-2027.

Three shifts are already underway that will change what a 90-day engagement looks like by 2026 and 2027.

Citation tracking becomes table stakes. Right now, fewer than half of AEO vendors track AI citations systematically. Within 18 months, clients will expect citation tracking as a standard reporting line, the same way they expect organic traffic in a Google Analytics dashboard. Vendors without a measurement system will not be able to renew at current rates.

llms.txt becomes a recognized technical standard. Google's robots.txt took years to become universal. The llms.txt convention is moving faster because the AI crawler ecosystem is more concentrated: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Googlebot-Extended cover the majority of AI indexing. Vendors who do not include llms.txt creation as a standard 90-day deliverable will be visibly behind the technical baseline.

Agentic AI changes the prompt landscape. As AI agents handle more B2B research and buying activity, the prompts that matter for citation will shift from "What is X?" to "Which vendor should I use for X?" and even "Compare vendors A, B, and C." This changes the citation baseline methodology: the prompt sets that matter most in 2026 are buyer-intent queries, not informational queries. Engagements that set up citation baselines against buyer-intent prompts now will have a significant advantage over competitors who track only informational queries.

The 90-day deliverable standard does not change. What changes is the sophistication of what those deliverables contain. The baseline audit will cover more criteria. The citation baseline will use more buyer-intent prompts. The llms.txt file will reference more structured content. But the contract itself, four deliverables in 90 days, remains the floor.

The 90-day deliverable standard is not a high bar. It is the minimum bar. Scored audit by day 14. llms.txt live by week 3. Schema validated by day 60. Citation baseline delivered at day 90. Any vendor with an actual system can hit all four. Any vendor who cannot name all four at the proposal stage is telling you something important before you spend a dollar.

The AEO market is maturing fast. The vendors who survive will be the ones who build systems, measure results, and produce deliverables their clients can verify. The ones who do not will keep calling month three "Phase One" until their clients stop renewing. You do not have to be one of those clients. Ask for the deliverable list. Write down the answers. That is the whole thing.

AEO Content's llms.txt creation and optimization service ships your file in week 2 and monitors AI crawler access for the full engagement term.