Hiring help · · By Gerald De Oleo

What to Ask an AEO Agency Before You Sign: A Vendor Checklist

The short answer: ask for the prompt set, the engine list and a sample report before you sign anything. If a vendor can’t show you what a month of work produces, the scope isn’t defined yet.

I sell this work, so I have a stake in how you read this. These are the questions I’d want asked of me.

Ask what they measure

Most reporting in this category stops at mention rate — how often your brand appears across a set of tracked questions. That’s useful as a trend line and it’s not a diagnosis.

Two things to ask for specifically:

Recommended versus mentioned. Being named in a list of ten and being the recommendation are different outcomes. A lot of reports score them the same.

The exact description. Not a sentiment score, the actual sentence the model used about your company. Is the category right? Is it describing what you sell today?

That second one is where most B2B SaaS companies are losing without knowing it — described accurately, in the category they moved away from two years ago.

Ask which engines, and see them separately

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI results draw from different sources and often disagree. A single blended “AI visibility” number hides that.

Confirm which engines are covered at your price, and ask to see them reported separately.

Ask for the sources

For every answer where you’re missing, which pages did the engine actually cite?

That list is the work plan. Those pages are writing your category description, and most of them won’t be yours. Without them, a report tells you what’s happening but not what to do about it.

Ask what month one looks like

The right answer starts with diagnosis, not a content calendar.

If a proposal opens with publishing, ask what they already know about your entity that makes content the first move. If your company is described three different ways across the web, more content amplifies the confusion instead of fixing it.

Ask about hours

This one’s uncomfortable and worth asking anyway: roughly how many hours a month is this, and which of them are senior?

A lot of AEO retainers are productized packages — a scan, a report, a few fixes. That can be a fine purchase at the right price. But you should know whether you’re buying someone’s attention or a workflow, because they solve different problems.

Things that should make you pause

Start with an audit

The lowest-risk way in is a paid audit rather than a retainer. Standalone audits in this market run from about $399 for fixed-price specialist audits to $5,000 at agencies — the full price breakdown is here.

A good one should leave you able to do one of three things: hire them, hand the findings to your own team, or walk away knowing what’s wrong. Ask whether the deliverable is yours to keep and to share with another vendor. If the audit only makes sense as a lead-in to their retainer, it wasn’t an audit.

A realistic first 90 days

Days 1–30. Baseline across every engine. An inventory of every listing and profile describing you, checked against your current positioning. A prioritized list of corrections.

Days 31–60. Corrections shipped — listings, schema, crawler access, and the pages your buyers’ specific questions need. Early re-measurement.

Days 61–90. Movement on engines that search the web on every question. Off-site work underway but not fully reflected yet; that part is slower.

What you shouldn’t expect is a clean number for a board deck by day 30. What you should expect is knowing, by day 30, exactly why you’re missing from the answers that matter.

How I work

Applying the same questions to myself, since it’d be odd not to.

Before we talk, I run a free Shortlist Check on your domain — three or four of your buyers’ questions in one engine — so the first call starts with something real rather than a pitch. The audit itself is paid and fixed at $499. Its deliverable is yours either way, including the right to take it elsewhere. You get the raw answers per engine — the exact descriptions, the cited sources, the competitors that appeared — not a score.

I work alone, as a one-person AEO agency. That means the person doing the analysis is the person you talk to. It also means I can’t produce content at agency volume or run large off-site PR programs in parallel. If you need production at scale, an agency with a bench is the better buy.

Entity first, then content. That order is the whole reason the later work is worth paying for.

Full scope is on the services page. Market price bands to benchmark any quote against, mine included, are in How to Choose an AEO Agency, and eight named options are compared in Best AEO Agencies for B2B SaaS.

Quick answers

What should an AEO agency deliver? A per-engine report of your prompt set showing whether you were recommended, mentioned or absent, the exact descriptions used, the sources cited, competitors that appeared, and a specific fix tied to each finding.

How much does it cost? Most B2B engagements run $2,000–$10,000 per month, with standalone audits between $399 and $5,000.

Should I start with a retainer? Usually not. An audit costs less, tells you what’s wrong, and leaves you free to decide who fixes it.

How long until it works? Changes to your own site register soonest. Changes to how third parties describe you take longer. Anyone promising a date for a specific engine is guessing.

If you want the diagnosis before deciding anything, that’s what the audit is. Before we talk, I run a free Shortlist Check — three or four of your buyers’ questions in one engine — so you can see whether the full audit is worth it. Book a call.