Buyer question
Who provides AEO as a service, and what does it include?
An AEO service does four jobs for you: tracks what the assistants say, rewrites your pages so they can be quoted, maintains structured data, and earns mentions on the sources engines already cite. A provider doing only the first is selling a tracker.
Updated 20 October 2026 · 7 minute read
There is a gap in this category that is easy to miss. Ask an assistant for tools and you get visibility trackers. Ask for services and you get a completely different list of agencies — with almost no overlap between them. We know because we asked both, on the same day, in the same run.
The four jobs
Everything worth paying for in this field is one of these. Judge any proposal by how many it covers and who does the hours.
| Job | What it is | How you know it was done |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Measure | Ask the engines your buyers’ questions on a schedule; record who is named and what is cited | A stored record per run, with the question list verbatim |
| 2. Rewrite | Direct answers in the first lines, question-shaped headings, prices and specifics in plain text on your own domain | Named pages changed, with before and after |
| 3. Mark up | Organization, Product, Offer, FAQPage, Article schema that matches the visible page | Markup that validates and agrees with the copy |
| 4. Earn sources | Accurate listings and genuine mentions on the review sites, directories and publications the answers already cite | New third-party pages naming you, and their appearance in citation lists |
More detail
Job four is the slowest and the least glamorous. Job two is the one most likely to be skipped, and our own citation data says it should not be. Across the eight questions in our audit, Perplexity cited 90 sources from 74 distinct domains in run A, of which 65 were cited exactly once.
Run B, a minute later, gave 75 domains and 66 singletons out of the
same 90 citations.
The most-cited single domain, blog.hubspot.com, accounted for five of
the ninety. There is no small trusted club here.
More useful still: a great many of the cited pages were vendors’ and agencies’
own sites. In run A, peec.ai was cited four times, scrunch.com
twice, and conductor.com, seo.com, elsner.com,
searchbloom.com, brandify.io, llmpulse.ai,
beamtrace.com, ultrascout.ai, trakkr.ai and
quattr.com once each.
That is the encouraging half of an otherwise bleak result for us: an engine will cite a company’s own page, if the page answers the question that was asked.
Who provides it
On 19 September 2026 we asked Perplexity “What is answer engine optimization and who provides it as a service?” through its API, as the first of the eight questions in our own audit.
More detail
In run A it named five providers: SEO.com, Searchbloom, Elsner Technologies, Conductor and Azoma. It named no dedicated visibility tracker, and it did not name Bungad.
Not an endorsement. We have not worked with any of those firms and cannot vouch for them. We are reporting who the engine named on a given date, because that is who a buyer asking this question is currently being shown, and that is a fact about the market rather than a recommendation.
The three shapes of provider
In practice providers come in three shapes, and the difference between them matters more than any feature list:
Swipe sideways to see every column
| Shape | Example of the type | Covers jobs | Buy it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO agency with AEO added | SEO.com, Searchbloom, Elsner | 2, 3, 4 — measurement often bought in | You already have a retainer and want this folded into it |
| Platform plus strategy | Conductor | 1, plus advisory | You have a team to operate the platform |
| Managed subscription | Bungad AEO | 1, 2, 3, 4 at a fixed monthly price | Nobody on your side will do the fixing |
More detail
Prices for each shape, with the ranges the engines currently quote, are on what AEO costs per month. Tools rather than services are compared on AEO tools compared.
What a month of real service looks like
If a proposal cannot be expressed as a list like this, it is a retainer looking for a justification.
- A dated run against a fixed question set, with the questions printed.
- The list of brands named instead of you, and the domains cited, for each question you lost.
- A short diagnosis per lost question: what the engine wanted that your site does not have.
- Named pages written or rewritten this month, with links.
- Schema added or corrected, and where.
- Third-party sources pursued, and their status — including the ones that said no.
- The three numbers, beside last month’s, on the same questions.
What is sold as AEO but is not
- Guaranteed placement in AI answers. Nobody controls what a model generates. A guarantee here is a promise about someone else’s system.
- Bulk pages to hold keywords. A page that exists to be indexed and says nothing is worse than no page: it dilutes the site and an engine that retrieves it once and finds nothing has no reason to return. This applies to us as much as anyone — the library you are reading is exactly the kind of project that goes wrong this way, which is why we published what we built and why rather than quietly adding pages.
