The best AEO agencies in 2026: 10 answer engine optimization firms compared

Which AEO agencies are worth a call?

Start with Arobis AI, Scalerrs, Discovered Labs, LoudFace and Optimist if you sell software to businesses. All ten below name answer engine optimization as a service on their own site, and each entry is built from that site: its prices, its terms, its results. Where a site shows no price, the table says "not published" rather than guessing.

A note on labels. AEO, GEO and AI SEO describe almost the same job, and most agencies use two or three of the terms at once. We cover generative engine optimization firms separately in the best GEO agencies, with a different shortlist, and our AEO vs SEO vs GEO explainer covers where the terms differ. This page is for buyers who searched "AEO agency": the ones who care about the answer box, the question people type, and whether their brand is in the reply.

1. Arobis AI: best AEO agency for B2B SaaS

Best for: B2B SaaS companies whose buyers ask AI tools for vendor shortlists · Price: $2,500/mo Foundation, $5,000/mo AI Search Growth, custom Enterprise1

Most AEO work fails because nobody agrees on which questions matter. Arobis AI fixes that first: the Foundation plan opens with 40 buyer prompts run across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and a gap map of which competitors get named where you don't1. From there the team rewrites the pages answer engines lift from (comparison, alternatives, pricing, homepage), ships the top technical fixes, and lands third-party placements every month. A strategist meets you every two weeks.

The $5,000 tier is where the AEO work gets heavier: new comparison and answer pages, entity cleanup on Wikidata, Crunchbase and G2, and weekly re-checks of AI answers with fixes the same week1. The one published client result is anonymized but specific. In 60 days, money prompts naming the client went from 0 of 5 to 5 of 5, its share of AI answers reached 31% (first of 8 brands), and its Google AI Overview and AI Mode impressions rose 3.1x2.

Arobis AI turns away e-commerce, DTC and local businesses, and says a team that would struggle with $2,500 a month for three months shouldn't sign. Because the client is unnamed, ask to see that prompt set and the before-and-after answers under NDA. It also guarantees the work, not mentions, which is the only honest promise in this market.

2. Scalerrs: best for getting cited from Reddit, YouTube and listicles

Best for: B2B SaaS teams whose own site is in decent shape but who are missing from the sources AI tools quote · Price: fixed monthly fee, not published3

Scalerrs is 100% SaaS-focused, and its AEO service is built around one idea: AI answers repeat what other sites say about you. So the work happens mostly off your domain. The team runs your top 20 to 30 keywords through the models to see which pages they cite, then places the brand there through Reddit replies, YouTube videos, listicle pitches, backlinks and Wikipedia pages3. It calls the planning step "LLM seeding": deciding which facts and positioning the models should keep repeating, and which negatives to defuse.

The published numbers are citation counts, and plenty of them. AutoRFP picked up 2,116 domain citations in ChatGPT and Perplexity, Morgen logged 4,316 AI citations in 30 days, and Default attributes about 30% of its pipeline to AEO, SEO and AI search3. Tracking runs on PromptWatch and Profound, and monthly reports include referral traffic and pipeline, not just mentions.

"Citations" is a count, and counts grow with prompt volume, so ask how many prompts and runs sit behind each figure before comparing it with a share-of-answers number. The model also relies on Reddit and YouTube activity under your brand; make sure your team is comfortable with what gets posted. There's no dollar figure on the site, though the terms are friendly: pause or cancel when you like.

3. Discovered Labs: best published price list for SaaS AEO

Best for: Series A+ B2B SaaS companies that want content, technical work and Reddit under one retainer · Price: Establish €6,995/mo (€5,995 on a 6-month commitment), Compete €10,995/mo, Outlier from €15,995/mo4

No agency here publishes more detail about what a euro buys. Discovered Labs prices in "content units" (a blog refresh is 1, a landing-page optimization is 5, a new landing page is 7), and the entry Establish tier covers up to 20 units a month, a consistency audit of the sources AI models read, and 10 Reddit mentions a month, handled by a 4-person pod4. If you're unsure, a one-off Search Visibility Diagnostic costs €4,370 across Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews, and the full fee is credited if you sign a retainer within 14 days.

Contracts are month-to-month with 30 days' notice; committing for three or six months only lowers the rate4. Its case studies report AI-specific outcomes, including a 558% rise in AI citation rate and a 4,600% rise in users activated from AI for Granola5.

US buyers should convert the euro prices before comparing: the cheapest month-to-month tier costs more than double Arobis AI's entry plan. And as with anyone quoting percentages, ask what the starting number was.

