The software half of answer engine optimization has a published price. The agency half mostly does not. I priced five AI visibility platforms on 22 September 2026, and the three pure play trackers among them charge between $1.22 and $2.00 per tracked prompt per month, so a hundred prompt programme costs under $250 in tools. If your AEO quote is $2,500 and it tracks a hundred prompts, you are buying about $189 of software and $2,311 of somebody’s time.
That second number is the whole conversation, and it stays folded inside the first. I run AI search optimization for clients, so this is an awkward thing for me to publish. I am publishing it because a client asked me last week what a fair AEO retainer looks like and I did not have a defensible answer. Now I do.
Every one of these vendors sells the same unit. Prompts watched, not citations won.
The mistake: buying AEO as one number
The question always arrives as a single figure. What does AEO cost. An agency answers with a number, the buyer flinches or signs, and nobody opens the number up.
There are only two things inside it: a subscription that watches what AI assistants say when somebody asks a question in your category, and a person doing something about what it finds. The first has a public market price. The second does not, and should not, because it depends entirely on what the person does.
Bought as one line, you can never tell which one you are paying for. A retainer that is $200 of software and $2,300 of page rewrites is a different purchase from one that is $200 of software and $2,300 of exporting that dashboard into a slide. Both look identical on an invoice.
What five AI visibility vendors actually charge
All five read from the vendors’ own pricing pages on 22 September 2026.
Otterly.AI lists $29 a month for 15 tracked search prompts, $189 for 100, and $489 for 400, with an add on pack of 100 extra prompts at $99. Peec AI lists $95 for 50 prompts, $245 for 150 and $495 for 350. Scrunch lists a Core plan at $250 for 125 unique prompts, and quotes everything above it as Enterprise.
Semrush does not sell the tracking separately. It sits inside the SEO subscription: $139 a month for the base plan, which lists monitoring custom prompts without naming a count, then $199 for 50 prompts tracked daily, $299 for 100 and $549 for 200, all on monthly rather than annual billing. Profound publishes no price at all. There is a seven day trial running 50 prompts a day, and then Enterprise, Custom, with what the page calls a tailored prompt tracking plan.
Now look at the unit rather than the numbers. Every one of these companies, including the one that will not print a price, sells the same thing: prompts watched per month. Not citations won. Not mentions gained. Not customers. Prompts watched.
Divide price by prompts and the three pure plays land in a band you can hold in your head. Otterly comes out at $1.93, $1.89 and $1.22 across its tiers. Peec at $1.90, $1.63 and $1.41. Scrunch Core at exactly $2.00. Otterly’s add on pack is the cheapest marginal prompt on the list at $0.99. Three independent companies, landing inside a dollar of each other.
I left Semrush out of that band on purpose. Its per prompt figure is higher, $2.99 on the 100 prompt tier and $2.75 on the 200, but you are buying an entire SEO suite in the same subscription. That is a different purchase, and quoting it as an AEO price would flatter my argument rather than test it.
The arithmetic on a $2,500 retainer
Agency retainers are harder to price because most of them are not published. The one AEO agency I found that does publish a range, AI Advantage Agency, puts starter retainers at $2,500 a month and enterprise engagements at $25,000 or more, and says in the same post that most agencies bury their costs behind a contact form.
Take the starter number at face value and put the tool price beside it. A hundred tracked prompts on Otterly’s $189 plan is 7.6 per cent of a $2,500 retainer. Roughly ninety two cents in every dollar is buying a person’s time. At the $25,000 end, the software is under one per cent.
$2,500 a month for answer engine optimization.
One number, no parts, nothing in it you can price against anything else.
$189 of prompt tracking and $2,311 of somebody’s time.
Same quote at a hundred tracked prompts, split at the one line with a public price.
None of that is an accusation. Ninety two cents of labour can be an excellent purchase, because rewriting the pages an assistant reads before it answers a buying question takes real hours. It is a poor purchase when the labour is a screenshot with a logo on it. The split is the point, and the ratio tells you which question to ask.
The outcome number is already free
One more thing is worth knowing before you agree a price, and it is new enough that most AEO quotes were written before it existed. Search Console now carries a generative AI features report. I opened mine this morning: 6.42 thousand impressions across the three month window, on my own property, at no cost. It offers exactly one metric, impressions. No click column, no position.
I have written separately about what that report can and cannot support, and the short version is that it is thinner than it looks. The narrow point for pricing is this. The nearest thing to a public scoreboard costs nothing and is already in your own Search Console, and it is not even an outcome, because being shown inside an answer is not a customer. So the scoreboard cannot be what a retainer sells you. Whatever it is worth has to live between the prompt list and that report: the writing, the pages, the schema, the decision about which questions are worth being the answer to.
Three moves before you sign an AEO retainer
Ask for the prompt list, then count it
Multiply the count by two dollars. That is the software line, near enough, and it is the only part of the quote with a public market price. Subtract it and ask what the remainder buys, in deliverables you could point at in a month, not in adjectives.
Write the prompt list from your last twenty sales calls
You are paying per prompt, so a prompt no buyer has ever typed is a line item that cannot pay you back. A list built from category keywords is not the same thing as a list built from questions buyers ask. The questions your closers answer on repeat are the ones worth tracking, and you already own that list.
Make the contract name a deliverable that is not a dashboard
Pages published, pages rewritten, schema shipped, comparison tables built, an FAQ block that answers the question in the prompt. A monthly report is evidence that work happened. On its own it is not the work, and it is easy to sell twice.
One caveat on the second move. If most of your calls come from one trade, the prompt list writes itself out of the first thirty seconds of those calls. That is the same list I build a content plan from, and it is why I ask for call recordings before a keyword export.
The bottom line
AEO monitoring is not expensive. Three companies have independently landed on what it is worth, and it is one to two dollars a prompt a month. What varies is the labour attached to it, and the only honest way to judge that is to price the software first, subtract it, and make somebody name what the remainder does. If the answer is a report, you already have a free one.