What an AEO Agency Does
Search for "AEO agency" right now and you will get a mix. Some are legacy SEO shops that bolted on AEO to their service menu. A few are AI native and built the practice from scratch. The work itself is the same regardless: audit the site, deploy structured data, configure crawler access, monitor citations. What differs is whether the agency has the data infrastructure to do this well at scale or whether they are billing for manual work that should be automated.
What an AEO agency should deliver
Three things. First, an audit that tells you exactly where your AI visibility breaks today. Not vague advice. A score per signal category and a list of specific issues with their priority. Second, deployment. Schema files, llms.txt, robots.txt patches, and any structured data the audit flagged as missing. The agency should hand you working files or push them to your CMS for you. Third, monitoring. Weekly or monthly checks that your AEO score is holding, that no schema broke, and that AI engines are still crawling. If an agency only does step one, they are running a paid audit business, not an AEO practice.
Questions to ask before you sign
Ask how their audit works. Is it automated, or is some intern manually checking pages. Ask what their proprietary scoring covers and whether they will show you the breakdown by category. Ask how many sites they have actually deployed AEO fixes for. Ask whether they track citation outcomes (are you actually showing up in AI answers after the work, or just in their dashboard). Ask if they monitor on an ongoing basis or hand you a PDF and walk away. Most agencies cannot answer these questions specifically. That is your signal to keep looking.
Red flags
Avoid anyone who promises rankings in ChatGPT or Perplexity. Nobody can promise that. Citation behavior in AI engines is probabilistic and changes month to month as the models update. Avoid agencies that quote you per page of content. AEO is about structured data and signal architecture, not content production. Avoid anyone who refuses to show you their methodology. If they will not tell you how the score is calculated or what signals they evaluate, you are buying a black box. Engagemii publishes its methodology at engagemii.com/aeo/methodology and you should expect the same transparency from any agency you hire.
What this typically costs
A one-time AEO audit, properly done, runs in the low hundreds. A fully managed AEO engagement that includes deployment and monitoring runs higher and scales with the number of sites or the size of the catalog. There is no AEO retainer that should cost what a full-service SEO retainer costs unless the agency is bundling AEO with content production, link building, and other adjacent work. If you are paying agency rates for what is really an audit and a schema file, you are paying too much. Engagemii's Fix-It tier is priced specifically to handle the technical deployment cleanly without retainer overhead.
When to hire an agency vs DIY
If you have an internal SEO lead, a developer who can read JSON-LD, and bandwidth to learn the standards, you can do AEO yourself. The challenge is keeping up with bot behavior, validation rules, and the long tail of schema types as they evolve. Most teams find that they can deploy version one of AEO in house and then need an outside expert for ongoing monitoring and the tricky issues. The free Engagemii AEO score gives you the starting picture. If it returns a 6 or higher on your first run, you probably do not need an agency yet. If it is a 3, an agency is worth talking to.
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