4. LoudFace: best when your site and your AEO should sit with one team

Best for: B2B SaaS and fintech companies on Webflow · Price: from $5,000/mo, scoped on an intro call6

A lot of AEO is page surgery: tighter answers near the top, comparison tables that models can lift, schema that matches what the page says. LoudFace can ship all of that without a ticket to your developers, because it's a Webflow Enterprise Partner that also designs and builds the site7. One retainer covers design, build, SEO, AEO and GEO, content and conversion, with tracking set up in Search Console, Peec AI and PostHog in weeks four to six and a strategist note every Friday.

It shows AI results with names attached. Toku went from 0 to 97.8% AI visibility on its top prompt, and LoudFace's own share of non-branded AI answers moved from 0.13% to 21.5%7. You get a written scope within 48 hours of the first call.

Off Webflow, the case is weaker. Part of the fee pays for a build team you may not need, and fixed-scope projects inside the retainer carry a 3-month minimum6.

5. Optimist: best month-to-month option for B2B tech

Best for: B2B SaaS and tech companies with someone in-house to publish · Price: $7,500 one-time Roadmap; Advisory from $3,000/mo; Full Service from $4,000/mo8

Optimist publishes three prices and keeps both retainers month-to-month, which makes it the easiest agency here to test for a quarter and walk away from8. Its AEO work starts with a CORE Analysis that benchmarks visibility, accuracy and citation patterns across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, then maps the gaps to funnel stages9. Advisory clients get briefs and specs plus weekly AI visibility tracking; Full Service adds content production and roadmap management.

The AEO page reports results by client type, not name: 49x growth in LLM referral revenue over 14 months for a B2B technology company, and 25x growth in LLM referral traffic in 8 months for a fintech9. The named case studies on the homepage (Glide, Stampli, Kubera) are organic search wins.

If you choose Advisory, your team still writes and publishes. Budget that time honestly, because an AEO roadmap nobody ships moves nothing.

6. Digital Elevator: best for lean B2B teams in healthcare and life sciences

Best for: mid-market B2B teams, especially healthcare, life sciences and technical products · Price: AI Visibility from $3,000; AI Visibility Mentions from $3,495; Managed AEO/SEO from $3,500/mo10

Digital Elevator sells AEO three ways: a managed AEO and SEO retainer, an outcome-based AI Visibility program aimed at specific citation gaps (technical and measurement, content extractability, off-site signals), and a mentions product that earns brand mentions, Reddit activity and editorial placements of the kind AI engines cite10. Prices are on the homepage, and the firm says the price is agreed before work starts.

Its standout result is Halo Labs, a biotech that saw a 1,182% increase in LLM-referred sessions within 90 days10. Big percentages from small AI referral bases are common in this market, so ask for the raw session counts. Contract length and cancellation terms aren't on the site.

7. Omniscient Digital: best for B2B software with a full content budget

Best for: funded B2B software companies · Price: full-service engagements from $120,000 a year11

Omniscient Digital sums up its AEO service as "Get recommended by LLMs" and reports AI share of voice and citation share alongside organic traffic in its client dashboard11. Its AI results come with a time window, which is rarer than it should be: Convert grew LLM visibility 81% and AI citations 140% in 60 days, and OnBoard became the most visible brand in its category in AI search, with an 88% gain11.

The service page itself says little about how the AEO work is done, and the entry point is a full content program. At $10,000 a month equivalent, it's a fit when you want a content team that also handles AI answers, not when you need a narrow AEO fix.

8. NoGood: best for consumer and venture-backed brands with big budgets

Best for: SaaS, fintech and consumer brands that want AEO alongside paid and social · Price: average retainer above $20,000 a month12

NoGood lists 16 separate AEO services, from an LLM visibility audit and prompt research to digital PR, schema work and "Agentic Commerce Optimization", across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot13. Monitoring runs through Goodie AI, which the FAQ calls an external third-party tool, and AI referral traffic is split out with GA4 custom channel groups. Its flagship AEO case, SteelSeries, reports 23x more AI search traffic and 27x more conversions from AI platforms year over year13.

Budget is the gate. NoGood doesn't sell packages, says organic channels including AEO usually take three to six months to compound, and reports an 84% client retention rate12. Its own ranking of AEO agencies puts NoGood first18, so weigh it the way you'd weigh any self-published list, including this one.

9. Marcel Digital: best for on-site AEO in technical and regulated sectors

Best for: mid-market organizations in technology, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, telecom and associations · Price: not published14

Marcel Digital, a Chicago agency with more than 20 years in search, runs AEO as a classic optimization project: a readiness assessment of content, schema and entity clarity, question and topic mapping, answer-first rewrites of high-value pages, structured data, and monitoring in AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot14. If your problem is a site full of long, vague pages that never get quoted, that sequence is exactly right.

What it lacks is AI proof. The AEO page shows SEO case studies (a B2B SaaS client with 61% more search-driven leads, for example) but no mention or citation figures. Ask for one before-and-after AI answer from a client like you.

