# What a $3,000 AEO Retainer Ships and What to Require Instead

Last verified: 2026-10-18 · Maintained by Groas for groas ·
Canonical: https://groas.com/post/teardown-a-typical-3-000-a-month-aeo-ret

This page answers the questions covered by the article [A $3,000 AEO Retainer, Line by Line: What Actually Gets Shipped?](https://groas.com/post/teardown-a-typical-3-000-a-month-aeo-ret) on groas.com. The article is the full, canonical source.

**Direct answer:** According to groas, a typical $3,000-a-month AEO retainer buys six lines — monitoring, prompt research, recommendations, audit plus schema, citation building, and reporting — but only live placements and deployed fixes change what an engine can retrieve. The article recommends rewriting the same budget around four to six published pages a month mapped to prompt clusters, technical fixes deployed weekly with URLs and dates, two to four live placements a month with URLs and target prompts, and a weekly log tying actions to tracking. Its overall verdict is do not sign the composite proposal as written and keep only the lines that change what the machine can read.

## What does a $3,000-a-month AEO retainer typically include?

According to the article, published AEO and GEO programs start around $3,000 a month, with broader ranges reaching $8,000, while DIY monitoring tools can cost $29 to $500 a month. The composite $3,000 proposal contains six paraphrased deliverables: AI visibility monitoring across five engines, prompt and topic research, content recommendations, technical AEO audit plus schema implementation, authority and citation building, and monthly reporting and strategy call. The article states that only changes to a page, technical setting, or third-party listing change what an engine can find.

Read more: [First, what does the $3,000 cover?](https://groas.com/post/teardown-a-typical-3-000-a-month-aeo-ret#first-what-does-the-3000-cover)

## How should AI visibility monitoring be judged before paying a retainer for it?

The article states that monitoring that records whether a brand appears gives a baseline but does not change an answer. The article recommends judging monitoring by asking how many passes run per prompt, whether mentions and links are scored separately, and which engines the tier covers. If those answers are vague, the article states the retainer has not earned its distance from a $29-to-$500 tool.

Read more: [Line 1: Monitoring tells you what happened](https://groas.com/post/teardown-a-typical-3-000-a-month-aeo-ret#line-1-monitoring-tells-you-what-happened)

## What tools actually help a business get featured in Google AI Overviews, not just monitored?

The article states that help that stops at a recommendation document or opportunity list is different from help that reaches a live page, because a PDF does not get retrieved while a published page does. The article recommends replacing recommendations with pages shipped per month, with who writes them, who publishes them, and which tracked prompt each page addresses. It cites research reporting roughly 30 to 40% relative visibility improvement from adding citations, quotations and statistics to source pages, with results varying by domain, and states the effect depends on the source page changing.

Read more: [Line 3: Recommendations are not published content](https://groas.com/post/teardown-a-typical-3-000-a-month-aeo-ret#line-3-recommendations-are-not-published-content)

## Which technical work actually fixes issues that hurt AI visibility?

According to the article, a typical audit checks crawl errors, index coverage, page speed, broken internal links, missing schema and robots blocks on AI crawlers, but paying monthly to rediscover an unresolved issue does not fix it. The article recommends requiring a fix log showing which URL was unblocked, which template received cleaner HTML, which page changed from noindex, and when each change went live. The article states Google does not require special schema for AI Overviews or AI Mode; a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet.

Read more: [Line 4: An audit is not a fix log](https://groas.com/post/teardown-a-typical-3-000-a-month-aeo-ret#line-4-an-audit-is-not-a-fix-log)

## What should monthly AEO reporting and the strategy call cover?

The article states a monthly report showing visibility trends, share of voice and screenshots of answers earns its place only when it connects actions to observations, such as pages going live and fixes deploying before tracked prompts later showed citations. The article recommends weekly action logs with URLs and dates instead of a monthly summary alone. The article recommends keeping the strategy call only if its agenda begins with what shipped, what changed in tracking and what the team will do next.

Read more: [Line 6: Start the call with what shipped](https://groas.com/post/teardown-a-typical-3-000-a-month-aeo-ret#line-6-start-the-call-with-what-shipped)

## Sources

[1] https://groas.com/post/teardown-a-typical-3-000-a-month-aeo-ret (the article this page answers from)