What belongs in an AEO scope
AEO services get you mentioned and cited in the answers AI tools produce, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. A real scope contains five things, and if a proposal is missing three of them, it is an SEO retainer with a new label.
- Answer-first restructuring of your key pages. A direct, quotable answer under each question heading. This is the highest-return item and it is mostly editing.
- A buyer question map. The 20–50 questions people actually ask an AI before hiring someone like you, each answered properly.
- Off-site description work. Reviews, directories, industry write-ups. Models learn what you are from the whole web, not your homepage.
- Prompt tracking. Running those questions across the answer engines on a schedule and recording whether you get named.
- A measurement plan that admits its limits. Because there is no Search Console for answer engines, and pretending otherwise is a lie of omission.
The uncomfortable thing vendors leave out
Google says there is nothing special to do. Its guide to optimizing for AI features tells site owners plainly that there are no additional technical requirements for AI Overviews or AI Mode, no special file, no AI-specific structured data, no secret markup. The same SEO fundamentals apply.
That does not make AEO fake. It makes most of it editorial. The work is real; the magic is not. Anyone selling you a "schema hack" or a tool that "submits your business to ChatGPT" is selling the exotic version of a job that is mostly careful writing and patient reputation building.
If the scope contains a secret, it is not a scope. It is a story.
What can honestly be promised
Not traffic. That is the honest headline, and it is why AEO gets mis-sold. Pew Research Center found that only 1% of visits to a page with an AI summary resulted in a click on a cited source. Being quoted and being visited are different events.
What can be promised is presence, being named at the moment someone is building a shortlist. That shows up later as branded search, as direct traffic, as a phone call with no traceable origin. It is real, and it is genuinely hard to attribute.
Which brings us to the rule that governs this entire category: if you cannot measure it properly, do not celebrate it yet. An AEO vendor showing you a tidy ROI dashboard is showing you a work of fiction.
Who should not buy AEO services yet
- Anyone whose tracking is broken. You are adding a hard-to-measure channel on top of numbers you already cannot trust.
- Anyone whose SEO is unfinished. A page must be indexed and snippet-eligible before an answer engine will consider it. AEO without SEO is a house without a slab.
- Anyone with no content worth citing. There is nothing for the engine to quote.
- Anyone who needs revenue this quarter. This is a visibility play with a long, fuzzy payoff.
If the first one is you, analytics and tracking is the cheaper, faster fix. If the second, start with SEO, and you will get most of the AEO benefit as a side effect, because the two jobs overlap far more than the sales pitch admits.
When the foundations are there, being the name the AI gives is worth having. Our AEO work is built for that, and the longer explanation lives in our post on what answer engine optimization actually is.
What AEO should cost, and what it should not
Because AEO is new and poorly understood, it is being priced like magic. It should be priced like editing, because that is mostly what it is.
A sensible engagement looks like a defined block of work: restructure a set of key pages so they answer questions directly, build the buyer question map, fix how you are described off-site, and set up prompt tracking. That is a project with an end, followed by a much lighter ongoing rhythm of monitoring and refreshing.
What it should not be is an open-ended retainer with a proprietary "AI visibility score" attached. If a vendor has invented a metric only they can calculate, they have invented a number only they can move.
- Reasonable: a scoped restructuring project, plus scheduled prompt tracking you can see the raw results of.
- Reasonable: AEO folded into an existing SEO engagement, because the work overlaps heavily and Google says the fundamentals are the same.
- Unreasonable: a premium retainer justified by a score nobody else can verify.
- Unreasonable: anything sold as a technical hack, a special file, or a submission service.
The honest test: ask the vendor to show you the raw prompt results, the actual answers ChatGPT and Perplexity gave, with and without your business named. If they can produce that, they are doing the work. If they can only produce a dashboard, they are producing a dashboard.
Frequently asked questions
What do AEO services include?
Answer-first restructuring of key pages, a map of the questions buyers ask AI before hiring, off-site description work so models learn what you do, prompt tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode, and a measurement plan that is honest about its limits.
Is AEO just SEO with a new name?
Largely, and Google says as much, there are no additional technical requirements or special markup for its AI features. The genuinely different work is editorial: clearer answers, self-contained passages, and being described accurately elsewhere on the web. The work is real; the magic is not.
Can AEO services guarantee traffic?
No, and any vendor promising it is misleading you. Pew found only 1% of visits to pages with an AI summary led to a click on a cited source. AEO buys presence at shortlist time, which shows up later as branded search and direct enquiries, real, but hard to attribute cleanly.
Who should not buy AEO yet?
Anyone with broken tracking, unfinished SEO, no content worth citing, or an urgent revenue problem. A page has to be indexed and snippet-eligible before an answer engine will cite it, so SEO comes first, and most AEO benefit arrives as a side effect of doing that properly.