- Schema that does not match the page. Marking up FAQs that are not visible, or reviews that do not exist, is worse than shipping no markup at all.
- Manufactured reviews and seeded forum posts. Beyond the obvious problem, the engines increasingly weigh corroboration across sources, so a fabricated consensus is both dishonest and fragile.
- A rising score with no question list. Change the questions and you can manufacture any trend. Insist the prompt set is fixed and printed in every report. Ours is stored verbatim inside every stored run.
How to evaluate a provider
Five questions. Apply them to us as readily as to anyone else — vagueness on any of them predicts vagueness later.
- Which engines do you query through an API, and which do you check by hand? “All the AI platforms” can hide engines that are checked by hand or scraped.
- Can I see one real client report, not a sample deck? A redacted real report tells you more than any proposal.
- Who writes the pages — you or me? This single answer can explain the entire price difference between two quotes.
- How is a failed engine call recorded? If a timeout is scored as “not mentioned”, the trend measures their reliability rather than your visibility. Almost nobody asks this and it quietly ruins a series.
- What happens to my question history and data if I leave? The prompt set and the run records are the asset; make sure you can take them.
What we provide
Measurement on every paid plan, and hands-on work that grows with the plan: structured data on Starter ($99); that plus monthly content fixes and a monthly call on Growth ($299); all of that plus source building on Scale ($799). Month to month with no setup fee. What you should know before buying:
- Perplexity is the only engine we hold an API key for. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini adapters are built and awaiting keys. Google AI Overviews and Copilot have no public consumer API, and we do not track them on any plan. We would rather lose the sale than have you find that out in month two.
- Our own audited visibility score is 0 out of 100. Named in none of our own eight questions, published in full at our score and updated monthly whether or not it improves.
Where a different provider is the right answer
- You already have an SEO retainer you are happy with. Ask them to add jobs 2, 3 and 4 before adding a second vendor. They know your site, and the work overlaps heavily with what they already do.
- You only need the data. Some self-serve trackers cost less than our Starter plan: the tools compared gives each entry price with its date and source. Pay for labour, not for numbers you are already equipped to act on.
- You need a dozen markets and languages now. An enterprise platform covers that breadth and we do not.
Common questions
What does an AEO service actually do?
Four jobs. It tracks what AI assistants say when asked the questions your buyers ask. It rewrites your pages so those assistants can quote them — direct answers, specifics in plain text, question-shaped headings. It adds and maintains structured data that matches what the page says. And it pursues accurate mentions on the third-party sources the engines already cite, such as review platforms and directories. A provider doing only the first is selling you a tracker.
Who provides answer engine optimization as a service?
Three kinds of provider. Established SEO agencies that have added AEO to their retainer, such as SEO.com, Searchbloom and Elsner Technologies. Enterprise software companies that pair a platform with strategy, such as Conductor. Specialists aimed at one channel, such as Azoma for ecommerce and AI shopping agents. And managed subscriptions built specifically for this, such as Bungad AEO. Notably, we asked Perplexity this question twice on 19 September 2026: run A named those five providers, and run B named four of them, dropping Elsner Technologies and adding Marcel Digital. Neither run named a dedicated visibility tracker at all — the service answer and the tool answer are different lists.
What is not AEO, despite being sold as it?
Guaranteed placement in AI answers, which nobody controls. Bulk thin pages generated to hold keywords, which dilute a site and give an engine nothing to quote. Stuffing schema markup that does not match the visible page, which is worse than no markup. Manufactured Reddit posts and reviews. And any report that shows a score going up without showing which questions were asked, because changing the question set can manufacture any trend you like.
How do you evaluate an AEO provider?
Ask which engines they query through an API and which they check by hand. Ask to see one real client report rather than a sample deck. Ask who writes the pages — them or you — because that single answer can explain the whole price. Ask whether a failed engine call is recorded as ‘not mentioned’. And ask what happens to your question history and data if you leave.
More guides
Read next
Start with a short version of job one, free
Enter your domain. We ask Perplexity three of your buyers’ questions and show you whether you were named and which domains the engine cited.
3 questions on Perplexity, free. A domain checked in the last week is served from that stored run rather than asked again, and the daily free allowance resets at midnight UTC.