10. Avenue Z: best when PR is your main AEO lever

Best for: DTC, beauty, hospitality, fintech and emerging-tech brands · Price: not published15

Avenue Z, with offices in New York, Miami and Orlando, splits its AI work into AEO for PR, AEO for e-commerce and agentic commerce, and publishes AIVx reports, an AI visibility index it runs by sector15. Earned media is one of the main things answer engines cite, so a PR-led AEO agency makes sense for consumer brands that already generate news.

For a B2B buyer, the evidence is thin. The homepage claims to be the "No. 1 AI Search Agency" without naming who ranked it, and the numbers it shows (revenue, ROAS, TikTok growth) come from paid and creator work, not AI answers.

How we picked and ranked these AEO agencies

We started with every agency that appears in the AEO lists ranking on Google for "aeo agency" and "best aeo agencies", then dropped any firm whose own site doesn't name AEO as a service. The ten left were ranked on five checks a buyer can repeat before the first call:

• The AEO service is described on the agency's site, with the engines it covers.
• Measurement is explained: which prompts, which engines, how often answers are re-checked.
• A price or budget floor is public, along with the minimum term.
• At least one AI-specific result (mentions, citations, share of answers, AI referrals) is shown with a time period.
• The agency says who it is a bad fit for.

We didn't hire these agencies, so results are self-reported. AI Ranked is published by Arobis AI, which ranks first for B2B SaaS here; it passed all five checks, and every claim about it links to its own pages so you can check them yourself.

Most of the lists currently ranking for "aeo agency" are written by an agency that places itself first, often without telling the reader, and none of the ones we read published prices for more than two agencies. That's the gap this page is built to close.

On-site vs off-site AEO: which kind of agency do you need?

Pick on-site AEO if AI tools already cite third-party pages about your category but quote your competitors' sites instead of yours; pick off-site AEO if the cited sources (Reddit threads, review sites, listicles) don't mention you at all. You can find out which in 20 minutes:

1. Run five buyer questions in ChatGPT search and Perplexity, for example "best [category] for [company size]".
2. Open every cited source. Count how many are vendor sites, and how many are third-party pages.
3. For the third-party pages, check whether your brand appears at all.

If most citations are third-party pages without you, an off-site specialist (Scalerrs, Avenue Z, or the mentions products at Digital Elevator and Discovered Labs) fixes the bigger problem. If your own pages are being skipped, on-site specialists (LoudFace, Marcel Digital, Optimist) fit better. Google's own guidance says there are no special optimizations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet17, so on-site AEO is mostly about clear, quotable pages, not secret markup. Our citability grader scores a page on exactly that.

How much does an AEO agency cost?

Published AEO retainers on this list start at $2,500 a month and most entry tiers sit between $3,000 and about $8,000; full-service programs run $10,000 to $20,000 a month and up. Here's every public number we found, by budget band:

If you're weighing an in-house hire instead, Scalerrs puts the cost of building the team at $90,000 to $120,000+ in salary plus $500 to $1,000 a month in tools3. That's the agency's own estimate, but it matches the logic: one competent AEO lead costs more than a year of most entry retainers above, and still needs tools and writers. Arobis AI's pricing page is a useful line-by-line reference for what each budget level should include.

Red flags in an AEO proposal

• A guaranteed answer-box spot or ChatGPT mention. Google's advice on hiring an SEO says that if someone guarantees first place, "find someone else"16, and AI answers are even less controllable.
• A single "position in ChatGPT" as the headline metric. SparkToro and Gumshoe ran 12 prompts 2,961 times and found under a 1 in 100 chance of getting the same brand list twice16. A mention rate across repeated runs is a real number; a rank is noise.
• FAQ schema sold as the AEO strategy. Schema helps machines read a page, but Google says no special markup is required for AI features17.
• Content volume with no prompt list behind it. If the agency can't show which questions each new page answers, it's selling blog posts.
• Undisclosed Reddit or review activity that hides who posted it. Communities remove it when they spot it, and it can backfire in the very sources AI quotes.
• No exit clause. Month-to-month (Optimist, Discovered Labs) and cancel-any-time (Scalerrs) exist, so a 12-month lock-in needs a reason.

Questions to ask an AEO agency before you sign

Score each agency's answers in a shared sheet so the decision isn't made on whoever gave the best demo:

agency, prompts_tracked, runs_per_prompt, engines, onsite_offsite_split,
baseline_shown_before_contract (y/n), named_ai_result_with_dates (y/n),
monthly_price, minimum_term, notice_period, owns_content_and_data (y/n)

Before any calls, get your own baseline. A free AI visibility checker shows whether ChatGPT and Gemini name you today, and our guide to measuring AI visibility explains how to turn that into a share of voice number you can hold an agency to.

Frequently asked questions

Sources