AEO Retainers for Agencies: Tiers, Scope Clauses and Reporting

Question 1

How should we price and cap AEO work in a client retainer?

Accepted Answer

The article proposes three retail tiers for proposals: Starter AEO Engine at $2,500/month for up to 25 validated buyer prompts and 2 answer-first assets per month; Growth AEO & Earned Search at $4,500/month for up to 60 prompts and 5 restructures or new assets per month; and Enterprise Authority Engine at $7,500/month for up to 120 prompts and 10 deployments or optimizations per month. The article recommends writing the prompt ceiling and engine list into the signed scope and offering a $350/month expansion for each additional block of 10 monitored prompts. It states the prices are proposed retail fees, not a promise about delivery cost.

Question 2

What should an AEO statement of work say about guarantees and change control?

Accepted Answer

The article recommends four SOW protections: define verifiable deliverables and quantities for the named tier with a Change Order required outside those limits; state the client acknowledges third-party answer engines control crawling, retrieval, and generated responses; require client CMS, DNS, and search-console access and bill remediation of client-introduced breaking changes at $[HOURLY_RATE]/hour; and allow five business days for written technical objections before logged deliverables are deemed accepted. According to groas, the agency does not guarantee citation inclusion, ranking placement, recommendation frequency, or a particular change in generated answers. The article states clause 4 prevents reopening accepted work because an answer changed later.

Question 3

What should we ask during AEO onboarding to pick the right buyer prompts?

Accepted Answer

The article recommends sending an intake form immediately after signing to choose the contracted prompt panel, asking for the top 5 prospect questions in their wording, the 3 compared providers, URLs for specs, pricing, integrations, and documentation, and known answer errors with prompt and answer where available. It also recommends asking the technical lead to confirm whether hosting or CDN blocks or challenges search crawlers rather than guessing. The article states the initial panel should be frozen at kickoff and put in the SOW, with new prompts handled through the expansion rule.

Question 4

How should we report AEO work each month without overselling results?

Accepted Answer

The article recommends reporting on the first business day of each billing cycle against the contracted panel and engines, showing brand mention rate, recommendation rate, cited client URLs, and active versus corrected factual discrepancies alongside a dated completed-work log with verification. It recommends listing the next 30-day sprint and deleting any composite AI visibility score. According to groas, reporting mentions, recommendations, cited URLs, and errors separately lets the client see answer movement without mistaking it for proof that a deployment did or did not happen.

Question 5

What should we say when a prospect asks for guaranteed mentions?

Accepted Answer

The article recommends answering “Can you guarantee we’ll be mentioned?” with “No. The engines control their answers. We guarantee the contracted checks, deployments, content work, and execution logs.” It provides parallel scripts that distinguish monitoring from delivery, decline honest citation dates, and state that published pages and on-domain changes remain subject to later client or provider changes while monitoring stops at cancellation. The article states account managers must not turn “we monitor citations” into “we will get you cited.”