What Does It Cost to Hire Someone for AEO?

Pricing for AEO looks chaotic because the label covers four different things. A $150 freelancer and a $9,000-a-month agency both say they do AEO. They are not selling the same product. Here is what each tier actually costs and what you get.

What are the real price tiers?

Do it yourself: free, plus your time. You run a prompt generator, log your visibility monthly, clean up your entity data, and add schema. The tools cost nothing. The constraint is hours and consistency.

Freelancer: roughly $75 to $200 an hour, or small project fees. Good for a specific task like a schema build or a one-time audit. You manage the work and stitch the pieces together yourself.

Fractional consultant: roughly $2,000 to $6,000 a month. A senior operator runs your AEO program directly, ongoing. Nearly all of the fee pays for the actual work because there is no agency structure to fund.

Full agency: roughly $5,000 to $10,000+ a month. A team, a process, and account management. The tradeoff is where the money goes, which is the part nobody puts on the proposal.

Why is an agency more expensive for the same work?

Not because the work is better. Because the structure is heavier. A $5,000 agency retainer funds office rent, an account manager to attend your calls, and the junior staff who do much of the hands-on work. The senior expert you met in the pitch is often the least available person on your account after you sign.

The same $5,000 with a fractional consultant buys senior work, directly, with no account-management layer skimming the budget. That is the case for hiring a consultant over an agency for AEO specifically: the discipline is new enough that you want the most experienced person actually doing it, not reviewing a junior's output.

How do I know what I actually need?

Match the tier to the gap. If your problem is a one-time fix, a schema build or an audit, hire a freelancer for that task. If your problem is that nobody owns AI visibility and it needs steady monthly work, a fractional consultant fits. An agency makes sense when you need many marketing channels run at once and have the budget to fund the structure.

Most B2B manufacturers we talk to fall in the middle. They do not need a full agency's overhead, and they do not have the internal time to DIY it well. That gap is exactly what a fractional consultant fills: senior work, no overhead, priced below an agency.

What's the payoff math?

Judge the cost against one outcome, not a traffic chart. If your close rate on an RFQ is 25% and an average project is worth $60,000, one additional RFQ per month carries $15,000 in expected revenue. Any AEO engagement priced under that pays for itself on a single win, and AEO work compounds because a citation earned this quarter keeps working next quarter. The question is not whether you can afford AEO. It is whether you can afford to be the supplier the AI never names.

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